for the marching banders out there..

Pre-College Issues High School Life
41

<p>Personally I’ve found the best bands (overall best sound, basics, and visuals) are the small ones because everyone has to be spot on for them to even have a chance at a decent score. In a big band you can have weak players and marchers and the chances of them being noticed (if you have the drill written to play on it) will be very slim. Most big bands aren’t very good. I’ve seen a few good big bands but most of them aren’t too great, they sound as loud as bands I’ve heard with half their players. In TOB group 2 is the most competitive group it has the most bands and has the highest scores almost every year at ACCs.</p>

42

<p>^^Take USSBA for example. The most well-known bands are in Groups IV and V. Why is this? Well, Groups I, II, and III are a tad too small to blow a stadium away, but the Group VI bands are so huge and unorganized at times, that most of them have bad performances. The only Group VI I know of that do well are Roxbury and South Brunswick. Groups IV and V are bands with members between 78 and 140 members. Large enough to create a good sound, but small enough that the director and staff can focus on the small mistakes and make it perfect.</p>

43

<p>USSBA is a completely different creature than TOB, TOB is where the big dogs go to play.
Not knocking on USSBA bands, there are some insanely great bands there (my all time favorite band is USSBA only), but TOB is much more competitive; USSBA inflates their scores to the max. I’ve competed at a TOB competition and scored a 91 and then gone to an USSBA (performed way worse, people were FALLING in our box of doom) and gotten a 95 and qualified for nationals (totally true story btw).</p>

44

<p>^</p>

<p><a href=“http://images.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/9489184.jpg[/url]”>http://images.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/9489184.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

45

<p>Band camp in eight hours, the last week of twelve hour practices for me… ever.</p>

46

<p>I’m glad I’ve still got another year ahead of this season.
We marked the first few sets of our real show. It’s amazing.</p>

47

<p>WHO CARES ABOUT WHAT SCORES ARE GIVEN OUT?! IT’S STILL RELATIVE! THE BEST BANDS GET THE BEST SCORES! </p>

<p>Sorry, but my band has gone to TOB championships before, and we’ve won even though we had never competed in TOB before.</p>

48

<p>^I have to disagree, second place in Northern States (totally true) with people falling on the field (the judges noticed they were freaking out on the tapes) is pretty bad. With a great show, the best we’ve ever played and marched, we could only scrape into 7th place at ACCs. If we were the 2nd to best band there, shame on those other bands.
Score inflation gives people the impression they are doing better than they actually are.</p>

<p>You haven’t gone to TOB championships if you haven’t competed in TOB before. To qualify for championships you must attend at least 2 TOB competitions prior to Chapters. So if you really did go to Champs you competed twice before. Also (you’d be group 4 in TOB right?) most chapters have under 5 group 4 bands. In my chapter there aren’t any, if you are competing against no one, you get 1st by default.</p>

49

<p>I’m in a band of about… 35ish people? And all we do is march down the street in the Labor Day parade. And we have plenty of trouble with just that.</p>

50

<p>@bandgeek1 Were you competing in A or Open Class in USSBA? I’d understand that you could get 2nd and have a terrible show in Group A, because those are the second class bands. And we have won. Check out Group 3 1997. We went there, won, and were like “This is too easy.” and never participated in TOB again. And looking at the most recent TOB Championship scores, USSBA is only 1-2 points higher in judging. Not a big difference…Bricktown Memorial’s score was even higher than our Nationals score… </p>

<p>Out of curiosity, what band are you in?</p>

<p>Edit: AND, TOB’s all time highest score is higher than USSBA’s (98.80 vs. 98.575)</p>

51

<p>Open, I PMed you I just don’t want that much info out there for everyone to see.
It might have just been my band that that has happened to but I doubt it</p>

<p>Group 3 is the biggest joke of a group in TOB. I’ve seen a band with an easy show, bad sound and bad basics be in the top 5 at ACCs. It’s pathetic in there :x</p>

52

<p>Bump, CCers, report how your band does per competition.</p>

<p>Just got back from Timber Creek NJ. We won Group 2A <3</p>

53

<p>Wow that’s early for competing. Our first competition isn’t until the end of this month. We’ve only got a little over half of our first song on the field lol, we get our drill from our writer in chunks of 4-7 sets and we haven’t gotten any in a while. He writes such great drill though.</p>

54

<p>We start early and finish at late October so around ACC time. We have, I’d say, five minutes of show on the field and we need to start moving forward. I’m surprised we won frankly because of time tears between battery and band but everything after that was excellent. We need to fix that, ASAP.</p>

<p>Does anyone know how the drum major category works?</p>

55

<p>My school has our first competition next Saturday. We have our Opener and Ballad on the field, and we just started the Closer today…</p>

56

<p>There are judges that judge just the Drum major and there are 4 (I think) categories (leadership is one and I’m not sure of the others) scored 1 to 5 and then they are added together so they’re out of 20. The judges scores are averaged and then that’s your score. The drum major with the highest score in each division wins best drum major. The score of your drum major doesn’t affect music/visual scores of the band, but a bad drum major can make it more difficult to have good timing thus making the other scores worse.
Bleeehh, tears are horrible things.
Good luck (:</p>

57

<p>Thanks. And yeah, tears are terrible. Our band has tears sometimes when marching (not caused by me, I know this) but I have tons of faith in our band especially since it’s been getting better, we’ll get it perfect soon enough. This is definitely our year. I wonder what they look at when grading leadership though.</p>

<p>Oh and. Timber Creek (not my school) looks pretty good, so if anyone faces them this year watch out.</p>

58

<p>Tears are very rarely caused by drum majors because if the whole band is watching like they’re supposed to tears are impossible. It’s if the band follows what you give them. Say you conduct a big crescendo or decrescendo and nothing happens you’ll get low leadership. Also if you have a really simple show (like same meter the whole time, tempo doesn’t vary, no dynamic changes) you’ll get low leadership because you have nothing to show.
My band is in open so we won’t be facing them.</p>

59

<p>Are you kidding me? Tears are caused BECAUSE the band follows the drum major. Have you heard of time lag? When the drumline’s backfield, their sound comes up to the audience about 1/2 a second late. If everyone is in time with the drum major’s hands, there will be a huge tear the whole show. The only person who should be with the drum major is the center snare. Then the drumline listens into the center snare. Then the rest of the band listens to the drumline, and that’s how everyone stays together. Don’t believe me? I can you show you my 2009 show, a prime example of what happens when everyone is in time with the hands…</p>

60

<p>^
What.</p>

<p>If everyone listened to the center snare, the sound would be far more off for the audience. This would only work if the drumline is behind everyone, and in a fairly central location. Otherwise, the delay would be awful.
If everyone is with the drum major, the delay experienced by the judges is negligible. </p>

<p>Oh yeah, and one bad example isn’t very good proof. Do you really think showing a video of a tear is proof of anything? It’s kind of hard to tell exactly who is following who.</p>