What are your controversial marching arts opinions?

[Cappybara]

42 minutes ago, Poppycock said:

I prefer marching demand and drill complexity over staging and simultaneous fluttering, Ring around the Rosie and striking a contortionist pose. Also, I prefer long musical phrases to short music statements and brass acrobatics, singing and/or narration. IMO props and electronics is becoming the focal points in productions instead of music, marching, and guard visual. It is easier to jazz run to a spot/set then it is to teach marching movement and technique. Two entirely different demand requirements. I am not a fan of the maximum number of members being increased to 165. Talent will move up and there will be a greater gap between corps. With the 128-member maximum, talent was spread throughout the activity. Now the pool of talent is not as wide or as deep. The system of evaluation needs to be overhauled. Separating performances within a sub caption by a single tenth is not judging, it is slotting. I would suggest the use of Ordinal numbers. Not one judge is going to be creditable in explaining let alone dignify their delta of a tenth between performances. The criteria required was essentially put in place for field judging not watching and listening from the sidelines or stands.   

Completely agree with you on the judging system in place. Ordinals would be a significant upgrade but there would be the need to account for tie breakers. It really is asinine that judges can separate a corps by a tenth. In a way, I guess they are using an ordinal system, but it is a flawed one. Currently too many people get confused by the fact that a 20 in a caption is not necessarily a perfect score, it’s just poor numbers management by the judge 

[IllianaLancerContra]

14 hours ago, Hrothgar15 said:

I’d be the first person to tell you the judges would place a show like that dead last, as has happened before with corps like Pioneer. The point is that the sheets should be changed so that something like that could be competitive, so we could actually see some diversity of instrumentation and design on the field. Or at the very least have a separate all-acoustic “Live Class” or something with different sheets and an incentive for corps to perform in that.

I fell in love with drum corps from an audio recording of the Cadets in 2000, on Bb/F. I only then later started listening to older shows and decided G bugles sounded better. 🙃

Yes, shows are designed to score well using system in place at the time.  1976 BD would not score well on 2022 sheets, & 2022 BD would not score well on 1976 sheets (even ignoring the fact that they would be DQ'd using 1976 rules).  And if 2022 BD design team wrote a show using 1976 rules, the result would look a lot like 1976 BD.

[Vidal28Rdg]

44 minutes ago, Cappybara said:

Completely agree with you on the judging system in place. Ordinals would be a significant upgrade but there would be the need to account for tie breakers. It really is asinine that judges can separate a corps by a tenth. In a way, I guess they are using an ordinal system, but it is a flawed one. Currently too many people get confused by the fact that a 20 in a caption is not necessarily a perfect score, it’s just poor numbers management by the judge 

20’s in visual and GE are given out like candy to champions but rarely so in music🙃

[TheOneWhoKnows]

Crown should have won 2015 and 2016. I said what I said. 

[jwillis35]

4 hours ago, Poppycock said:

I prefer marching demand and drill complexity over staging and simultaneous fluttering, Ring around the Rosie and striking a contortionist pose. Also, I prefer long musical phrases to short music statements and brass acrobatics, singing and/or narration. IMO props and electronics is becoming the focal points in productions instead of music, marching, and guard visual. It is easier to jazz run to a spot/set then it is to teach marching movement and technique. Two entirely different demand requirements. I am not a fan of the maximum number of members being increased to 165. Talent will move up and there will be a greater gap between corps. With the 128-member maximum, talent was spread throughout the activity. Now the pool of talent is not as wide or as deep. The system of evaluation needs to be overhauled. Separating performances within a sub caption by a single tenth is not judging, it is slotting. I would suggest the use of Ordinal numbers. Not one judge is going to be creditable in explaining let alone dignify their delta of a tenth between performances. The criteria required was essentially put in place for field judging not watching and listening from the sidelines or stands.   

Man, I want to tell you that you are one Concise, Clear, Articulate, and Observant DCI fan. It would take me 2 pages to describe all of this as accurately as you have. I really can't disagree with any of this. 

[jwillis35]

1 hour ago, TheOneWhoKnows said:

Crown should have won 2015 and 2016. I said what I said. 

If they had marched better on Finals night they likely would have won in 2015. Not sure about 2016. That was a Bluecoats year for sure. 

[TheOneWhoKnows]

5 minutes ago, jwillis35 said:

If they had marched better on Finals night they likely would have won in 2015. Not sure about 2016. That was a Bluecoats year for sure. 

While I understand the reason for the change, I think they could've definitely given Bluecoats a run for their money in GE in 2016 if they kept the old ending. It just worked better and was more impactful. 

[FTNK]

Bluecoats “Hey Jude” ending threw away the title

[Orwellian Wiress]

I like both Felliniesque and Tilt and I would have been ok with either winning. 

[jjeffeory]

On 7/13/2022 at 4:56 PM, Orwellian Wiress said:

Yes! I've always thought a "crowd" caption would be fun. It shouldn't be a super big part of scoring, but it would be cool to score some extra points for it

There was a time when the guard caption worked that way...

Now the guard has their fingers in every caption in one way or another.