Brass Ablaze

Just makes it harder now, thats all. Like for instance I am looking at yesterday's scores and it looks like maybe my caption changes didnt take effect but now to verify it I have to go to dci's website instead of looking at the captions list. DOH! More work for me. :P

cheap trick GIT-R-DONE!

Any rumors should be considered just that...rumors. I can confirm however that we are in the midst of negotiations with world famous classical singer Hayley Westenra for possible membership next year. Obviasly, if it works out, it will have a large impact on next year's show planning. We'll be sure to post more information as the discussions continue.

Edit: nevermind. the captions I found were from last year. Sorry to get your hopes up. :lolhit:

Just that certain captions have significantly less effect on the overall score than others. I'll say that much. :)

This formula has given me an incredible insite on how the scores are done. b**bs I actually dislike how these are calculated. <**> I won't go into details now because it could effect how some people choose captions but I will explain after the season is over. B) I suspect there are others who notices the same thing as me, given some of the captions I see people choosing. I'm just a little slow to the punch I guess. We'll see how many people pick up on this little thing as captions change. :P

You've just now realized this? Only problem with this is since everyone gets 10 caption changes, they could essentially use them all at once and change every caption to the the same as the person with the highest score. But then again, scores change and you never know how a judge will score a show plus their also might be a better combination than the person who has the highest score as well.

AH Ok. Works out now. Dang, I thought I had a genuine mess up on my hands. Turns out it was just me. HE HE :lolhit: w/Stp: edit: appairently D@rn is a bad word.

Perhaps my confusion is with these two rules... From this, it appears that perhaps the mistake was that either the rules were not updated to reflect 145 starting points instead of 140, or that some people thought it was 145, or I'm just a complete moron and did the math wrong or missed something in one of the captions, which is entirely possible.

Anyone look at the most recent scores? Something seemed fishy so I did some reverse engineering. It looks to me like if those captions line up correctly, Kosmos is using 147 points. CONSPIRACY! <**> Can you verify this? This would mean they would have to be in 35 shows already this year to have 7 bonus points. hrmmmmm. Am I missing something? Maybe it was a goof up. Here is the scores I am looking at... July 5, 2005 ................................ Effect......Music...................Visual ................................ Mus...Vis...Brss..Ens...P.Fld.P.Ens.Perf..Clgd..Ens.. Score Green Bay, WI (Packer Bowl) 1 Kosmos........................ 16.82 17.51 15.97 17.10 14.93 14.68 15.55 16.50 17.45 83.018 I am compairing with the most recent posted captions of 7/4/2005.

Ok, you twisted my arm. Here's a couple insider tips I heard from a little birdie.... Defanitely Kawanis Kavaliers for Visual ensamble and CG. That's pretty much a givin. To top of the visual side go with Troopers for GE visual. Then you will most certainly want Pioneer for Music Ensamble. With that combination you can't go wrong. B) I've said too much already! This tread will self distruct in 5....4....3....2...1...

All I have to say is.........

I know this question came up somewhere already but I am still confused on what is considered a week. By my calculations, we can make any week three caption changes beginning yesterday. Is this right? Here is what I have assumed thus far. Week 1: Thu Jun 16 - Wed Jun 22 Week 2: Thu Jun 23 - Wed Jun 29 Week 3: Thu Jun 30 - Wed Jul 6 etc... This is based on the first show being on June 16th. Is this correct? Or does it go by MY first show? Or is a week Sunday-Saturday?

Any west coast corps on there? hmm... I think those east judges must be more liberal on their scoring. Perhaps having more critical judges in the west will hold us to higher standards and make us better? :P West Coast FTW!

Amps suck <**> http://www.petitiononline.com/SCV1987/petition.html There. I said my peace. :P

Brass Ablaze organization drum corps have swept the hearts of their fans from the Pacific Northwest but it's time they must leave. Tonight is an off night but you can bet your liver that these kids won't be doing a lot of hanging around. The division 1 corp is staying at a church tonight near San Fransisco where they've been drawing quite a croud from the local neighbors who have been watching them practice in the parking lot all morning. Meanwhile the division 2 and 3 corps have been traveling all night from Spokane, WA and are said to have taken a pitstop in Oregon early this moring for some much deserved IHOP breakfast. The idea today is to get the kids used to sleeping on the bus, because they will need to do it a lot in the coming months. They expect to arive in Sunnyvale, CA early this afternoon where they will meet up with their corp director for a few days of cleanup and expected show changes. The A Corp is continuting to polish their show today and tomorrow and performs tomorrow night in San Fransisco then takes off that night to Sunnyvale to meet up with the other corps. 3 of the corps will then be performing in Sunnyvale friday evening which is expected to draw a nice sized crowd. The B and C corps directors have been in constant contact with the organization director during the last few days and are expected to undergo some changes to their shows during practices before their next performace on Friday. Rainy City Sound (RCS), however, does not have another performance until saturday night in Fresno and is expected to forcus not on changes to the show but on fundamentals and basics. RCS has sadly been looked at as somewhat of the ugly duckling of the organization because they made up of mostly of tryouts who didn't make the cut in the other corps. RCS has regularly been putting up the lowest scores in each competition and is statistically the lowest ranked division 3 corp at this time. "The thing you have to remember about RCS is we came into the season with a disadvantage," said Benjamin Goodman, Assistant Director, "Because we are essentially made up of cut players and alternates, we didn't really get a chance to get the full group together to start learning the show until very late in the spring. Additionally we ended up with a few late cuts that couldn't hack it and the loss of a bass player who was sent up to another corp to replace an injured member. So weended up not having our ideal number of members in each section and overall RCS is about 2/3 the size of Brass Ablaze C. Considering all of that, I'm thrilled with what we have been able to accomplish in such a short time with these kids and with the smaller numbers, it actually makes it much easier to practice and stay focused. The kids are learning so much and they are improving every day. You can't look at the scores, you have to focus on the show and look at how much we have accomplished and learned. The kids are staying positive and having a good time and I think the crowds are enjoying them as well and that's all that matters." Mr. Goodman directs Rainy City Sound and is also the brass and visual caption head for the group. I look forward to hearing and seeing them on Saturday and seeing the progress they have made.

Hopefully we can continue the momentum. B) Good luck in Spokane. Our division 2 and 3 corps will be there representin'. Unfortunately I'd love to be in two places at once but they are in the hands of my individual corp directors right now. Let me know how they sound in Spokane. I hope to have some time to work with the division 2 and 3 corps on the shows when they make it down here to cali with us. ;)

Brass Ablaze is on fire! B) We posted out first score over 70 at the Fullerton, CA show with a score of 71.635 beating out 6 other division 1 corps! I couldn't be more proud! Our visual and general effect scores are now a little more where we'd expect them to be which tells us that the changes we made to the show were for the best. Now we just have to continue cleaning up the show. The progress we are making so far has been amazing.

Yeah, competition is getting pretty tight between us an the ol' Tri-Color folks eh. :)

Funny, that's what the general effect visual judge said on his recoding too. :P We have a lot going for us and I think our sound quality and our music is really doing better than we had thought for this early in the season. The color guard is flat out amazing and arugably one of the top color guards out there, at least the best I have seen so far this year. I'm a little biased though. Where we are getting killed is in our marching and it shows in our ensamble visual score and in our general effect visual score. It's quite difficult to have such a low GE visual score with a color guard as good as we have but we somehow, unfortunately, manage to pull it off. :P The staff and I sat down and watched a tape today of the show and we know that the low scores in those captions don't seem to be related to any individuals marching poorly but rather as a whole ensamble, some of the forms are not quite there. Some of our circles look like ovals and our triangle inside a triangle rotation still looks like two trains running into each other which gives more of a custery havoc effect than the precise and clean wowing effect we were going for. We may end up altering the move slightly to be a little easier to look good. Additionally we might have to alter a few other moves simply to make them a little easier to pull off. We are asking quite a bit of them and some of the moves are just a little to difficult to pull off at this point in time. All the staff members agree that by simplifying a few things, we can improve the overall score, and we have some really killer ideas on how to do that, inspired by a move we saw in an old Coldfusion video.

Wow that was an exciting show. Everyone knew the scores would be close and you could really feel the energy in both corps that they both wanted to win it. I know that the our kids were really fueled by the competition of performing against Tri-Color and I think it pushes them to work even harder. The've managed to bridge the gap between themselves and Tri-Color quite a bit and although they still lost, they are looking at it as a victory in that they are seeing results of their efforts reflected in the scores. I think by far it was the best show this year for all the Brass Ablaze corps. All the performances really got the crowd going. Congratulations goes out to Damion Geoffreys, a Brass Ablaze snare drummer who won the great snare drummer challenge. It was a real hit with the fans and the corps alike and I don't think anyone minded that it went a little longer than planned due to the amazing head to head action at the end between Damion and one of the drummers from Tri-Color. Both really showed some amazing skills. I think all the participants really had fun doing it as well. We also heard word back from the Eagles Kazoo marching band who mentioned they got 3 people who expressed interest in joining them after seeing them perform last night. :) They were a blast to watch Also a shout out to our Rival corp Tri-Color. We'd like to thank them for coming and putting on a great show. They sure made the competition a lot more fun and really made our first homeshow feel more like a real "competition". That's Tri-Color and best of luck to you this season.

Conspiracy! :P

Yeah, that is why I... It's important to me that my members all have the right attitudes and as many of them are new to drum corps, they have a lot to learn still. They are quickly making a name for themselves as the unofficial bad boys of DCPI which is not the image I would like our organization to project. Rest assured that attitude takes priority over all in our organization and anyone who doesn't like it can run laps. :P

Brass Ablaze's second show was last night. Was it easier than the night before? Maybe. With first performance jitters a thing of the past, we were hoping for a little more focus from the members. Unfortunately after the bus ride down, we had very little time to work on some of the problem areas of the show. Additionally, this was our first exposure to the onslaught of western division 1 corps. There were 9 division one corps performing last night. Surely this made some people nervous as this is the first large scale competition of the year against many others in our division. From a staff perspective we were pleased to see that everyone seemed a little more confident of themselves, which showed in the quality of the performance and the score bringing us up .57 points from the previous night. That put us right about in the middle of the pack. Unfortunately, a few of the members did not take well to the judges decisions on a few corps, in particular the Menagerie and Aerofusion scores which were two division 2 corps that beat our scores. General consensus amoung members was that their scores were inflated. I had a pep talk with the corps prior to our leaving Sacremento to try and get everyone back into the right frame of mind. Our show is next and we need to stay focused. The only score we can effect is our own. We made it into Seattle this morning and we let the kids get a little rest before waking them for exercises and warm-ups. They seem to have a little better attitude today than last night and the focus has switched to cleaning up problem spots in the show so we will be ready to give it our all for tomorrow night. There are still a number of dirty spots and we are looking today to possibly dumb a few things down. After listening to comments from some judges, we feel we may have a few things that are too difficult at this stage and are detracting from the quality because we are not yet able to execute them flawlessly. At this point we would rather work on getting it clean and adding back in some of the difficult "fluff" later. Hopefully this will had some extra points in the short term and allow us to focus more on quality, then we can add it back later once we really have it down. The members are excited about the show tomorrow and can't wait to have another head to head match up with Tri-Color. The judges seemed to favor try color in sacremento, raising them 1.11 points from the Eugene show. "Their pit seemed more solid tonight. I'm sure that had something to do with the higher score." said drum corp fan Cynthia McGuire. Cynthia saw last night's show as well and commented to us about how she thought the two corps were doing. "Still, I can't argue that Brass Ablaze has a much more solid visual show than Tri-Color. Their guard is defanitly better but the rest of the corps just seems to still be in the elementary stage. The show has lots of potential if they can get it together. They have a lot of cleaning to do, but if they can get it up to superior quality, I think you will see their score soar. Tri-Color just needs to step up to the plate with their guard if they want to maintain their lead agaist Brass Ablaze and tonight they just didn't show that. Their guard was just not with it tonight and I don't think they were even as solid as their show last night. Still, I think at this point in the game, it's clear that Tri-Color has a more polished show but in the long run, I just don't know, it's anyone's guess." So there you have it, stright from the mouth of a fan. :)