Forums | MacLife

I was in marching band from '84 - '86. I started as a trumpet player, but moved to mallets in 10th grade.

The thing I love to point out most often is that back then, we were referred to as "band fags" by all the "cool" kids...but I don't recall any other teams that were co-ed and pretty much stripped down to their skivvies to dress out before performance/competition, then again afterwards, and gave each other massages all the way back home on the bus.

"Band fags" indeed.

In Texas they say football is for the kids who couldn't make the marching band.

My HS didn't have a marching band. Our jazz band kicked ass, though.

dvpierce wrote:

Malkin wrote:

Marching band was the reason I quit band.  I hated it.

Here, here!

It's the only extracurricular activity in HS that really is a dead end. Shop, English, Art, even Football have professional counterparts, but Marching Band? Well, there's Blast, I guess, but yeesh what a waste of time and money.

It's not really a dead end if you consider marching Corps (DCI, DCA etc), marching military band (Actually pretty highly paid, but you have to do concert AND marching), or even being a professional musician for anything, the marching band helps with your musicianship and such.  It also leads into being a band director, so you know the workings.

I was in marching band. Four years of it, and I'm finally done with it. Luckily, my teacher hated it as much as we did.
Marching band: Mellophone
Symphony Orchestra: French Horn
Jazz Band: Trombone

I was in marching band in HS (89-91). I didn't do it my senior year because I couldn't fit it into my class schedule.

9th grade: trumpet (played trumpet 5th - 8th grade)
9th grade concert band: french horn
10th & 11th grade: marching horn

Marching band does teach you to be a better player because you have to play better to compensate for the movement. It's easy to hold a note for two measures while sitting in a chair. You have to be better to keep a steady note while marching knees to chest.

We went to a few competitions and it was the highlight of my HS years. I never played any organized sports in HS. Marching band was it. I tell you what... there's very few things that feel like warming up inside a gymnasium and hearing the sound of you and your friends reverberating inside that metal building. You come out of there fired up. You just know that you are about to play your best. You march to the beats of your sweepstakes winning percussion. You round the corner and onto the field. You raise your horn to the press box and for 12 minutes, you are part of this entity called "the band" and thousands of people are cheering you on.

Oh well... good memories.

Check out the movie "Drumline". It does a pretty good job of getting across the emotion of being part of the band.

I was in marching band from '78-'82.    Oh yeah, I played trombone.

Last edited by XRA (2005-03-18 4:14 pm)

dvpierce wrote:

Most of those kick you out at 21. It's easier to get a paying gig as a classical musician than as a professional drum corp marcher.

Yes, the junior corps do have an age limit of 22.  It is billed as a youth activity, however.
All-age "senior" corps do not have an age limit and will not kick you out for being "old".
Also, neither all-age nor junior corps are paying gigs.  At the junior corps level, some members will pay up to $1500 in membership fees.  That's after auditioning with 300 other hopefuls, some of which are going for 1-2 open spots in their particular section.

They'll teach you how to march in the military, and it's not a bloody thing like high school halftime shows.

Nor college, for that matter.  Military bands have their own style.  Military drum corps, like the Marine drum and bugle corps, have a similar style to the junior and all-age corps.  I actually marched with a guy in 2000 who joined the Marines to be in the drum corps.  He now plays contrabass (think shoulder-mounted tuba) for them.

...and there are so many things wrong with that statement. Marching band and musicianship, as a rule, don't belong in the same sentence. MB taught me precisely how not to play musically.

That depends on which band you're in.  Some marching bands, especially the Bands of America groups which march with a drum corps-style technique, strongly push for musicality, especially with the demands of the drill.

Here's an example:  Go to http://www.indianamarching.com/multimed … 102304.php and check out the video for Avon High School, Indiana's Class A marching band champion.  Despite the poor quality of the video and the fact that the performance is in an echoing domed stadium, it's pretty impressive what they accopmlish.  They're also playing music from NFL Films so it's a pretty fun show to watch, too.

Yeah, so you can conduct your pointless marching band when you force your students to do it...

I think you may be surprised at how many students do want to do marching band, and not just because they get into football games for free.  Not all bands are going to be as good as the band in the video I recommended above but there are a lot of bands which push their members to be good musicians, good marchers, and good students overall.  I've had the privilege of working with such a band in Parma, Ohio (Valley Forge).  They weren't going to win any competitions but their director is really good at her job, knows how to teach and knows how to motivate and the kids were better for it.

I didn't get that kind of experience when I was in marching band but, coming from a family which has marched drum corps since the 1940's, I was going to get it in corps.  I am now on the board of directors for an all-age corps starting up here in the Cleveland, Ohio area.  I also host a weekly podcast about drum corps.  I've also applied the discipline I learned while marching corps to everything I do in life.  Regardless of the musical experience I gained, that made my drum corps experience worth every minute.

By the way, there's a drum corps tie-in with Apple:  Greg Gilman, webmaster for the San Francisco Renegades (http://www.renegades.org) also works on the Apple website and has been known to sneak in pictures and names of Renegades on the Apple site now and then.

Og wrote:

okay, this one time at band camp...

Somebody had to say it.

dvpierce wrote:

I'm not even going to touch this one - if you're one of those people, I'd have better luck trying to convert you to Islam (assuming you're Christian, visa versa if not.)

I guess we'll just agree to disagree, then, except for the part about me being one of those people.  I can't argue that one at all.

But paying $1500 to do it makes it even more pointless. Oh, and that band wasn't great.

Well, that does make you $1500 richer than those who are doing it.

Look at it this way:  Those who are willing to pay that much are getting what they want out of it and then some.  They could have spent their money elsewhere, like the mall or on less healthy habits, but they didn't.  They're happy with what they got, you're happy with the money.  Everybody's happy.

OMGZOMBIE!!!