skajerk Posted September 5, 2012 Share Posted September 5, 2012 (edited) 2004 Crown is one of my all-time favorite shows ever....Cadets 2005 and 2007 were great...Cascades Airborne Symphony was a great use of narration. Just this year...Blue Knights opening number was my favorite number of the season. Lots of great use of electronics, and it just gets better. The Cadets have made me fall in love with them all over again the past couple of years and I've been a HUGE Crown supporter since seeing them in Pasadena. For me, those are 3 shows I will never listen to again. You say it was "great use of electronics" and I think just the opposite. And pretty much everyone knows how I felt about BK's over-use (my opinion) of a&e this past season. Different strokes, as they say. Edited September 5, 2012 by skajerk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kevin Powell Posted September 5, 2012 Share Posted September 5, 2012 I think there is a corps from the past that you might enjoy. See if you can get a recording of 1990 Phantom Regiment. Listen to the first 3 minutes, and let us know what you think. I think revisiting many of the shows from the late eighties and early nineties. I always come back to 1991 SCV because the use of percussion effects in that show were simply amazing - You do not catch the effect from video the same as live. Then I imagine that show today. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skajerk Posted September 5, 2012 Share Posted September 5, 2012 Carmine Appice - who wrote the book on rock drumming and played with Vanilla Fudge, Beck, Bogart and Appice, Rod Stewart just to name a few...was the guest host on a PBS DCI Championship telecast. This was BITD when you could sit at home and watch the Championships live on TV. Other guest hosts were Gene Rayburn, Rita Moreno, Maynard Ferguson, etc. Carmine made a statement about adding electric guitars. For that time that was totally absurd! LOL NOW? Maybe he was ahead of his time in drum corps. Someone heard that, remembered it when they were young and made it happen. Also known for one of his comments during the broadcast... "That was cool". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grandpa Posted September 5, 2012 Share Posted September 5, 2012 Oh, I totally disagree. Hardly surprising - I'll totally disagree with your total disagreement. Except for the drum posing thing. That really needs to go..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeD Posted September 5, 2012 Share Posted September 5, 2012 Hardly surprising - I'll totally disagree with your total disagreement. and I'll totally disagree with your total disagreement of my total disagreement. Except for the drum posing thing. That really needs to go..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeD Posted September 5, 2012 Share Posted September 5, 2012 The Cadets have made me fall in love with them all over again the past couple of years and I've been a HUGE Crown supporter since seeing them in Pasadena. For me, those are 3 shows I will never listen to again. You say it was "great use of electronics" and I think just the opposite. And pretty much everyone knows how I felt about BK's over-use (my opinion) of a&e this past season. Different strokes, as they say. Exactly! . . . . . . . . ...except I am right. (j/k) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kevin Powell Posted September 5, 2012 Share Posted September 5, 2012 (edited) Oh, I totally disagree. There is far more variety today than in my day, when drills were made up of primarily set pieces. I don't think people would confuse The Cadets show with the Blue Devils with Crown with Surf with...the change to drills with fewer set pieces and the added themes in 71 with Garfield, Madison and the Cavies raised a huge stink. As for a checklist, the one I do agree on is the drum posing thing...I hate that! Guard dancing and electronics? Those are basic standard elements of DCI drum corps. Unless you want to add marching, trumpets, snare drums and flags to your checklist those should not be there. They are as much a part of drum corps as any other element. The shows have become "twitter feeds"... lots of small elements pieced together for the sake of staying competitive. Short elements without real resolve. This removes the memory aspects of the show and confuses the audience (the consumer). These little snippets are part of that same checklist just to stay competitive. I do appreciate the Cadets being more entertaining and absolutely do not confuse it with BD. The BD show was a mix of 12 or 13 different musical selections and the Cadets show 4 with layered Christmas ideas throughout. Both shows could have been well executed without electronics. Maybe it is the short attention span of today's society. I do not know... Maybe I am not in Vogue. As Madonna use to say... "STRIKE A POSE.." Edited September 5, 2012 by Kevin Powell 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kevin Powell Posted September 5, 2012 Share Posted September 5, 2012 (edited) First off - this dino says "great post"! Themes in themselves are not a big deal. I generally ignore them anyway. What I do think is a problem is when the presentation of theme demands chopped up music and excessive dance to the point where it becomes mundane. This doesn't enhance, it detracts, and we seem to see it all the time. Dance, especially in the hornline, is much more dramatic when used sparingly. PRESENTATION... That is what I keep forgetting. Thanks Grandpa. Has anyone ever sat through a "great" PowerPoint presentation? Not many people have. A great PowerPoint presentation is very minimal with only headlines and key talking points. An APPLE keynote speech is a great example of a great PowerPoint presentation. On the other hand you have the usual teacher given PowerPoint Presentation. These have 100s of slides with every note needed for your test and you are bored senseless... WHY??? No sense of self within the presentation. There is no need to engage and think. Modern shows are taking away the sense of "WONDER" by putting to much in. By this form of presentation, the shows are starting to bore people. Put the sense of "WONDER" back into the shows by "TRUSTING" the audience and taking things away. Judges need to let the corps take things out. Spoken Narrative should be a voice in your head. Reverb effects on trumpet solos can be created by TWO soloist in different parts of the field, facing different directions, timed differently... Pipe organs can be muted horns played back field. Helicopters are drums.... Tin is thunder... The front pit should resemble a 1940s radio hour with sound effects that are man made. The designers do not trust themselves enough to take elements away and tell the story in its simplest form. These same designers do not trust that YOU will understand it. They are forced by judges scoring to put it ALL out there without sense of WONDER... And we let them. Edited September 5, 2012 by Kevin Powell 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
frachel Posted September 5, 2012 Share Posted September 5, 2012 One of my all-time favorite shows. I'd love to hear Phantom Regiment do the Organ Symphony again with their current horn line and a synth on the organ and piano parts. ...though they still need to do Janacek's Sinfonietta for me first. That's our general difference I think - I'd love to hear the "drum corps version" of the Organ Symphony.. somehow arranged for brass and drums only, to see what they come up with to fit the instrumentation. I'm not there to hear an actual organ and piano in the piece. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GUARDLING Posted September 5, 2012 Share Posted September 5, 2012 marching members rock... yes. And what was taken away was the one difference between "drum & bugle corps" and "marching band" - the bugles. If there is another difference besides complexity of show - please enlighten the world. there isnt alot of difference as far as I think...evolve , sure, also a BUGLE ( do they even make those things anymore ? ) didnt chage anything and isnt what made it different from MB, brass is brass no matter how many valves or if it had a rotor...but if thats how youn feel...thats cool...dont know what you can do about that but hey youre entitled Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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