acanadeanhick

There wasn't so much talk about Academy's tour in 2008 when they fell off the pace. People only care when its a threat to their corps because Academy's/PC/Whoever doing it a different (but approved and encouraged by DCI) way.

So your response to speculation is to ... speculate

Via Academy's twitter feed: Paramount CA Scores! Cascades 72.7 Mandarins 74.7 Pacific Crest 75.9 Academy 80.1 Breakin' 80 - not a full panel but they're still putting up the number in captions that will still be around next week when they hook up with the rest of the tour. The 12th place corps is usually right around 86, and scores get a little crowded from the Texas shows until Allentown. So there's no reason they should be considered out of the hunt. With MN rained out and the SA change this year, most of the corps won't be at the same show until Atlanta in 2 weeks. A lot of placements aren't going to be obvious at all this year with only 2 shows of every corps performing to the same panel in the same day.

Last year they were in the 16-17 range out of San Antonio and finished in 14th, even if they didn't beat Troopers after the early season shows the scores/recaps were competitive until finals week. 2007 is really the only year where they completely leveled off competitively after Texas (with 2008 being sort of a competitive ruin the whole way through).

To be a stickler, wasn't it one quarter of a tenth? And I feel like I see this misprinted by DCI fairly regularly...

It's like how english went for me in college "GREAT paper! You did everything right, so you get a.... B." On Topic, I havn't been around the activity long enough to grade him, especially in relation to those who ran DCI previously

Bloo- At San Antonio one of the snares fell off on the last hit, one of my favorite hype moments of the season. Makes me wonder how often drums come off carriers from getting wailed on during a season

I can't find a good place online, but I found that buying 2 pairs of nylon tuxedo gloves to split between rehearsals and shows was a really good thing to do. Rinsing them out every week or so, my 6 week old gloves looked better than all my corps mates' week old gloves at the end of the season - didn't lose their color or even begin to rip. Very durable and cost about 9 dollars a pair - typically at a tuxedo rental shop or something like that

All these posts about sticking valves on baritones/euphoniums remind me how my rookie year on euph I had a terrible problem with valves sticking, but once the staff cracked down on my posture I learned to rotate my hips under me and keep a flat back all the time in horn arc and the valves became smooth as glass. It allowed my hands to relax and push straight down on the valves instead of slightly at an angle, which shaves off bits of metal, causing the valve to get stuck. Watching the bari/euph section over the next couple of years, the people who had the most systemic valve problems also had tended to have the worst posture (those extra dusty days aside), and those who were afflicted never quite seemed to get the correlation The point is: maybe some of the common instrument 'malfunctions' are actually due to bad posture or bad technique on the member's part.

If you've ever played in the U of A stadium at night, it's something special. My favorite place to march, but I've never been on it durring the daytime, and so you're probably right about that.

I'm still laughing at that horrible story you told me sunday, but i think some of mine can compete. we'll see at the next camp haha. (you'll figure out who this is.) and that recording was awesome.

I was actually in europe at the same time as BD with a concert musical group from Arizona headed up by the father of the director of Arizona Academy. Some people stopped a few of us in the louvre, in the Mona Lisa room, to ask who all of us were wearing the matching tour jackets, and we explained it to him, and turns out they were all with the Blue Devils, and had even heard about us to some degree and stuff. It was really cool, and it was funny to run into a bunch of drum corps people in front of the Mona Lisa. Trips to europe are definately a really fun experience, it's really cool that the Gladdmen get to do that AND drum corps, instead of having to chose like I did.

Brahms's Hungarian Dances No. 5. Sibelius's Finlandia Checking on Corpsreps they've been done before, but not for a while.

This isn't a marching band/DCI judge and isn't about negative feedback as much as confusing judges. This year I was in a "We the People" competition in Arizona, somewhat similar to speech and debate except it focuses on the constitution and is formatted like a senate hearing. After my group was done presenting, and the judges had asked a few questions, the head judge stopped the time 50 seconds early and said "okay, we're done, that was amazing, and we don't need to hear anything else." There wasn't a single negative comment from the judges, it was all about how we were the best thing they'd seen all day. Well, after losing the overall competition, we got to see the scores of my group compared to everyone else who was there. The school right before us beat us by 3 points out of 180, despite everything they had said about us. We really wanted to know how they beat us, especially after being called "flawless." Of course, that has nothing to do with drum corps judging. Just one of the weirder things i've seen judges do. And with any event with human judges, there's a lot of room for human error. It happens, so one just has to get used to it in this sort of activity/any other one that ranks based upon judging.