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Favorite unnoticed drum corps show nuances?


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My favorite nuance is the bug you can see on the field in the Cadets' '89 show. You see it during the mellophone solo in Bring Him Home

Are there any entomologists on here who can tell everyone what kind of insect that was?

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For those wondering about the Cadets horns up and horns down the reason is basically in the 80's they had an excellent mellophone player and one of the best mello soloists in DCI history named Barbara Maroney who only had one arm. Because of this her fake left hand was somehow attached to the instrument but she couldn't do the quick snaps. They made the change so that they could all be in unison.

In 83 her glove was tied around the bottom of the horn...in 84 she had a full prosthetic claw that clamped around the valve cluster.

I don't buy the now-well known horns up being changed for her specifically...she marched 4 years....they did snap ups and downs before she became a soloist...the last one I remember was the chart before her 83 solo...and some of the horns down in 84 -- after they'd started doing the vertical more often -- were pretty fast. You guys talk like she couldn't move the horn at all....she DID have a right hand to help with the movements, y'know, and the claw wasn't exactly there just for show.

What I wanna know is what she did after the Rumble in 84 when the brass brought the horns down to a trail on their right and put their left hands on the cummerbunds...I don't know if she could've undone the claw at that point...and it was well before her final solo.

The REALLY impressive thing about her playing is that she could not adjust the 1st valve tuning slide...so she had to lip to all those 1st valve notes that were usually a little flat on a G horn.

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Curses! You beat me to it. How did that thing not get squished?

Cause they were so big if you stepped on one it would just shake you off. I was worried I was gonna step on that thing I saw in 1988 cause I was worried it would trip me instead of me squishing it. looked like a little tank.

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My favorite nuance is the bug you can see on the field in the Cadets' '89 show. You see it during the mellophone solo in Bring Him Home.

Hey, I interviewed that bug ten years later for a "Where are they now" segment on DCI.org. His name is Percy and after a stint in the Green Berets, he ended up graduating from University of Kansas with a degree in business administration and went to work with Chase as a financial consultant. Last I heard, he retired to running an Italian ice kiosk at county fairs in Texas.

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Yes, my guess is that it had something to do with the flag( or a paper attachment as one poster said here ) or something. I did not think it was an artificially created sound effect at the time either, but really wasn't sure.

I remember watching their show, and then.. bam... I saw them spin the flags and heard this very cool sound from flags that I don't recall hearing before in a Corps. The Corps was smart enough in this segment to make sure that no other section of the Corps was making any competing sound too. The rest of the Corps fell silent when they began it, and when the Guard spun the flags along the front sidelines where it could not be missed, it gave off a very cool sound effect when they spun the flags. Kudos to the Glassmen for that nice touch there this year.

Some say aluminum, though I'm not quite sure how you would spin aluminum. On a semi related note, Corona WG used paper flags in this year's show, and would rip through them (intentionally). Sure they had a deal with a Staples or an Office Max!

Edited by c.l.
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Hey, I interviewed that bug ten years later for a "Where are they now" segment on DCI.org. His name is Percy and went to work with Chase as a financial consultant.

I always thought that Chase had a few bugs there that they needed to get rid of.

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