So what are we going to do about it?

[ThirdValvesAreForWimps]

"Amplification in drum corps is like using a trampoline in the high jump." 

Someone else wrote that but I wanted to remind everyone about it.

[Cadevilina Crown]

53 minutes ago, mcjordansc said:

I like that corps experiment. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it does not. If a corps wants to put a bluegrass ensemble in the pit and it sounds cool, I say go for it. If they decide to warm up the crowd with a comedian during pre-show, that is fine by me. If they want to play old school drum corps and blow the stands down, I would like that too. I am looking to be entertained and there is a lot of ways that can be accomplished. 

I am and will always be OK with experimentation and risk-taking, for it keeps this activity alive. However, it's when something that works for one corps becomes a knock-off trend across a multitude of other corps that I don't like. For example, I thought the Bluecoats' use of spandex uniforms last year was just genius. But when a good number of other corps decided to use spandex uniforms this year, many of them just didn't look good at all. The same goes for the trend of writing all-original music in the early 2000s. The Cavaliers' all-original music during this time was incredible. In the hands of other top corps, however, it made for some pretty forgettable shows. There are plenty of other trends that have come and gone over the 45 years of DCI's history, some good and others bad. But whatever direction a corps decides to go in a certain year, they should be uniquely themselves, not rip off the trends that the top corps have established.

Edited July 18, 2017 by Cadevilina Crown

[xandandl]

2 minutes ago, Cadevilina Crown said:

I am and will always be OK with experimentation and risk-taking, for it keeps this activity alive. However, it's when something that works for one corps becomes a knock-off trend across a multitude of other corps. For example, I thought the Bluecoats' use of spandex uniforms last year was just genius. But when a good number of other corps decided to use spandex uniforms this year, many of them just didn't look good at all. The same goes for the trend of writing all-original music in the early 2000s. The Cavaliers' all-original music during this time was incredible. In the hands of other top corps, however, it made for some pretty forgettable shows. There are plenty of other trends that have come and gone over the 45 years of DCI's history, some good and others bad. But whatever direction a corps decides to go in a certain year, they should be uniquely themselves, not rip off the trends that the top corps have established.

Are you saying that corps are becoming lemmings?

 

I pretty much agree that they are.

[Fred Windish]

Good topic!

This is NOT an anti-amplification effort. Any change that solves a problem deserves consideration, and maybe an honest try. Uncontrolled new developments of any sort create a risk. Expanding-out amplification is different. It effects the essence of what we are.

What "problem" is being solved by a growing dominance of instrument amplification in our productions?

[drumcorpsfever]

Like most other things, if it's done well, okay.    But a couple of things I object to:

1) Use of amplified horns to create volume like the ''big boys" when they can't do it themselves.

2) Hearing voices through the speakers and not being able to figure out where the heck the player(s) are on the field.

[Cadevilina Crown]

6 minutes ago, xandandl said:

Are you saying that corps are becoming lemmings?

 

I pretty much agree that they are.

Yep. It's actually pretty much been that way since DCI's founding. If you're an older fan, you may remember the trends of corps playing music by Chuck Mangione and stepping over colorguard members in a company front - same idea as the newer trends. Everyone wants to fit in to what the judges reward, not necessarily what the audience rewards.

[2muchcoffeeman]

G.K. Chesterton, from his autobiography, 1936:

 

I deny that children have suffered under a tyranny of moral tales. For I remember the time when it would have seemed the most hideous tyranny to take my moral tales away from me. And, in order to make this clear, I must contradict yet another common assumption in the romantic description of the dawn of life. The point is not very easy to explain; indeed I have spent the greater part of my life in an unsuccessful attempt to explain it. Upon the cartloads of ill-constructed books in which I have completely failed to do so, I have no desire to dwell. But perhaps, as a general definition, this might be useful; or, if not as a definition, at least as a suggestion. From the first vaguely, and of late more and more clearly, I have felt that the world is conceiving liberty as something that merely works outwards. And I have always conceived it as something that works inwards.

The ordinary poetic description of the first dreams of life is a description of mere longing for larger and larger horizons. The imagination is supposed to work towards the infinite; though in that sense the infinite is the opposite of the imagination. For the imagination deals with an image. And an image is in its nature a thing that has an outline and therefore a limit. Now I will maintain, paradoxical as it may seem, that the child does not desire merely to fall out of the window, or even to fly through the air or to be drowned in the sea. When he wishes to go to other places, they are still places; even if nobody has ever been there. But in truth the case is much stronger than that. It is plain on the face of the facts that the child is positively in love with limits. He uses his imagination to invent imaginary limits. The nurse and the governess have never told him that it is his moral duty to step on alternate paving-stones. He deliberately deprives this world of half its paving-stones, in order to exult in a challenge that he has offered to himself. I played that kind of game with myself all over the mats and boards and carpets of the house; and, at the risk of being detained during His Majesty's pleasure, I will admit that I often play it still. In that sense I have constantly tried to cut down the actual space at my disposal; to divide and subdivide, into these happy prisons, the house in which I was quite free to run wild. And I believe that there is in this psychological freak a truth without which the whole modern world is missing its main opportunity. If we look at the favourite nursery romances, or at least if we have the patience to look at them twice, we shall find that they all really support this view; even when they have largely been accepted as supporting the opposite view. The charm of Robinson Crusoe is not in the fact that he could find his way to a remote island; but in the fact that he could not find any way of getting away from it. It is that fact which gives an intensive interest and excitement to all the things that he had with him on the island; the axe and the parrot and the guns and the little hoard of grain. The tale of Treasure Island is not the record of a vague desire to go on a sea voyage for one's health. It ends where it began; and it began with Stevenson drawing a map of the island, with all its bays and capes cut out as clearly as fretwork. And the eternal interest of the Noah's Ark, considered as a toy, consists in its complete suggestion of compactness and isolation; of creatures so comically remote and fantastic being all locked up in one box; as if Noah had been told to pack up the sun and moon with his luggage. In other words, it is exactly the same game that I have played myself, by piling all the things I wanted on a sofa, and imagining that the carpet around me was the surrounding sea.

This game of self-limitation is one of the secret pleasures of life. As it says in the little manuals about such sports, the game is played in several forms. One very good way of playing it is to look at the nearest bookcase, and wonder whether you would find sufficient entertainment in that chance collection, even if you had no other books. But always it is dominated by this principle of division and restriction; which begins with the game played by the child with the paving-stones.

 

Whole-corps amplification removes the limits.

[Polonius]

jazz bands in concert halls - sure mic who ever needs to be mic'd

rock concerts at large stadiums - sure - makes sense

but for a brass ensembles on a football field with limited speaker setups -- ? I just think it's not going to sound as good -- it would be one thing if the brass ensemble were always indoors and not moving -- but mic'ing moving musicians through a relatively small sound system -- you're just not going to get a nice blend -- it's not going to sound as good as just a hornline playing and blending and listening to one another --

[xandandl]

4 minutes ago, Cadevilina Crown said:

Yep. It's actually pretty much been that way since DCI's founding. If you're an older fan, you may remember the trends of corps playing music by Chuck Mangione and stepping over colorguard members in a company front - same idea as the newer trends. Everyone wants to fit in to what the judges reward, not necessarily what the audience rewards.

Agreed but in most modern drum corps it is what the Artistic Director who lectures the judges pre-season and critiques their scores and tapes during the season rewards. Also back in the day, the judges were more representative of the whole nation and not just the West Coast and Deep South. Today there are not as many Northeast judges.

[Fran Haring]

1 hour ago, 2muchcoffeeman said:

I don't know whether a petition is worthwhile, but as to the logic of amplification applied to the entire hornline:

If you don't have a problem with it, then you don't have a problem with diminishing the size of the hornline to maybe an 8- to 12-piece ensemble, enough for one player on each part in each of the four horn sections, and then using amplification to blow down the stands. After all, if volume, and volume alone, is the critereon for GE and crowd enjoyment, then the method of achieving it is irrelevant.

There is a lot of logic behind this idea. A corps would save a ton of money hauling around a couple dozen performers instead of 150. Think of all the bus costs, food costs, housing costs, etc., that would be saved by putting XYZ Drum and Bugle Corps into a single bus and a panel van carrying the amps. Think of how suddenly viable hundreds of new drum and bugle corps would become, owing to the dramatically reduced costs of putting 10 horn players, 4 drummers and a dozen guard members on the field. Let a thousand drum corps bloom!

So, if fan enjoyment is all about volume and nothing but volume, then bring on the amps and let's help drum corps survive into the future by dramatically reducing the overhead costs.

 

 

 

But maybe . . . . maybe there are other values that are more important than volume and pleasing fans in the bleachers. Values like teaching kids the value of teamwork, sacrifice, discipline, excellence. Values like earning what you receive. Values like exposing as many kids as possible to this kind of activity. And maybe there are strong practical reasons to uphold these values: The ability to obtain community/granting support for youth development, for one. You're not going to make much of a case for being a force for youth development when you're serving 24 kids in your city.

And if it really is about the youth -- if it is they who are the true customer, and it is they you intend to serve, then you would want to run away from whole-corps amplification as fast as you can.

Plus, amps and other electronics equipment don't pay tour fees.