Discuss: Corps Stye Marching Band(high school, corps, indoor, anything!)

[Hikaru]

If it's one thing I've learned about band geeks is that they are avid forum users, so this thread should be pretty busy in the next few months.

Coloradofag reporting, just started 2nd week of band camp today and we already have some drill on the field. I'm in the drumline( "Assistant Center Snare" as I call it, Center Snare asks me for advice pretty often) and i must say that I think we may be one of the biggest lines this year (5 snare, 3 quads, 5 bass, 7 or so in the front ensemble, Colorado lines are usually really damn small, except for Legacy's and Chapparel's lines). It's only week 2 and about %70 of our snare book is clean and we still have about 3 months to clean and fine tune dynamics and other stuff like that.

Our only problems that can fuck us good right now is one of the quad players and one of our snare newbies. Since I'm in a ragey mood I'll go into details.

Ahem, anyway, this freshman quad player (we have 2 freshmen on quads but the other is pretty good and it fairing pretty well with the help of our vet.) is really just not cut out for this program. Every rep of a warm-up or music chunk he takes his drums off and sits down, then when we get directions to move on it takes him a good 5 seconds to get his kit back on. (5 seconds is about 3 or 4 bars of our music at tempo if my guess is correct) We are rarely [I]not[/I] waiting on this guy to get up so Center can start taps. Also the usual horrid posture and marching/playing technique that hasn't quite rubbed off the first week is now getting shittier and he refuses to fix it. Intervention is tomorrow, will report.

Then we got this guy who's never marched snare before(2 years of 2nd bass), but he did a lot of work with trad and technique during the winter and he's actually pretty good now. However, he does have one fatal flaw: He doesn't know how to play in a Snareline. Sure, he could play the music well enough and his marching was nothing to complain about. The thing is, that the rest of us were either vets from last year or came from a school as a snare drummer so we all knew all the little things that you're not supposed to do so we don't step on each others toes and we ended up playing about %90 of played all our book stuff with good clarity(if not a little out of time, but that's easy to fix). Now enter this guy; a bass drummer. A bass drummer, mind you, who has to play his notes regardless of what is happening to the other bass drummers. So this guy has no idea how to blend sound at all(We play by the Soviet Russia rule of Center Snares, even if they're wrong , they're right.) and it always complain how its rushing or dragging or if it's dirty, even if it is it should be still with the Center. Every. Fucking. Rep, during taps.

It's kind of an unspoken thing that if you play a bunch of reps with your line really well, and then for some reason you tick on something, next rep you just fix it without being told to and resume playing sweet beats until you stop to stretch/get water/sunblock or bathroom adventures/change tampon. But every rep he has something to say, and everyone has gotten onto him for it, even our newest guy has said a thing or two. This wouldn't be so bad if that wasn't my and another snare's biggest pet peeves. Also he's never taken any advice from me without saying something like a shit excuse or just throwing it back in my face or if later our instructor says the same thing. So now I brought to the attention of our Center and the rest of the Snareline, so tomorrow we are probably going to scoop out his knee cartilage with my Leathermanm or just have a nice long talk.

So how's every one else's yeah shaping out?