Marching Band Shows

[Nick Pierce]

College, correct?

There's a great website out there that not many people know about where thousands of marching band shows are uploaded where anybody can view them for free. Use the search engine to look for university name, show title, or even the year of the show (be sure to type in "marching band" as well.) I'll type in the link below. Go to town!












http://www.youtube.com

Sorry, bad joke.

[rocksanddirt]

I definitely second the idea of searching you tube.

do you guys only do one half time show per season?

most of the college/university bands I know of do a new show for each game. (some may be compilations of the good parts of early season shows)

Here's one that's gotten a lot of attention in the past year or so.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QNI3W8UB-s

[Eupharitone]

Yeah, there's a pretty good sized subcultural niche online for High School Marching Band. I'm personally a forum moderator for txbands.com, which centers around the Texas HS marching band scene (many other states with strong marching band competition circuits have community boards for their own state circuits as well; Indiana, Illinois, California etc.), and of course you've also got BOA's forums and their national appeal.

Surprisingly though, there isn't as big of a following online for college/university band. I don't know why this is exactly but it probably has something to do with the fact that HS bands are more involved in their activity with competitions and fundraisers and hours and hours spent making more artistically intricate shows, while the universities are more focused on creating an exciting experiences for halftime, playing music that's more "crowd friendly" and not investing nearly as much time/money into it (college band students are more focused on their majors). The HS bands are more closely tied into the fandom and pageantry of DCI than they are with their older University marching band brothers, and there's more creative talent being invested into them than the unis.

[David Richoux]

You won't see precision marching and disappearing diamonds, but:
http://lsjumb.stanford.edu/multimedia/videos/" target="_blank is some fun... have not checked if all is SFW, so be careful!

[sloan]

Thats what it is like at Alma, its one intricate show for the entire season, although if people actually practiced and weren't dicking around at every pause we could easily do more.

You haven't lived until you've been in a "Scramble Band". Back in the day, we would write the show on Sunday, arrange the music on Monday, pass it out at the first rehearsal on Tuesday, run through it on Thursday, fine-tune it Saturday morning, and perform it for the first, last, and only time on Saturday afternoon. Home AND Away.

That left us plenty of time to prepare for Hockey 1/3-time shows.

Sadly, few players managed to memorize their music, and we had no "pit".

[rocksanddirt]

Thats what it is like at Alma, its one intricate show for the entire season, although if people actually practiced and weren't dicking around at every pause we could easily do more.

You haven't lived until you've been in a "Scramble Band". Back in the day, we would write the show on Sunday, arrange the music on Monday, pass it out at the first rehearsal on Tuesday, run through it on Thursday, fine-tune it Saturday morning, and perform it for the first, last, and only time on Saturday afternoon. Home AND Away.

That left us plenty of time to prepare for Hockey 1/3-time shows.

Sadly, few players managed to memorize their music, and we had no "pit".

heh. we did much the same, only it was high step and precision....the music and show were mostly planned during the summer, but Monday pass out music and poopsheets (section leaders group rehearsal), tuesday full band learn the show, wednesday more learning, thursday do a little pregame as well..., friday polish (learn the dance steps, etc) work on memorizing the music, It's saturday morning Bears!

and no pit, and if there were more than 3 music majors in band during the 5 years I was I'd be shocked.