r/drumcorps

Hey guys!

For my 30th birthday my wife wanted to gift me going to finals this year. All I had to do was tell her specifics and she would plan it. Well... waited too long and saw about a month ago that almost every "good" seat seems to be sold.

Normally we'd say "you know what it's a good opportunity to just go", but considering we're making the trip from CA I'm a little worried about spending a ton of money to travel and then having mediocre seats for finals. So definitely considering canceling the trip altogether which would be a bit of a bummer.

Am I s.o.l. here or is there some magical "last minute tickets opened up" thing I might be able to catch?

Thanks for any advice you guys can give me!

Hey all. Really happy to be here. I am a Blue Devil alum and also a Disney drummer (Tom Float's trash can Jammitors groups in Japan Disneyland and DisneySea..Universal Florida, and some other parks as well), Japan and Southeast Asian clinician more recently. Wanted to connect, and also share a vid I made with a Thai kid in Chiang Mai which has blown up. It'd be great if you guys could help out getting it to half a million views (it's almost there). Just a fun little jam, so go easy on me lol..

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSAEJX6D3TH/?igsh=dmk0OGd2aTZjcXVh

Also I've been around a long time, so feel free to AMA about growing up in the DCI of the 80s and 90s..also taught BAC (front ensemble) and Magic of Orlando (battery) bitd.

Nice to meet you guys!

David

TL;DR: the humanity being taken out of show design ruins the joy of creation and performance for me as an audience member, and the lack of transparency about its use makes it hard to get excited about productions anymore.

I’m finding it harder and harder to wholeheartedly get excited about show announcements because of the threat that large language models were used in the design process.

Now, there are glimmers of hope against machine use in the activity! FJM rejecting its use, for example, is a great sign. On the other hand, though, you have bad actors like Shane Gwaltney posturing “accessibility” with his shameless, lazy use of machines to do his work for him, in an endless pursuit of ease and money that makes athletic music look worse, to say nothing about his clients. This laziness, this greediness, sucks the joy out of any show announcement his clients make.

This is a great example of my point - Shane’s show for Music City, my home corps, is CONFIRMED to have used machines in its design: its visuals are certainly generated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the concept was, too. How am I supposed to be excited for this? Where’s the humanity in this concept?

And with other corps, one can’t help but be suspicious. After initially crediting an artist in the comments of their announcement, the Spartans have disabled and hidden those comments on Instagram! Is that an admission of guilt? Who’s to say! I’d love to be proven wrong in saying that Academy’s graphics are machine-made - they’ve credited a designer, but maybe that designer is using LLMs in their process! Who knows! (Edit: we do, thanks to a commenter. No AI there! but to my point, I had to wonder). What’s clear enough is that few corps are so shameless that they’ll openly admit to allowing the use of LLMs, and they seem to understand how little the community cares for it, so it’s upsetting that they’re used at all.

This lack of transparency in the design process, for me, is killing the pre-season hype. These days, instead of being excited for what direction a corps might go, what they might do with the material, how they’ll translate the music and concept to the field, I feel the need to antagonize the announcements, because it’s IMPORTANT that anti-human, anti-creative machine use is uprooted and exposed. At the same time, though, it’s depressing, exhausting, and joyless. Show announcements used to be fun. Now it feels like fighting a battle for creativity and humanity, and against laziness and greed.

Athletic music is an art. It’s a beautiful crossroads of fields: a little bit creative, a little bit competitive, a little bit educational. It sees multiple people coming together to make a unique work that’s competitive with other works and balances challenge and achievability for young people. Because of that collaboration, because of those crossroads, large language models have no place here, and their use, confirmed or not, sucks the joy out of athletic music.

Corps designers, admin, directors, and staff: You are hurting your programs by allowing the use of machine generation to continue. You lose credibility and favor when there’s even SUSPICION of its use. The only right move is to credit your creatives, confirm that LLMs weren’t used in any part of the design process, and denounce the use of “AI” entirely. Otherwise, you hurt not only your corps, but the activity at large. Who would want to consume art made by a machine?

PS - Some background on me: I’m an alumni well removed from my marching days. I’m a music educator. I’m a composer and show designer. I’m also one of the most anti-LLM people out there - I refuse to call it “AI” or “artificial intelligence” because that has always been marketing language for something that is either insignificant in machine learning or not advanced enough to be traditional sci-fi-like AI (depending on your definition).

I saw Boston at their Florida camp today and... my god.

Oh sure, they were pretty damn good last year. [2nd] to [1st] is surely no joke. But this - what I saw today - this is now something entirely different. This is something that I've seen before. I've seen it and I recognize it as sure as I know my own face. I cannot mistake this feeling for anything other than what it most assuredly is. It is something I saw, and felt, back in 2012 with Crown; I saw and felt it again in '14 with TILT.

And this thing is - a Super Saiyan.

That's the only way I can explain it. Those corps in those years took that invisible step that upped their power to a level they had never achieved before. Maybe they didn't win it all, but that was not why we remember those shows. We remember because they had crossed some invisible line and the ultimate results of that was inevitable. Even if it took another season, even if it took two.

Boston has crossed that line. It's not even about where they place this year. It's about putting everyone else; the fans, DCI, and the top 3, on notice. They know how to go Super Saiyan now, and they are coming.

We've had corps do 'dark' shows. We've had corps do artsy shows. We've had 'clever', and minimalist and Fellini-esque and psychedelic and you name it shows. Prepare for Angry. Animal Farm in comparison was just sarcastic with a touch of upset. Wicked Games was dark with a touch of brooding.

What is coming this year is controlled and brutal anger. I know it because even Gino was surprised enough by it to raise an eyebrow and say out loud, "these kids are very good at doing angry".

Anyways, I'm calling it right now. Top [1].

They'll fight it out with someone, possibly [Bloo]. Here's the Shamaliyan plot twist though. It's entirely too early to tell of course, but if they keep ramping up their power level at this same rate, they may very well leave [2nd] in their wake.

There, I said it. There is a definite possibility that, despite all I just said and what I've just predicted, that I might be underestimating them.

Looking to see if anyone has any snare audition packets they could send my way. Anything would be great, but I’m looking for Blue Knights in particular!

I am very much interested in auditioning for indoor and outdoor groups these next coming seasons, however, as I have now graduated high school, I don't exactly have access to a marimba anymore. How am I supposed to prepare audition work and practice?

What are some of the best drum corps memes

post them here

- Opener: - "The Greatest Show" from *The Greatest Showman*

- 2nd Movement - "Millionaire" from *Slumdog Millionaire*, plus original music from Richard Saucedo.

- Ballad - "Never Enough" from *The Greatest Showman*, largely focused on soprano sax solo.

- Closer - "Ghost Love Score" and "The Greatest Show on Earth" by Nightwish.

A bit of a goofy question, I know. But I was thinking about how the Blue Devils marched 149 members in 2015 to leave space for the C corps member to come in for finals, and it got me thinking. How easy would it be for a corps to just field 166 people and not tell anybody? Does DCI have a system to verify membership numbers and keep corps in compliance? What happens if a corps gets caught having marched more than the limit?

Im 100% deaf in my left ear and have perfect hearing in my right. I’ve marched three years in high school like this with minor notes, but I worry that this will somehow affect how much corps will value my audition. I heard corps are pretty mindful when it comes to disabilities, but I don’t know how this applies to deaf people in a musical activity. Would my deafness lower or erase my chances of getting into a corp??

Hi all,

I’m in the early stages of making a video about the evolution of sound systems and sampled audio in drum corps—specifically, how more and more corps are adopting a more atmospheric soundcheck/preshow and commentating on a few examples I think are particularly effective. I can’t easily comment on it without playing the samples in question, and by nature of what it is, a lot of the examples I have were taken from snippets of recordings from FloMarching streams I’ve collected, both officially released and otherwise.

A lot of content creators I follow (Funliner Productions, CJ’s Music, et. al.) use corps footage with audio playing as B-roll, so I was wondering if anyone has experience with making content in the drum corps space knows what rights, if any, I’d have to get to use corps audio—if the corps sound team made the samples, but they were recorded by Flo, would I need an agreement with the corps, with FloMarching, or both? Or if it comes from the source music verbatim (i.e. Bluecoats 2024), would I need to also get permission from the Son Lux label?

I know music/sampling rights are messy, especially in the drum corps space, so I’d rather double check on what I may need before getting copyright struck out of existence. If anyone familiar is able to offer some guidance, I’d appreciate any input!

Who will have a woodwind soloist. We should be able to bet on this on Kalshi