Stu Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 As long as the criteria include the items we have been discussing, yes, the sound will factor into the score, as will other items that make up the evaluation criteria. I guess that might give those with the rosewood marimbas some level of advantage, however slight, if it were noticable upstairs among the rest of the voices in the mix. Would it make a tenth of a point difference in the overall score? Who knows? However slight? You are the one stating that these more expensive items (when collected together within an ensemble) make an improvement in sound so great that you have to recognize their significance in your scoring. if part of the criteria is to evaluate the quality of the sound produced, how else would you judge it? You should judge what is presented irrespective of the instrumentation choice. Balance, blend, tonality, dynamic contrasts, articulation, tempo, and all the things in which are at the mercy of the performers out on the field, floor, or stage are to be judged; and you judge them according to the particular instruments being utilized by the soloist or ensemble. It thus should not matter if you as a judge prefer the sound of Bb horns over G horns; it should not matter if you as a judge prefer Rosewood sound over Acoustalon sound; it should not matter if you as a judge prefer amplified electronics over unamplified acoustic. None of those factors 'improve' or 'diminish' the sound but just change the sound; and you should not judge based on your own personal preference of what you like or dislike in color, timber, or other items inherent to the particular instrument choice. Again, you are zoning in on one very small component of a caption and now you are focussing on one instrument. This is getting more and more like those judging clinic meetings I used to attend where we beat the most far-out hypotheticals to death that had zero relevance to reality. Nope this is not theoretical. Let me give you simple example that happens all the time: Let's say you were judging snare solos. Two drummers which are on the docket are rather equally stellar in their performance capabilities. Student 1 comes from a rather poor school system and performs on an older metal shell snare with a Mylar head. Student 2 comes from a rather rich school and performs on the newest free-floating wood snare with the newest and best Kevlar head (a modern sound which is a so-called improved sound by the judging community). In your judging system, if both performers are rather equal in their capabilities, you have to, must place the kid with the more expensive so-called 'improved' sounding drum over the other. But I contend this is not really the case; because the sound is not actually an ‘improvement’ but rather that you as a judge is biased in not liking the older Mylar Head/Metal Shell sound as opposed to the newer Kevlar Head/Wooden shell sound. Expand this out to full ensembles and the same sound ‘preference’ bias occurs many times over. And I can tell you from personal experiences that this happens in all marching competitions from the local to the national. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
perc2100 Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 More of a financial heads-up than anything but.....be advised that a lot of the people who get in to bad financial trouble(Usually via creadit cards) happens due to excessive $20.00 - $30.00 purchases....not from spending hundreds at a time. All expenses count.....and add up. That's kind of my point: a poor corps Directors/manager will be poor at their job regardless of what they are spending money on. A good corps Director/manager will be good at their job & will manage funds in such a way to keep their organization financial stable. What you suggest above = symptomatic of poor financial managers, not "this small portion of the budget = leads to corps' folding" (not that you are suggesting that). As far as brass costs go...a brand new Kanstul 3 valve horn cost just under $600.00 several years back...looking at the yea.org site...a used trumpet costs you $1,595.00..... Not being a brass guy, I honestly wasn't paying attention to prices of brand new G-keyed brass "several years back." Where there several different 'lines'/makes of G-brass: i.e. a student model, mid-line model, and a few different top-of-the-line pro models? I know that now-a-days there are SEVERAL different lines of Yamaha trumpet (Yamaha has about 10 different trumpet models that I can think of). The trumpet that Cadets use is a pretty high-end trumpet, that probably costs around $2500 new. Knowing what I do of Yamaha's percussion department, I would venture to guess that Cadets didn't actually pay $1,595 cash money per trumpet & got it at a considerable discount. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeD Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 However slight? You are the one stating that these more expensive items (when collected together within an ensemble) make an improvement in sound so great that you have to recognize their significance in your scoring. You should judge what is presented irrespective of the instrumentation choice. Balance, blend, tonality, dynamic contrasts, articulation, tempo, and all the things in which are at the mercy of the performers out on the field, floor, or stage are to be judged; and you judge them according to the particular instruments being utilized by the soloist or ensemble. It thus should not matter if you as a judge prefer the sound of Bb horns over G horns; it should not matter if you as a judge prefer Rosewood sound over Acoustalon sound; it should not matter if you as a judge prefer amplified electronics over unamplified acoustic. None of those factors 'improve' or 'diminish' the sound but just change the sound; and you should not judge based on your own personal preference of what you like or dislike in color, timber, or other items inherent to the particular instrument choice. Nope this is not theoretical. Let me give you simple example that happens all the time: Let's say you were judging snare solos. Two drummers which are on the docket are rather equally stellar in their performance capabilities. Student 1 comes from a rather poor school system and performs on an older metal shell snare with a Mylar head. Student 2 comes from a rather rich school and performs on the newest free-floating wood snare with the newest and best Kevlar head (a modern sound which is a so-called improved sound by the judging community). In your judging system, if both performers are rather equal in their capabilities, you have to, must place the kid with the more expensive so-called 'improved' sounding drum over the other. But I contend this is not really the case; because the sound is not actually an ‘improvement’ but rather that you as a judge is biased in not liking the older Mylar Head/Metal Shell sound as opposed to the newer Kevlar Head/Wooden shell sound. Expand this out to full ensembles and the same sound ‘preference’ bias occurs many times over. And I can tell you from personal experiences that this happens in all marching competitions from the local to the national. "However slight" is right....you are the one talking about the difference a rosewood marimba would make in a score, not me. "You should judge what is presented irrespective of the instrumentation choice." Exactly. You prove my point. You judge the sound, not the make of the instruments. Yes, it is theoretical...you want from talking about a drum corps show and judging ensemble and effect to judging a solo snare drum competition, which would have different criteria. I judged many in the past, both corps-style individual contests through region and all-state band auditions. In those arenas, the criteria are different than an ensemble music or music effect judge would use in a MB or corps competition. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CrownLeadSop Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 I tried going back and reading some posts but I started going cross-eyed. The whole thread can be summed up by a simple line from a movie starring Jeff Bridges. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeD Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 I tried going back and reading some posts but I started going cross-eyed. The whole thread can be summed up by a simple line from a movie starring Jeff Bridges. Then our work here is complete! Great job everybody! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
perc2100 Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 Okay, first Merry Christmas. I'm looking a definitive answer to what makes this activity so different from others that stop its grow or hastens its death? In the past people have compared it to everything from pro sports to BOA. The reason I'm asking is because while listening to the best drum lines of 1972 I noticed that of the 39 original corps only 7 are still active. 13 of 48 from 82, 15 of 27 from 92. Adding the lower divisions you have 6 of 29 corps and 16 of 21 in 2002 plus 6 of 42 corps in lower divisions. Going back to only 2002 24 out of 63 corps are still left. That's a little more then a third of corps that year who marched last year. If this was pro sports there would be only 12 MLB or 10 NFL and 8 NHL teams left. Why is this activity so different then everything else? To get back to this question, I think the obvious answer of "what makes drum corps so different from MLB, NFL, and NHL (to use your examples)" is $$$$. It's as simple as that. Professional athletic conferences have huge revenue streams from apparel, ticket buyers, and (most important) TV/media. Drum corps has nothing close to that sort of revenue stream, or else they would likely be a lot more financially solvent. In those pro sport leagues you mention, when an owner (or ownership group) decide that running a pro sport club is not financially viable they can sell the team (often at huge profits), thus bringing in a new owner with new ideas & finances. A great example recently is the LA Dodgers. They had an owner who was in the middle of a divorce, was in bankruptcy, and couldn't afford to pay salaries. He sold the team for a HUGE profit to a new ownership group that has sunk more money into player salaries, thus renewing interest into the team from locals, thus driving up ticket sales, thus injecting more revenue into the LA Dodgers. I recently read a great brook about the math and numbers of World soccer (called "Soccernomics") that spends a lot of time talking about metrics similar to 'Moneyball.' One chapter talks about how soccer team owners don't own clubs to profit: in fact most clubs lose a TON of money annually. The owners run clubs because they're sports fans and want to see their club win. There was HUGE problem a few decades back with English soccer teams going into bankruptcy and gaming the financial courts in order to sidestep debt. The book does a great job of showing that even the wealthiest of soccer clubs wouldn't come close to the lower 500 profit-making businesses (such as regional grocery stores, I think was the example in the book). I suspect that many US sports owners also don't see huge profits from their ventures until they sell their team: most of them just kind of do it "for fun" or the love of the sport. The leagues, however, make so much money that it is easier I guess to help keep the lower-performing financial teams afloat (such as 'luxury tax' or salary cap penalties). If your asking why DCI doesn't try to enact something like that, I would suspect it's because corps directors and DCI BoD members don't want to give up a piece of the pie to help out other corps. And I guess if Corps Z is successful in bringing in revenue and controlling expenditures why should they have to give up funds to Corps G who is not? i don't know if I agree or disagree with that philosophy, but I can see where directors might be coming from: especially in an activity that doesn't generate a lot of revenue anyway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Ream Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 If your contention is that 'improvement' of sound, which is based on the ability to procure the best of the best most expensive equipment, is to be scored higher, it therefore does not matter if you are judging DCI, WGI, BOA, TOB, or any number of regional or local marching shows. Given two rather equal performances, whether individual or as an ensemble, again you as a judge, with your belief structure, you have to, must, give the scoring edge in an equal performance situation to the person or group using the 'improved' sound of the very expensive ultra-high quality equipment over the sound of the good quality yet less expensive equipment. This means that the individual or group who struggled hard to purchase the good quality, yet less expensive, Acoustolon is automatically at a judging disadvantage from the start simply because they cannot afford to purchase the ultra-high quality, and way more expensive, Rosewood. This also means that even if Pioneer was to somehow put together staff and youth performers at the performance quality level of Crown or BD, but not able to purchase all the brand new fancy dandy equipment and brand new so-called ‘improved’ electronic amplification toys, Pioneer would still be scored by you as a judge well below Crown and BD. Now if DCI, BOA, WGI, etc were adult ‘professional’ competitive organizations I would tend to agree with you; but we are, last time I checked, actually talking about youth non-profit organizations which also claim to be educational as well as competitive; even within DCI. for the record, the percusion section that won in TOB in the ACC's show i judged had duct tape holding their marimba together. the kid whoever played wonderfully, as did the rest f his section mates. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stu Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 "However slight" is right....you are the one talking about the difference a rosewood marimba would make in a score, not me. "You should judge what is presented irrespective of the instrumentation choice." Exactly. You prove my point. You judge the sound, not the make of the instruments. Yes, it is theoretical...you want from talking about a drum corps show and judging ensemble and effect to judging a solo snare drum competition, which would have different criteria. I judged many in the past, both corps-style individual contests through region and all-state band auditions. In those arenas, the criteria are different than an ensemble music or music effect judge would use in a MB or corps competition. Two ensembles with relativly the same caliber of performers and the same style of arranging of the musical material; which one would, to you, have the so-called 'improved' sound and thus get the higher score from you as a judge? a) The performance where the ensemble uses 5-Octave Rosewood Grand Marimbas, Professional Grade 3.5 OCT Vibraphones, a Moog Voyager XL Synth and other electronic devices, a Yamaha 02R96VCM Mixing Console, Oxygen Free Cables, a Sennheiser KR402 High Tech Ultra-light Powered Line Array, with a series of Mackie HDA / HD1501 PA speakers and an adult professional sound engineer; b) The performance where the ensemble uses 4.3-Octave Kelon Marimbas, Student Grade 3-Octave Vibraphones, with a Casio Keyboard, standard cables, JBL amplification, and with just a two-channel board and no sound engineer? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stu Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 for the record, the percusion section that won in TOB in the ACC's show i judged had duct tape holding their marimba together. the kid whoever played wonderfully, as did the rest f his section mates. And for the record if MikeD was judging that 'probably' would not have been the case!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Ream Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 And for the record if MikeD was judging that 'probably' would not have been the case!!! no, it was a pretty easy call to make Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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