the initial problem: the drumline at tulane this coming year is pretty small (8 people), so the show is being written where each member plays multiple roles. To start, everyone is in percussion pods that are out on the field. At some point, they switch to traditional battery instruments of 3 snares, four bass drums, one cymbal. After that, half of those shed their drums to put on ethnic drums/timbales, then they move back to their pods, then they end on battery instruments again.
the challenge is how to write the parts in the full band score that make it easy to distribute the parts. Typically a marching percussion score consists of pit vs. battery where pit is one person per staff but battery is one section per staff. Since the percussionists are only playing as a battery for two sections of the show, having a single staff dedicated to bass drums makes no sense since it will contain a lot of empty measures and make it so that players have to shuffle between different parts to figure out what they’re playing when &c.
solution: each player gets their own individual staff, more like a pit score. The times in which they’re playing traditional battery, duplicate all of the parts on each staff.
resultant problem: to help with overall design for the color guard designer, the dance team choreogrpher, and the cheersquad, plus to aid with memorization and visualization of parts and tempos for the members, all of the parts need to actually sound like what’s going to happen on the field. Because of the roles being played, some players need to have assigned to them two different percussion channels for the sounds to be accurate (one for marching percussion and one for general percussion). This falls outside of my normal percussion notation paradigm of only needing two layers to deal with stems up vs. stems down; playback and notation together would require at least three if not all four layers that are available in Finale, and i’m limited in how i can configure layers 1 and 2 because they’re already being used by the wind instruments (and i can’t therefore manipulate global stem direction, treatment of ties, &c without mucking up how they appear elsewhere in the score).
Additionally, in the battery sections there are three staves that have the same snare part and four staves that have the same bass drum part. This is unnecessary duplication of MIDI output which will a) affect balance of the final MIDI output and b) cause dropped notes when the full ensemble is playing because of MIDI’s limitations, but i can’t just mute a particular person’s track or even a particular layer of a track because that layer may have unique parts in other parts in the show.
solution:
First, i created a single percussion map that encompassed all of the instrument sounds and notation for those sounds that i needed to use in the score:
I applied that map to every individual percussion staff in the score. Placement on the staff and notehead type of each individual sound is defined by the map, so use of a MIDI controller is necessary to ensure that the correct map path is used. (In other words, mouse-clicking a note on E4 could mean either bass drum 2, snare, snare rim shot, snare crossshot, drum set tom 1, cymbal player crash, cymbal player hi hat, or cymbal player slide choke, and determining which is a pain. Playing the correct “map” note on the keyboard will place the note on E4 but also ensure that it’s mapped to the correct sound.)
Once all of the parts are placed in the score, I muted all of the percussion staves. I created a new stave, called “playback”, and had the first layer assigned to the marching percussion channel and the second layer assigned to the general MIDI percussion channel. I copied a single version of all of the necessary parts into that playback staff and then made that playback staff invisible in the final score.
The playback staff doesn’t look pretty, but it’s not supposed to. FOr some of the more layered sections i might try to separate some of it into a spare layer just for the purposes of easier debugging, particularly if there are ever any changes that are made to the score that i will then need to change in playback.
today’s football games were riddled with the continuing controversy of FIFA’s refusal to incorporate technological arbitration for poor play calls.
for those that didn’t catch the games, England was down 2-1 against Germany and kicked the ball into the goal tthat was disallowed because the ball hit the top bar, bounced once close to the plane, and ended up bouncing out. The rule is that if the entire ball crosses the plane at any point even if it bounces out, it’s considered a goal. The immediate ref ruling was that it didn’t cross the plane so it was declared no goal, but a replay of the ball that was shown to everyone showed indisputably that the ball was a good full inch or more beyond the plane before it spun back out. Germany ended up winning the game 4-1 due to the England defense completely unraveling, but it’s impossible to say what would have occurred in the game dynamic if the game had been tied as opposed to still 2-1 at that point. strategy, position, substitutions are all so vastly different in a tie game situation as opposed to one goal against.
The second controversial play of the day was in the Mexico vs. Argentina game. Argentina was on the attack and one of the players ended up passing the ball to another player that ended up scoring, but that player was in a clearly offside position. The assistant ref failed to put up the offside flag and it was called a goal, but pretty soon after the score happened, the assistant ref went to the head ref to have a conversation about the play. In the meantime, Mexico players are trying to argue with the head ref as he’s trying to sort the whole thing out with the assistant ref, and a replay on the big screen shows how blatantly offsides the player was. The head ref was in a tough spot, but made the correct decision to not overturn the play because there is no current rule or precedent to do such a thing, so the goal stuck even though it clearly shouldn’t have counted.
The commentators of the games used these examples as well as the two US disallowed goals in their matches leading to the round of 16 to attack FIFA for its decision to not allow technological arbitration (read: replay challenges allowed in american football, computerized verification of in/out balls now allowed in tennis, &c), and i thought i’d take a moment to jump on that soapbox and say a big What The Fuck, FIFA. In a sport in which every goal has so much importance in shaping the entire game and in one of the very few competitive fields in which entire nations are being symbolized and represented, to not incorporate such a measure to help deal with human error is just flat out irresponsible. Get over yourselves and embrace the needed change.
as a related but tangental thought, i have to say this about football: i’ve always liked the sport; i even played it when i was younger and liked it pretty well even though i sucked at it due to asthma. But I appreciate the World Cup in particular now more than ever after the Saints won the Super Bowl. The idea that an athletic team can embody a community is something that i kind of acknowledged and understood but never truly grokked to its fullest level until the Saints won the Super Bowl. It’s impossible to describe what it was like to be a part of that, to participate in the Saints Victory Parade and have a 800,000 people stretched across a three mile parade route, all there for one reason, for one purpose. It’s hard to describe what it was like talking to the local community about it, to have people say things like, “i wish my uncle was still alive to witness this” as if the Saints winning the Super Bowl would have represented a personal victory for that person who had been a faithful Saints fan during the 47 years that they never got even close to winning. For the players and the coach and the community to see the win as proof that we’re still alive and strong after Katrina would have seemed baffling to me if i hadn’t been in the midst of it, in the midst of all of the people and all of the faces who believed it and took it to heart and used it as an avenue to create that personal life fire.
it was an incredibly moving experience, and after that, my understanding of that resonance makes the World Cup that much more significant to me, not necessarily in that i feel like i have any personal loyalty to the US soccer team versus any other, but because i now have a greater comprehension of what it is that is being represented on a global scale, that these teams are coming together and actually playing, competing, and fighting for their country in the form of a pretty amazing sport. To think of the image that the world now has of the US given their success in the World cup, to think of the image that the world now has of France after their disgrace in the World Cup, it’s interesting how much something that in some ways seems so small carries such magnitude for an entire nation.
Of course, the fact that i now appreciate this doesn’t diminish the sort of frustrated platform that i have regarding the attitude of athletics versus academics or versus the arts. Inspiration on a national and global scale can come in many forms and i still find it annoying how much the US society in particular tips favoritism towards athletics and “pop fame” and deemphasizes other potential inspirational platforms that have more personal significance to me.
That’s an entirely different discussion, however. Maybe next time.
to me, countdowns are a very silly way to create a false sense of tension in telly.
there’s only two situations that i can think of in which employing a countdown for some sort of Event is practical: the first is when the Event needs some lead time for get away because the triggering of the event has to happen within the proximity of the Event’s effect. an antagonist needs to set off the timer for an explosion and then get away, or some place needs to set off the self-destruct protocol or lock-down protocol to contain a threat. the second is when the timing of an Event itself is critical for coordination of other events. Multiple explosions need to happen at once, or an explosion is used as the trigger for another action to start.
There are times when media will be thoughtful enough to build into a plot one of the two above scenarios, but more often than not shows will put bombs or other doomsday devices with fancy countdowns on them merely to try to create a sense of urgency and tension to the situation that fails to create actual urgency and tension because of the predictability of the outcome.
A recent frustrating example of this is in one of the recent episodes of Doctor Who, Victory of the Daleks. In a sea of otherwise outstanding episodes thus far under new management, Victory, despite a decent plot conception and decent character interactions, suffered from poor execution of solving the mystery and resolving the conflict. In what was supposed to be the Turning Point of the episode, the Doctor is faced with the classic pursue-or-save-the-hostage choice of “eliminate the Daleks once and for all” or “let the Daleks get away because otherwise they’ll destroy the world with a bomb.” Which is fine even though it’s pretty standard plot fare because it’s a pretty reasonable scenario, but the problem in this instance was that when the Doctor made the predictable hero choice, the Daleks said, “we’re going to destroy your world anyway!” and…. started a very long countdown to the bomb.
Given the fact that the Daleks were already in the throes of getting away from the planet, that sequence of events was ludicrous. First off, it invalidated the Doctor’s choice moments before because they were going to set off the bomb regardless of the choice that the Doctor made. But worse, it invalidated the daleks’ threat because if the Doctor would have chosen to destroy the ship and the daleks managed to start the countdown before the Doctor managed to finish them off, he still would have been able to stop the bomb because the countdown was minutes long. Resultingly, it just brought about lots of “why?” questions. if the doctor was saavy enough to anticipate that the daleks were going to detonate the bomb in the first place, why didn’t he let the attacking ship destroy the daleks at the same time? why did the daleks create a bomb that had such a long countdown and was so flawed that it could be stopped just by trying to convince the bomb that he was a human being? How did the new Daleks even know that a bomb existed in the *first* place? They weren’t the ones that planted it; they had just been born.
Another great example of a frustrating countdown situation was in the first season Leverage episode The 12-Step Job. In that episode, two of the protagonists, Elliot and Hardison, are searching a car. Hardison opens up the driver door and sits down in the driver’s seat right as Elliot determines that the seat has been tampered with. They discover that Hardison sitting down in the driver’s seat arms a weight bomb that will go off if he decides to get up. Fair enough. But while he’s trying to come up with ideas on how to get out of the car whilst still maintaining weight on the driver’s seat, Elliot inspects the bottom of the car and sees that Hardison arming the bomb also sets off a countdown timer.
Given the fact that the antagonists of the situation were nowhere to be found at the scene, the only reason that the bomb was set up in such a stupid way was to give the protagonists a way to get out of it. If you want to be sure that the bomb goes off, why not just rig it so that it will detonate when the protagonist first sits down? Why give them the opportunity to be able to sit in the car and then react to a visible countdown? Not only that, but immediately after Hardison and Elliot successfully disarm the bomb and escape the car, the protagonists suddenly come out of nowhere and point guns at them. Why point a gun at them at a point when they’re now able to defend themselves? Why not get to the scene earlier when they were helpless because they were trying to deal with the bomb?
I seem to remember that one of the seasons of 24 had a similarly ridiculous countdown issue, some bomb that was hidden at an airport or something. I don’t quite remember as that was many years ago and pretty unmemorable (it’s a pretty unmemorable show as far as i’m concerned). I’m sure that if i thought about it i could come up with many other modern examples, and i find it truly bizarre. These days there are much more effective ways to create crisis tension, even some that involve a specific and known timeline. Countdown tension situations to me belong in the same category of the damsel-tied-up-on-the-train-tracks scenario. It has its history and you appreciate its use in historic television and movies, but even in the face of our current terrorist-panic environment, the premise of a doomsday device with a countdown seems old and tired, and will always seem old and tired to me until the moment when the main protagonist actually fails to stop the bomb and gets killed.
Or maybe i’m just disgruntled and should just relax about the situation.
i know this is more of a life thing than a thought thing so it really belongs on oscillate, but it’s been a while since i’ve written on resonate, and my brain is still in this state of analysis about everything that happened, so i thought i’d mix it up a bit.
so yeah. i got three teeth extracted today. it needs to be documented.
the first thing that i did after the dentist’s assistant (darlene) put me in the chair was to read and sign a form that stated that i understood what was being done to me, that i had had a discussion about the potential side effects and complications and yadeyade. It’s the second time i’ve signed something like that in which one of the potential complications listed on the form was “death”, the first being when i went skydiving in 2004. Other than that, the form was pretty straightforward with those typical “things could go wrong, you could get infections” nonsense that to me has the sort of odds like the nut flush against the straight flush. Sure, it’s *possible*, but the odds just aren’t there, and even if by some stretch something were to happen, it’s not unfixable.
So okay. i signed the paper, the oral surgeon guy then went over what he was going to do, and discussed options for one of the teeth to be extracted, as in two of the teeth were my wisdom teeth on the right side which was fine, but one tooth on my left hand side was my second molar which would leave a gap between my left wisdom tooth and my first molar. He said that if i wanted to i could just leave it alone and then over years the two teeth would likely push closer together which isn’t a big deal, or i could get a replacement fake tooth to go in there instead which would cost a bunch of money, but is an option. He didn’t want to sway me one way or the other, but he did say after i essentially decided that it was unnecessary that he probably would have done the same thing and just left it alone. I also have the option of changing my mind if i want down the road. He mentioned some potential low-risk dangers and some low-to-moderate numb-like side effects that could go on for days or weeks or months, but that that would only happen if he was sloppy. He had an accent that i couldn’t quite place because it was fairly light; it was definitely either european or eastern bloc. He said his last name, but it wasn’t something that i caught because it was somewhat complicated or else i wasn’t listening properly.
They put a thing over my nose that was supposed to introduce nitrous oxide into my system. Darlene told me that it was just supposed to relax me, make me feel like “i had just had a couple of cocktails.” After a while i started to feel a tingle in my legs, but other than that my sense of awareness didn’t seem to dull at all. I said as such, so she let it run some more, and after a few more minutes, she applied some topical novocaine to the areas of my teeth. After a few minutes, the oral surgeon stuck needles into my mouth to put the more Heavy Stuff into my mouth, and then we waited to allow the numbness to go into effect.
While we waited for the heavy novocaine to settle in, Darlene asked me where i was from and all that and i gave a basic answer, and when i said that i marched in the Saints Victory parade, she said that she was there and that brought more of her background into the light, that she had lived here all of her life, her parents got married in the big chapel downtown in the quarter. So i asked the question that’s been on my mind ever since the saints won the super bowl and we did the parade, “so the saints winning the super bowl was a very personal thing fro you, then?” and her face kind of lit up (over her facemask) and said, “absolutely.” and it spurned a small conversation about how the super bowl was such a unifying thing for the city, a topic of a separate entry in my head.
She asked me how i was doing with the numbness and with the nitrous, and i said that i was feeling pretty numb from the novocaine, but i wasn’t sure about the whole nitrous thing. i mean, more of my body was feeling numb, but my brain still felt very alert. She left me for a few minutes after that, which i think was an effort to distract me less so i could breathe the nitrous more completely.
After a while, the oral surgeon came back and said, “i’m going to do some stuff and all you should feel is pressure. if you feel pain, let me know and we’ll give you more anaesthetic.” So he did some stuff, saying out loud, “some pressure, some pressure, a little pressure, a lot of pressure…” and i didn’t feel any pain at all, so he got to work.
and i would have loved to see a video of what he did. not because i was particularly interested in the process, but because i felt like what he was doing would have really really hurt if it weren’t for the numbing stuff. i know it must have been pretty bloody since i’m still bleeding a lot (have to replace gauze in my mouth every half hour or so), but whatever. i’m normally squeamish about blood, but this is different, maybe because it’s mine, or because i knew what it felt like which wasn’t much at all; i don’t know. But it was just interesting to feel tugs of pressure without pain for something that feels like i should have been screaming in agony.
Two of the teeth were difficult to extract apparently; one because it just had a long root, the other because that tooth has been broken for a while and so it was more fussy to get out. He did a bunch of a drilling and then pulling and then drilling and then pulling. When the teeth actually came out, i only felt one of them. The other two i was only aware that they came out because i could tell that what the assistant was doing was dealing with gauzing up the bleeding as opposed to assisting him with the process. With the tooth on my left side, he put in a stitch, which marks the first stitch i’ve ever had in my life.
The whole thing took about an hour to do (starting with the topical novocaine – the actual extraction was maybe ten minutes each?). After it was done, Darlene switched the nitrous to a concentrated oxygen to “clear my head so i can drive”, and honestly, i thikn i got gipped out of the nitrous experience because when i went back and evaluated the way my head felt and my body felt overall, i don’t think i felt any effects of the nitrous other than the initial tingly feeling in my limbs. My head still felt pretty alert but relaxed, but not in a way that was moreso than normal. maybe i was just that unaware of whether or not it had any effect, but if i had known that it would go like that, i might have asked to not have it, especially since it was an additional $95 charge that didn’t get covered by my insurance.
After i was taken off of the oxygen, Darlene gave me a brief overview of what i needed to do post-extraction, which strangely includes not rinsing or drinking through a straw for twenty-four hours. Apparently rinsing and suction of any sort can complicate the whole healing process, so until 14:00 tomorrow i can’t really brush my teeth. I can eat soft foods, but i’m probably going to stick with yogurt and liquids, maybe throw in some sliced meats. i’m not supposed to eat rice or strawberries or anything that could potentially lodge itself into the areas where the teeth used to be.
I have three prescriptions: one for amoxacillan which takes me back to my younger asthmatic years, one for percoset which i can take as needed, and one “oral rinse” deal that i need to start to do tomorrow after i’m actually allowed to rinse. i’m not sure if i’m going to take the percoset since it’s just a pain killer as opposed to anything that prevents infection, and i generally shy away from that sort of stuff. i figure that if i could march an entire week of 8+ hour rehearsals at 160-200 BPM with a pulled groin muscle (Crossmen 1995 finals week), i can deal with some stupid pain in my mouth for a week or two. i have a followup appointment a week from now so they can make sure that i’m all healing properly.
it’s now 16:15 and the bottom half of my mouth is starting to finally get feeling back, which is a good thing. i hate having to talk or eat or do anything with that feeling of numbness. when i was younger and still went to the dentist, i eventually started having my cavities drilled without novocaine because i preferred the short term pain over the long term numbness. my attitude is less strong than it used to be which means that i’ll take the novocaine with a shrug, but the numbness and how long it lasts is still pretty annoying.
there’s one other part of the whole visit that’s worthy of mentioning, but that part will actually go into an oscillate entry instead of here, and also be picture number twelve of my 40 day lent scheme.
for various reasons, something started taking shape for me since i moved to new orleans regarding travel.
when i lived in eugene i didn’t travel that much. usually any travel were road trips related to DDR tournaments in either seattle or san fran which would occupy a weekend or four days. There were several reasons for this both philosophically and practically; mainly it was because travel felt like an expensive interruption to a flow, and i was one of those sorts that liked to hoard my PTO so i had wiggle room for its use.
since moving to new orleans a year and a half ago, i’ve now traveled four times of note. First was when i drove to nashville for hurricane evacuation. most of that time was spent with ken, playing disc golf with friends and exploring nashville stuff. Second was when i went back to PA for winter holidays, the first time i was back in the area since moving to the west coast in 1999. Third was the multihop trip in august – Eugene to visit old friends, Hawaii to see one of my oldest and dearest friends get married, and eastern oregon to teach band camp of one of my former students and to hang out for a bit. Fourth is what’s happening right now. San Francisco to see another old and dear friend get married, Anaheim to visit jjk, Long Beach to visit an old undergraduate classmate who i still connect with, Chatsworth to meet a long time LJ friend in person for the first time, Santa Barbara to visit another LJ friend in person for the first time.
What’s true about all of these trips is that they’ve all been incredibly valuable experiences for me, secondly because of the new places i’ve visited, but primarily because of the people in my life who i cherish and get to share time with. I have a lot of friends scattered everywhere in the united states, and it’s resultingly not too difficult for me to find someone or some people to hang out with if i state my intent to travel. Particularly this time around i’ve had a few people in the SF area express their interest in seeing me, and it sucks that i can’t see them because so much of my sf time is occupied with the wedding.
thinking about these experiences and the sentiments that go with them makes me reflect on how social interaction in general has changed and how that relates to the love i have for the people in my life. even when i was a teenager i had started to develop the sensibility that people were the most important thing in my life, and as the internet rose to mainstream use, that became easier to manage because the internet made it easier to keep the connection with all of these people active without the need to be physically close and/or without breaking the phone bill. But back then, social networking and social etiquette were very different; it was common for me to exchange four-page-and-up emails with friends on a semi-regular basis, it was common for me to have 2-3 hour phone converations on more than a weekly basis, and LJ as a primary outlet for personal expression had an interaction depth level that brought me close to and care deeply about people who i have never met in real life. But as the popularlity and use of LJ declined in favor of more surface-level instaorgasm social networking sites (myspace/facebook/twitter) and texting, the amount of long distance interactions that have that same degree of depth are fewer and far between (part of which i acknowledge is my own fault, but that’s tangental to this post).
Resultingly what i’ve discovered is that travel is filling that void, that these trips are very important for my soul. Seeing all of the people on these trips and the people who have visited me in new orleans for the past year and a half represent times in my life that i treasure and know i will never forget. i have amazing friends and acquaintances, and i’ve met some fantastic people, and my life is nothing without them.
This realization is causing me to further shift my financial priorities to accomodate this concept, to understand that given the choice between, say, buying a video game console or a snazzy tv or the next awesome phone versus going thorugh some complicated travel plans to try to see as many of my friends as possible during an opportune lull in my work schedule, travel will win out every time, no contest.
philosophical shift aside, i’m not certain how much more frequently i’ll be able to travel per year based on schedule and finances, but i do understand that what i should probably do some research on reward miles and similar travel-based reward packages.
Activision has just released the newest US mimic of japanese bemani that has been a popular video game trend ever since Guitar Hero made it big. But unlike Guitar Hero’s japanese predecessor which sports pretty much the exact same control scheme and gameplay paradigm as Guitar Hero except with two extra buttons, DJ Hero decided to make a few significant changes to the iidx aesthetic that gave me incentive to do a comparative analysis.
first, a couple of videos for background:
tatsujin video of a guy playing V another on iidx. i chose this one because he kept the sound of him hitting the keys in, and the middle part where he mashed to deal with the trill chords is hilarious.
Other than the fact that difficult charts are much rarer in DJ Hero than in iidx, the most striking distinction between the gameplay has to do with the handling of multiple responsibilities and how the player deals with them. one of the things that annoys me the most about 7key iidx is that while there are many notecharts that employ polyrhythmic ideas in them, players aren’t forced to think of them as polyrhythmic because they can read them as single rhythm streams with some chords put in. The easiest example i can come up with on this is this section of Colors Heavy. (Sorry that the guy playing in the video isn’t that good. This is the only video of colors heavy that i could find not on random.) For as long as i’ve played this song, i’ve dealt with this section by thinking it as polyrhythmic, reading it like this:
because that’s a polyrhythmic pattern i always used to play on tenors or drumset or timbales or whatever. Right hand is doing triple strokes, left hand is doing 1..a..+.1..a..+. i treat those as independent rhythms in my head. But in talking to a lot of people who play iidx, they don’t think of it that way at all. They see it as a single stream of notes with a few two-note chords thrown in, so the concept of polyrhythm isn’t important. Even if they understand that that’s what’s happening, they don’t have to think of it that way in order to execute it. The only times in iidx where people have the potential to be forced to think and execute two rhythms happening simultaneously instead of a single stream of notes is a scratch heavy song or when playing 14key.
What i think DJ Hero does is change that; while it takes away the concept of scratching being independent from note hitting most of the time, the concept of the left-right fader adds an extra element that iidx doesn’t have. Regardless of how complex and/or streamy iidx can get, it’s still a hit or scratch aesthetic, while DJ Hero has a hit, sctrach, or L/R fade aesthetic. Because all of those things are executed very differently, it potentially forces the player to have to think of those elements independently in order to execute them. So the base skillset between that and iidx is somewhat different and employs a more advanced musical concept, and that makes it more interesting than GH or even Rock Band.
Given that, i feel like the success of DJ Hero as a paradigm then depends primarily on two factors. The first is more obvious: how far the bar will raise in difficulty as new installments come out? Surely when beatmania first came out back in 1997, no one imagined that it would reach a difficulty level that dominates iidx now. Similarly, DJ Hero is in its own sort of initial conception, so it offers a potential to raise the bar somewhat, but even with the level of demand placed on the player for hit/scratch/fade, i suspect that it will become clear how limiting it is that they decided to go with only three buttons and three hit lanes.
The second is less obvious but much more important, which has to do with the philosophy and approach to what i’m going to term “internal pedagogy”, or maybe more simply the learning curve. Does the game have charts or section of charts that successfully teach the base polyrhythmic fader/hit/scratch concepts so that players can then comfortably execute the more difficult charts? Does the complexity of those concepts ramp up in a pedagogical and gradual manner?
Unfortunately those aren’t questions i can answer since i’ve only seen a few select charts of the game and most of them are on the easy side of the spectrum. As more charts come to surface and as the game evolves over time, i may have more to say about it.
Ultimately, though, the game has to get at least one negative mark from me for not having the ability to play double. I’m a 14key player by trade; no matter how much more you might add to the mix, three buttons is still three buttons.
This is more for my own personal historical archive than anything else, but i thought i’d post it on my blog in the event that anyone else was interested.
The idea to make a video of me playing chain factor came as a result of me not finding any online videos of gameplay that could help guide my own play to being better, so i decided to make my own video of one of my better runs. I got lucky – the run that i ended up recording was the first run that i did, and while it’s not my best score, i felt it was good enough for me to use.
the run actually took about 22 minutes to complete, so the first step was to speed up the video so that it would meet youtube’s 10 minute specification limit (although i do realize that yt’s limitation has more to do with filesize rather than length). Doing that meant that i couldn’t use the original music/soundtrack without it sounding ridiculous, so the next step was to find music to go with the run. Ten minutes is longer than songs typically are, but i immediately rejected the idea of using more than one song because i didn’t want the video to be broken in half by two songs. The only piece of music that I had in my iTunes library that was close to ten minutes was Cheating, Lying, Stealing by David Lang. so i sped it up slightly to get it to the needed length, and planned to just stick it in the background of the video.
Once i had chosen the tune, it didn’t feel right to just have the piece sit in the background while the video did nothing but show a static gameplay field. So i decided some basic manipulation would be easy to do. So the “tremor effect” for all of the opening kick drum segments was born. At the time, i was to just going to do that in appropriate places and call it good, but once i started to put in the effect and thought about what was happening in the rest of the music, it wasn’t enough. I felt like the music deserved more – it’s a fantastic piece with a lot of immediate appeal as well as a lot of analytical depth. To have the video manipulation not reflect that depth goes against my general artistic principles. So i started brainstorming in my head ideas for what should happen in each section of the piece.
And it kept growing. and growing. and, um.
here’s a basic rundown of each section: the effects, the motivation behind them, the evolution of them, and some of the technical construction of them:
Section A (0′00″-0′34″) – Tremor Effect: I went to the web to figure out how to do this in FCP since i don’t have a copy of After Effects or a similar program. Basically it involved creating a copy of the snippet of video in question, and then doing a right and left reposition multiple times every two frames. I decided that the only thing that i wanted to actually tremor was the playfield, so i had to create cropped copies of the right “score” side, the left “Back To Menu” side, and the bottom “Level Up” side that would run independently of the playfield. This would be key to later sections.
Section B (0′34″-1′06″) – Echo layers: Originally, the idea i had was to create a “ghost layer” every time the cello changed notes. Each layer was supposed to clearly come from the spot that it just got left off, and all of the layers were supposed to be slower. I tried this at first and decided after i watched a few layers that it moved too slowly and was too boring, so i changed the concept to instead make the layers a mix of slower and quicker and have them start in a spot where at the very end of the section they would all converge to the same moment.
This was very early in my FCP video editing chops – if i had done the middle/late sections first, i would have done these sections differently. Probably a little cleaner, and also more interesting.
Sections A’, B’, A” (1′06″-2′41″) – Recap and Ripple: The ripple is the only thing that i did differently for the section recaps. That was a basic FCP video effect; nothing too special there.
Section C part 1 (2′41″-3′39″) – Moving Menu/Score: Originally i had an idea of having either the score or the menu jitter around for every piano hit, but since i lost my score to the piece from when i analyzed/performed it in college, it ended up being too daunting and impractical. I still wanted the menu and score to move, so i simplified the criteria.
i took the screen and replicated it six times: one for the cropped version of the playfield, one for the “Level” indicator on the bottom, one for a white bar on the left side along with the sound toggles, one for the “Back to Menu” that was on top of it, one for the white bar on the right side, and one for the score that was on top of it. The white bars served as a backdrop for the moving menu and scores, and i’m guessing that i probably did this in the most inefficient way possible – i didn’t create a .tga of a static white backgorund, i just cropped a white portion of the playfield and then zoomed it by 1000 percent. I’m betting that this took extra processing power because even though the video was “invisible” since i only picked a portion of it, i imagine that the video was still running in the background, which would have caused for more cpu needed and more time to render. but oh well.
getting the menu and score to move was a fairly simple matter of finding the frames with the audio that i wanted to line the move with and then creating two adjacent keyframes: one to hold the previous position, and one to immediately move it to the new position. i also added some motion blur to give the move some more “depth”.
Section C part 2 (2′56″-3′39″) – Number Fill: Conceptually the gradual number fill turned out exactly how i wanted it – start with a basic number fill, gradually hit a point where the entire board is filled with numbers by the end. In some of its execution i’m also pretty happy with what i did; it was a deliberate choice to start with a predictable pattern before finding new ways to break it – start with all 7s, then 6s, then 5s, then break that by doing something different, then break that by doing a more random pattern, then break that by turning the numbers upside down, &c. Even so, i’m not *completely* satisfied with that section because at some point it loses its sense of direction because i didn’t pace it properly and think enough ahead.
This was the first time that i deliberately decided to take a snapshot of all of the numbers indivdually into still .tga’s as opposed to grabbing small clips of video. It did me a lot of good in the long run i think – it would have been a headache both cropping-wise, timing-wise, and rendering-wise if all of those numbers were film instead of snapshots.
Section D (3′39″ – 5′28″) – Rotating Playfield and Number Trails: The slowly rotating board felt appropriate for the mood of this section; since everything prior to this part was primarily percussive, the more legato sense of this section needed a more legato visual effect. The white-faded rotation that lines up with the piano cluster hits is meant to be a variation of the original “Batman” rotating segue, and although you can’t tell, it’s a copy of whatever the current playfield is at the time. Originally i had it in negative colors, but it was too distracting from the main playfield action, so i decided to change my approach.
The number trails were fairly straightforward to do, but is also one of my favorite effects in the whole video. It recycled the .tga snapshots of the previous section, just placed in strategic spots with the piano cluster hits as well. The thing that i wrestled with a little here was how the growing number of “stuck” numbers obscured the playfield, problematic because despite all of the video manipulations i was doing, the main premise behind the video was still to demonstrate gameplay. Ultimately i decided that i liked the effect too much for the lack of complete clarity to matter enough, and i’m glad i kept it in.
Section E (5′28″ – 6′13″) – Moving Playfield: Another ‘gradually evolving’ section where i tried to establish the basis for the section by zooming in place, then breaking that expectation by zooming to different spots, then breaking that by adding x-axis rotation, then breaking that by adding z-axis rotation. Standard fcp functionality, but i think it’s fairly effective. i’m annoyed that by doing the z rotation, the “crop” changed so that you could visibly see the score as it rotated, but i was too lazy to try to create a moving crop to match the rotation. too much work for too little return.
Section F (6′15″ – 9′06″) – Pendulum Playfield/Zoom Echo Playfields/Snare Drum Flashes: The original concept i had for the Pendulum Playfield was instead to have the hits be “mirror polarity”, as in for every hit it would flip between a mirror playfield and the regular playfield. I nixed that idea for the same reason i was wary about the “sticky” numbers in that i felt that it would obscure the actual gameplay too much. When i first did the pendulum swinging, it was an extreme and unchanging swing the whole way, and the result was pretty dissatisfying because after establishing the swing, it didn’t go anywhere and got boring too quickly. The gradual increase of the swing gave it direction but a subtle one; hopefully it’s something that you can easily not notice because it’s gradual enough and there’s too much other stuff going on, and before you realize it, the swing is at its peak.
The zoom echo playfields effect was a fairly straightforward execution at this point since i had done a different version of that earlier in the piece. I systematically created two ‘echo playfields’ that would zoom out to 1000 percent centered on a random spot, then two ‘echo playfields’ that would zoom in to zero percent centered on a random spot. This repeated for every moving note in the violin part. I toyed around with trying to make the playfields change opacity over time, but having multiple layers on top of each other achieved the effect well enough and any more lessened the impact of the swinging pendulum which i still wanted to be main focus. i did put the opacity of all of the layers back to 100% when they all came back in a collapse to try to create more visual tension. That particular moment i tried about 10 times and i’m still not completely happy with it. I had this idea of playfields zooming suddenly in in rapid succession and in rapid velocity, but i couldn’t get the effect to work the right way, so i settled for the final effect here because at this point i was also impatient to get the whole project done. I think i have a better idea of what to do if i ever tried something like that again.
The snare drum flashes came from taking a few snapshots from the background combo flashes, photoshopping out the gridlines, and then putting them all in frame by frickin’ frame. Granted, once i got the main repeating pattern, i could copy/paste the repeating pattern and place it when i needed to, but for each one i also had to make sure that where it hit didn’t potentially collide with new objects in the playfield, so it involved looking at each one fairly carefully, and when the pattern was interrupted, i’d have to shift the whole pattern around.
the snare drum hits in the music contribute greatly to the tension of the climax, and although i think i conveyed that okay in my visualization of it, it gets completely lost because of the echo playfields zooming in. I’m not completely happy with how that turned out, but again, after so many failed attempts and just wanting the whole thing to be done, i decided to call it good.
As for the final recaps of the opening sections, i put some consideration into doing something different with it to give it a better bookend but decided against it because doing anything different felt like it would have been completely out of context.
The whole project took me roughly six or so weeks to complete. crazy considering that originally i was going to make it a one-session video edit and call it finished, but i’m glad that it turned out the way that it did, because i’m happy with how it turned out, and it’s expanded my vocabulary and conceptualizations of what i can do with video manipulation which will hopefully help me with my Green Lantern project.
Very recently i’ve come to more conclusions about the use of facebook, both my usage of it and the site overall.
When i first joined, i had a healthy degree of skepticism as to what it was all about and what sort of people i wanted to have access to the information that i posted on it. At some point, i changed that philosophy and started allowing everyone and anyone to be my facebook friend regardless of their context to see what sort of effect that would have on me and the sort of interactions i have and people have with me.
What i think i’ve discovered after now having over 600 friends and two or so years of facebook interactions is that the interaction level on facebook feels like the equivalent of “people window shopping”. In my head i break it down into some rough subcategories: on the first tier, you’re skimming past someone’s status update or quiz result and while you may acknowledge that that stuff has passed by, once it passes by you don’t give it another thought. On the second tier, you may “glance at something interesting in the window” because a particular status or photo or whatnot catches your eye. And that might spurn a “like” or a comment or something similar. On the third tier, you may actually “walk into the store” either because something resonates with you or the person that posts it may be close enough to you as an actual Friend that it warrants you becoming more invested in it.
The analogy is far from perfect, but it hits upon my main point which is that in all of that process in shopping, you’re not actually committing yourself to anything concrete, you’re not making an actual purchase. Facebook equivalent interactions can seem to me to be similarly unreal, usually nothing more than a sophisticated version of giving a passing “hello” when you see a stranger or a casual friend on the street, or judging an entire song by the iTunes 20 second preview before you buy. Not that more meaningful interactions or friendships *can’t* exist on facebook, but the facebook paradigm doesn’t lend itself to doing that very well; most deeper level interactions on facebook happen outside of the facebook context.
Compare this to Livejournal or blogging networks in general where there are several people who i met first on livejournal and can now state “i love you” to even though i still have yet to meet some of them in person, how many people i care about enough that i would drop anything to help them out if they needed me.
Not that this is anything mind-blowingly new. My previous facebook ramblings concluded no differently that facebook functions merely as a touchpoint of greater human interaction rather than be the end of it. But the degree of that mentality needs to be retracted some, because my criticism of facebook and my promotion of livejournal is too black and white. Livejournal serves as a better tool for getting into someone’s head, but a) an LJer may decide to not treat it that way because even behind a friends lock, a journal can be too public, and b) with as many people and communities that i try to keep up with on a daily basis, i fall victim to skimming through entries as opposed to properly reading them which turns any potential deeper level interaction into nothing different than a facebook interaction.
On the flipside of this, i have to also acknowledge in facebook’s defense that depending on the user, a continual flurry of status updates/commentary/notes can give you at least enough of a surface-level bigger picture of what a person is to have the potential (if all parties are willing) to be that spark that leads to a deeper level of interaction that could turn into something more meaningful and permanent. I never would have imagined that there i would meet people on facebook that i would learn to care about in the way that i care about people, and while it’s rare, it’s definitely present.
All of this introspection leads to to a more established stabilization to my particular approach to facebook both as an observer and a contributor. A lot of it has to do with shaping my use of facebook in a way that best serves my purpose, and keeping perspective about what sorts of interactions hold what degree of value.
From an observer perspective, what this means is that i do my best to minimize the amount of pollution and unnecessary distraction that facebook offers and focus my energies on the aspects of facebook that are important to me. So i use no applications other than photos and notes; occasionally the Biggest Brain and Prolific out of nostalgia. I never turn on facebook chat because i stopped IMing a long time ago and have no desire to ever return to it with a few notable exceptions.
In reality, what i care about the most is status updates (and to a lesser degree photos and notes), and in this regard, the newest facebook app on the iPhone shines over facebook.com because unlike facebook.com, you can filter the news feed on the iPhone app to show just status updates and nothing else with no effort or complicated app blocking, &c.
Granted, the problem that can arise with status updates is that i as an observer don’t control how people choose to use status updates, and thus i can get a lot of information that i don’t want. What i care about the most has more to do with what the actual People are about, whether it’s their daily life stuff or what goes through their head. What i don’t care about is getting a sports update or a celebrity update or other similar sorts of things that i could get on my own if i wanted to. Not that i don’t appreciate the enthusiasm because there are certain things that i can get that Fandom about, but once i understand someone’s enthusiasm for it once or twice which adds to the picture of who they are, i’m not interested in it anymore unless there’s something more personal about it (such as photos of going to see the game live or a unique perspective).
Additionally, celebrity gossip/lives is something i care nothing about and used to stay blissfully ignorant of, but facebook has now made that pretty impossible. Very recently there seemed to be some sort of controversy surrounding Kanye West and the VMA awards (ATM machine? TUMB Marching Band?). I have no idea what actually happened (nor do i care to know), but it still bothers me that i know about it at all due to facebook statuses being a conduit for public reaction.
But i take the bad with the good and i can’t begrudge individuals for using their facebook in this way because it’s stuff that they care about or feel like reacting to, and that’s exactly what facebook is designed for. And so long as i have a medium in which i can get some bigger picture of what some people are all about, that still has some value, yes?
The potential problem/danger with that comes out when we shift the discussion to me as a contributor versus an observer and brings back the surface-level bigger picture versus deeper-level bigger picture discussion. As i was recently thinking more about how i choose to divulge information on facebook, i realized how i generally attempt to filter what i post to have nothing to do with (for lack of a better term) my soul, not necessarily because of facebook itself, but because of just how public facebook is. I have potentailly over 600 people looking at the stuff i write on facebook and that ranges from acquaintances, peers, close friends, students, teachers, superiors, subordinates, both past and present and future. put that way, it’s obvious how stupid it is to share anything that i deem as Truly Personal, and as that realization became more clear, i made a recent conscious choice to filter my contributions to facebook even further, and not ever post anything that truly defines my inner self. I went so far as to remove my “relationship status” and my “political views” from my profile as a personal stance against that sort of information having any play in my facebook universe. That doesn’t mean that facebook puts out a false impression of who i am; what i post on facebook is still Me, but only a particular facet of me, one that i carefully control.
(Tangentially, coming to this realization made me think that this must be what celebrities feel like all of the time, and that gave me a small epiphany that maybe that’s a part of the facebook appeal; in a way, it makes everyone a celebrity in their own context, and is thus a platform for people to feel like they have a high degree of importance. Which isn’t necessarily untrue; that’s a discussion for a future post.)
Now, i say that this is a *potential* problem/danger because i feel that it only arises based on individual perception. Surely a majority of facebook users employ a similar philosophy to their facebook usage whether consciously or sub-consciously, so as long as people grok that and don’t misconstrue certain kinds of interactions or lack of interactions as having any Real Meaning, then there’s no problem, right?
Except that this then brings up another level of a discussion: a) how much more of that surface level interaction we’re exposed to versus the pre-myspace/facebook/twitter era, and b) the attitude that can arise from the support of the facebook paradigm that this level of interaction is enough to clear a moral social conscience.
more on that in part two.
originally posted on darkblog resonate. i prefer any commentary or thoughts there.
Given those sorts of struggles on top of other small or big struggles that they face, questions arise: should they have stayed in open class? should they have reached for a longer term goal of becoming world class but with more of a full tour model? is this “in between” model that they’re employing a failed model for the world class paradigm?
The answers to these questions are difficult to answer right now because they depends on a few factors: a) what the drum corps community has set as an expectation for the Surf, b) what the Surf itself as an organization and in its individuals has set as an expectation, and c) the fact that the long-term success of this model can’t truly be determined by the results of a single year.
Going back to that first struggle item i talked about in part one, one could argue that even beating a single full-tour corps during Nats Week would be a measurable success – Surf, on its limited rehearsal schedule managed to beat a full tour corps. That says something about the organization, about its commitment to excellence.
But the question is whether that is enough. That the Surf is in their first stint in world class is one of the more interesting things that’s occurred in drum corps this year, and thus has to put them under at least somewhat of a microscope in the drum corps community, and their expectations and projections of Surf may be higher. A more substantial success could also make a strong enough statement to secure more corporate sponsorships and donations as well as member and staff loyalty. Not only that, but it’s possible that if they *don’t* meet that substantial success, it would be perceived as a failure.
As an outsider with only vague ties to the staff, i don’t have a good idea of what sort of expectations Surf has for the next few years; make semi finals in two to three years, and then try to maintain a semi-final placement? Are there higher aspirations for individual aspects of the corps, the drum score, the horn score, the guard score? How does that differ from any expectations that the kids may have, the donors may have?
It’s a tricky balance to maintain because of the struggle between Surf as a pedagogical and educational organization versus a business and corporate organization and how those contradict each other.
As i said earlier, from a corporate standpoint, Surf struggles in a contextual environment of DCI as the equivalent of a small business market amidst a global business market, and by the difference between the two models alone it will never move beyond that. And for some of the individuals associated with the organization, it can be too easy to look at the immediate bottom line and think, “why am i here when i could be a bigger fish in a bigger pond?” And it would be resultingly easy for Surf and the greater drum corps community to react to that and contemplate the idea of changing and evolving their business model towards more of a full corps tour to take it to ‘the next level’. Some would see it as a natural evolution of the corps just as the move from Open to World was a natural evolution.
However, there are a few issues to consider with that. First, although Surf may have limitations as a corporate model for success, i personally think that the Surf model shines from a pedagogical and educational model more than a full corps tour does. When i marched in the Crossmen, i learned that being on a full tour may have taught me a lot and helped give me the tools to be the teacher that i am today, but i also am aware that full tour was an easy escape from reality. For three months you live on a bus and you don’t have to worry about paying bills, making money, doing chores, summer reading, &c. all you do is wake up, run, eat, drum, eat, drum, eat, drum, sleep on the bus or gym floor, rinse, repeat. On the other hand, the Surf model teaches more of a life lesson, how to handle the responsibilities of the drum corps on top of any other responsibilities that a member may have during the week. As opposed to being dictated a schedule because everyone is all in the same place, they have to work out their own schedule, find their own time to practice, otherwise face the consequences of letting themselves and the organization down when they show up for the weekend unprepared. That to me is more analogous to a real-life experience, learning how to juggle multiple responsibilities and be accountable for your own actions by the choices that you make, both within the context of the drum corps and how that fits in with everything else.
Secondly, while there may be members of the corps that may have ‘full tour envy’, the Surf model continues to grant an opportunity for kids that would not be able to afford the money or commitment for a full tour. This may be countered by the fact that there’s still a pretty strong east coast senior corps circuit represented by DCA, but the senior corps experience, while similar, has characteristics to it that are not comparable to a junior corps experience (which is a separate discussion altogether). If other drum corps existed already with a similar model to help fill that void, it would be less of an issue, but as it stands, Surf is the only organization that offers the DCI experience in this way.
Given that, if the Surf were to change to a full tour model, it may garner more success as an organization, but one which potentially sacrifices one of the more important lessons that the members can learn about life and takes away a particular membership pool that would then have an audience only with DCA. Maybe in the long term that decision will be the correct one for Surf, but at the moment it’s too early to tell, too premature to rationalize such a drastic change in Surf history and philosophy after only one year in the World Class market.
So then i return to the other question: is this a failed business model for a world class drum corps? should such a model only aspire to go so far in the world of DCI, stay in the realm of open class?
As the organization continues to grow and evolve and the DCI community reacts to that evolution, the answers will be made clearer at least in the model of drum corps that exists today. But again, i don’t feel like there is a clear cut answer to be made after a single year. Surf and DCI needs a larger and more long-term perspective to determine whether or not it can be competitive in that realm.
Regardless of whether or not it can exist in the world class paradigm or if it is a better fit for open class (or maybe the model itself will inspire DCI to consider another change to its structure, particularly if more corps come out and follow this sort of model in the future), i feel it’s important to pay tribute to and honor Surf for what they’ve already achieved and for throwing themselves into that fire as a modern drum corps history-maker in a way that none of the top drum corps can touch. it serves as an example of a model that may not be something to eventually be absorbed and identified under the current drum corps models, but as the potential birth and inspiration of a new sustainable model, something that can bridge junior corps membership in the context of today’s evolving world and serve as a catalyst and inspiration for other organizations to manage and maintain drum corps that might otherwise be forced to fold.
And despite the fact that drum corps remains and should remain a competitive activity, i feel that the mission of the activity is to provide kids and adults alike a conduit for which they can learn and experience life lessons that they would not otherwise have access to. So if more drum corps could be sustained, revived, or created through alternative models such as this, it is the responsibility of DCI and of the drum corps community to support it and grant it an avenue where those organizations can be successful. Drum Corps changed my life. Without it, i would not be the teacher i am now, i would not have made the connections that i have now, i would not have made the friends who i love and cherish and will for the rest of my life, and i know many people who feel the same. In that sense, there is no doubt in my mind that the dedication, bravery, and vision that has pushed them to this point already made them a world class success even before they took their first step on the competition field in Rome, NY.
originally posted on darkblog resonate. i prefer any comments there.
The Jersey Surf Drum and Bugle Corps are in their cinderella year in World Class this year, and as an individual who has some personal investment in the corps as a former staff member and the mentor of one of the current staff members who likes to chat it up with me, i felt like it was worth doing a writeup of their unique position in the world of DCI and drum corps of today.
First, a little background:
Since it’s birth in 1991/1992, Jersey Surf was a Division II corps (now dubbed “Open”), and in the past few years established themselves as one of the more dominant forces in that class, culminating in a 2nd place finish in 2007 (winning both brass and percussion performance) and a 3rd place finish in 2008. Given their success and growth as an organization, they decided bump up to World Class for the 2009 season.
What makes the Jersey Surf unique in today’s drum corps world is their summer schedule. The corps director, Bob Jacobs, has always been a drum corps fan, but was never able to march in a drum corps in his youth because he couldn’t afford to not work over the summer, which took most full-summer-tour corps out of the picture. His goal with the Surf was to be able to give kids who needed a summer job or otherwise wanted or needed their summers free the opportunity that he didn’t have, to give them the opportunity to march in a respectable junior drum corps organization without having to sacrifice their entire summer. Thus, Surf functions primarily as a weekend corps in the summer with a couple of two-week block “tours” that go every day.
Surf has gone through a lot of growing pains in their history, but has steadily matured as an organization culminating to their open class success. I feel that part of this has to do with the focus in recent years to raise the level of professionalism and organization of Surf’s middle and upper management, and thus be able to bring in greater staff talent tha and build loyalty in the staff talent. When i taught Surf in 1999, everyone on staff was volunteer, and that can only draw from a certain pool of instructional staff. Eventually this model changed, and along with that was a gradual changeover of the staff that was able to bump up the vision of excellence and the reputation of the corps as a force that even with its strong running start in its early years continued to build in strength and be a force to be reckoned with, which in turn helped attract a stronger and more loyal membership pool.
Although I don’t know all of the details of the Why and How of Surf moving from Open to World Class, it seems like this was an inevitability given the sort of momentum and evolution they’ve had as an organization. Regardless of this, making this move couldn’t have been easy and deserves a high level of admiration. i’m making an educated guess that it would have been easier for them to stay in Open Class and know that they had the potential to capture their first gold medal. Instead, they decided that they needed to think bigger, and even if there was a risk that it was biting off more than they could chew, they threw themselves into the fire as a new rookie to see where it would take them. In today’s world where it seems like more organizations and individuals focus mainly on stability and creating a business model that they know will succeed with very little risk, Surf needs to be commended for standing against that model and attempting to try to see how far it can push its success.
And now that they’re in their first summer tour as a World Class organization, i think that it’s highlighted some of the challenges that this new kid on the block has to face not only because it is their debut year in World Class, but because of their unique “weekend-only summer” model, the only World Class drum corps tomy knowledge that is functioning in this way. And i think that it’s important, therefore, to take a moment to do some outside analysis on the choices that Surf has made, how that fits within the bigger picture of the current DCI model, musical pedagogy, and life pedagogy, and speculate as to what role Surf has in the future, both for itself and for the activity of drum corps.
There’s no doubt that because of the choices that Surf has made, they’re fighting an upward struggle. Take the shittiest and most inexperienced drum corps out there that does a full tour and pit them against the Surf, and there’s a good chance that the shitty drum corps will beat them purely because of how much more time they practice and thus how much more time they can meld as a collective ensemble from the top down, how much more chops are built through consistently playing/spinning every day, how much more physical endurance they develop, &c. Talent can only go so far behind solid, consistent, hard work.
Given those sorts of struggles on top of other small or big struggles that they face, questions arise: should they have stayed in open class? should they have reached for a longer term goal of becoming world class but with more of a full tour model? is this “in between” model that they’re employing a failed model for the world class paradigm?
currently after you make a comment on one of my entries, it may send you to a 404 page. If you don't see your comment show up, it's likely not lost but stored in my moderation queue. i'll be addressing this when i get the opportunity.
random thought:
just because a thought may be hypocritical does not make it any less truthful.
