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BLUE DEVILS 2022 The Return


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3 hours ago, saxfreq1128 said:

Yep we saw the real flags at Rose Bowl tonight -- very interesting! The Moon River silks are a cloudy skyline design, and the closer silks have this amazing liquid effect; they have a bunch of people backstage at the end who walk across the rows of steps, and it looks like flowing water. 

But the corps jackets remain a mystery for now. I'm intrigued!!

Maybe we aren’t getting the jacket and shako after all?  Maybe they were just a red herring to throw us off. Or maybe none of them fit and they haven’t finished tailoring them?  Regardless, they don’t need them. They are gorgeous as they are. They DO glimmer like water. Very effective on the field. And yeah, i would have bet real money that we had only seen practice flags. Scott would never have overlooked a critical detail like yellow flags in a production about the color blue!

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12 hours ago, WarriorWay said:

The ending didn’t seem as catchy as 2019, my big worry. Their brass sonority sounds also very different than usual. More baritone / tuba voice. There was a lot of content but it came up rather suddenly so that pacing seemed odd. For early season it was about usual for them… we shall see if music design is enough to carry them over the threshold  

Well, for starters they have ditched their System Blue horns and are on Conn-Selmer made horns. That has really adjusted the EQ overall for the horns. Chip Crotts also brings a more aggressive and in-your-face vibe to the horns, which I really love. Nice to see a Jim Ott-ish approach for the first time in about 45 years. 
 

I did attend the rehearsal and uniformed performance at Grand Terrace “blind”. General impression for me was positive but there is so far to go with the show. They are really at stage one in the active deployment of the show. Major ideas and concepts have been blocked in. Once they get past tonight’s show, then they begin going through this show with a fine tooth comb, a process that will last until they arrive at Indy. 
 

The program is a little disjointed and the flow isn’t quite where it needs to be but they will get the transitions ironed out, and refine the drill ideas. I anticipate some moderate changes in the drill, feels a little too “big linear” for me at the moment. There is no question the move to 165 members has had an impact though. The field seems quite a bit more congested than in the past, and I kind of like the negative space that a group of say, 135 provides. I’m not sure if this is a temporary thing and they’ll roll it back but if they don’t, hopefully this is as big as it gets. Any bigger, it’s just gonna look like marching band. 
 

At any rate, they are off to a good start. One thing for sure is, BD staff will make sure they challenge the kids to the bitter end. It’s no coincidence how many times they have pulled off a title win at the 11th hour. They are literally improving until they get on the bus for finals. That’s the essence of the BD aura. 

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Ah. It's officially "All they do is park and bark" and "if this wins DCI is over!" season -- wild how you can follow an activity for 20 years and the critiques never change, literally just copy/paste. Someone's even already gotten their stopwatch out to time the marching&playing. I hate sequels!!

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1 minute ago, saxfreq1128 said:

Ah. It's officially "All they do is park and bark" and "if this wins DCI is over!" season -- wild how you can follow an activity for 20 years and the critiques never change, literally just copy/paste. Someone's even already gotten their stopwatch out to time the marching&playing. I hate sequels!!

I’m very much confused by the park and bark comments. BD was marching actual formations last night for extended periods of time. If you timed it, I’d imagine they marched the most of any corps last night 

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1 minute ago, Cappybara said:

I’m very much confused by the park and bark comments. BD was marching actual formations last night for extended periods of time. If you timed it, I’d imagine they marched the most of any corps last night 

The diagonal front at the end isn’t a piece of cake.  They have to clean them but those pass thrus they do through the tubas aren’t easy either. They’re a mess now but they’ll get there.

 I’ve found that just because they make it look easy, doesn’t mean it’s easy.

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Having watched the dress rehearsal video and nothing else...I think the thing I get the most vibes off of is 2002? But late-season after-they-rewrote-the-show 2002. (I wasn't around the activity in 2002 so I don't actually know what the early-season version of it was like.) Mostly in the last two movements. Not sure why...just kinda had the same vibes as House of the Rising Sun and Channel One did in that year.

I kinda wish that in a show at least a little bit about different shades of blue that they'd incorporated Ticheli's Blue Shades, and possibly some of Kind of Blue. But that's because I'm a dork.

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1 minute ago, Terri Schehr said:

The diagonal front at the end isn’t a piece of cake.  They have to clean them but those pass thrus they do through the tubas aren’t easy either. They’re a mess now but they’ll get there.

 I’ve found that just because they make it look easy, doesn’t mean it’s easy.

And they aren't even making it look easy yet! 

 

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Just now, Terri Schehr said:

The diagonal front at the end isn’t a piece of cake.  They have to clean them but those pass thrus they do through the tubas aren’t easy either. They’re a mess now but they’ll get there.

 I’ve found that just because they make it look easy, doesn’t mean it’s easy.

That diagonal front is so classic BD. Not sure if they’ll get it felliniesque clean but it will be significantly cleaner by August 

I agree, BD doesn’t seem to do as much “in your face difficult” drill like you’d see Crown or the Cadets do, they have a lot more subtle difficulty built into their shows 

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