Drumline People!

I've been transcribing DCI stuff for my drumline (Ditty, Double Beat, Flam I Am, ect...) and though I know our tenor line can handle it, and our basses (with a bit of hard work), our snare line is trash. Everybody wants to play the music, but I refuse to noobify it to the extent that the snares would require; some parts would have to be COMPLETELY changed.

Know any ways to quickly motivate and train snare drummers? I tried during the school year, but nobody gave enough of a damn to try.

Not gonna happen. Put your thinking cap on and do the best rewrite you can.

Use a little reverse psychology on 'em. I've observed one of the best for the past 11 years. It works like this.

Don't tell them you transcribed it from the Blue Vanguard or whatever, tell 'em you stole it from the drumline of one of your rivals. Say you saw it in his car with the window down and grabbed it. At first you thought it'd be fun to play it to show 'em up, but realized it's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyy to hard for anyone on your line to play. Leave a copy with them though anyway. Over the next week or so mention several times that you'd like to play it, but it's just waaaaaaaaaaaaayyy to hard for your line to even try.

Check back a week or later or so and pull it up.

See if this gets you anywhere.

But I'm talking about a group of losers that have trouble playing 8-on-hand clean with 3 other snares. That might get them working on it, or it might depress them to the point of giving up.

Make it so that it can at least sound good. Get the accents right though, those will stand out more than anything else. As far as the group of "losers", it seems like you all need some basic exercises in teamwork.

You all need to get really drunk together, and hit up the Flag or Pom Line like you own the place.

digga digga GOCK, flwhack flwhack flwhack flwhack, GET SOME!

I shouldn't have called them losers, they're some pretty cool people.

I think my problem with it is that I really miss the snare line from two years ago, everybody (other than me) graduated, so I got the hell off snare.

Huh?

What?

eh?

haha. I had the same thing with my line this past season. There was some awesome potential talent (I got a drumline almost entirely of newbies as my one and only year as drum captain, lucky me...) but they didn't practice nearly enough. They practiced enough to just get by, and many times not even that. We ended up sounding pretty good by the end of the season, but there's no way in Hell we would be playing Ditty, Flam I am or Double beat. Only three of us on the line actually knew double beat and I was the only one that could play it at a reasonable tempo.

From my experience, motivation is one of the hardest things to instill into people. I'm definietly not an expert, but I'd suggest getting DCI videos and ESPECIALLY getting BOA videos, just to show them that it is possible for kids their age to play stuff like that (you don't play in BOA, do you?). But yeah, I'd suggest showing them what their potential is and try to get them excited about playing cool stuff like that. Also let them know that they can't reach the level of Double Beat and Martian Mambo without getting THE BASICS down first.

btw, have you heard SCV's new Eight on a Hand exercise? The University of Arizona's line is playing it next season and it's awesome. Try to find it somewhere. If not, I'll make a video of it and send it to you so you can try to teach it to your line. I think the fact that they would be playing Div. 1 drum corps level stuff might get them excited.

DUDE! How do you about them?

Uhhhh.... I've known the staff there for 4 years, and I'll likely be marching with them next season (assuming I make it, which I'm sure i will as long as I don't stop practicing). Why do you ask?

Holy {censored}!, we're practically related.

I've been best friends w/ Mr. Swanson since the 5th grade, he's obviously not coaching there anymore, but I'm sure you know about him. I hung out with the 1999-2001 members pretty frequently, as I was able to live a college life vicariously through them. Some good times with plenty of "Purple Stuff".

Did you just graduate High School in the Naked Pueblo? I'm a Sahuaro grad myself.

Best of luck making it next season. Have you been practicing... what is it called? #72 Beef Nachos? That one's a classic for them. Rodenkirk and someone else made it up at one of the local taco joints at lunch way back in the day, around '92 or so. The UofA has one of the most serious, and dedicated lines in all of the country. They've been laying down the law for YEARS.

For the curious, this is what we're talking about: http://web.cfa.arizona.edu/drumline/index.php

haha. yeah. I just graduated from University High School. It's a college prep school on the same campus as Rincon, if you didn't know (fat lot of good it did me, with my $0 in scholarships...). And I think they call that "72 count cadence" now. Not sure why...

But yeah, the coach now is Vicente Lopez (I believe he was center snare about the same time you were talking about). He's a real cool guy. He works with a bunch of high school lines (including Rincon's) and I believe his goal in life is to open up a percussion studio of sorts for high school kids. I can't think of a better use for a master's degree in percussion.

Wasn't 2001 around the time they did Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili Peppers? Those two show were AMAZING!!! Although I must admit, their best show was easily 2005's Led Zeppelin. I actually almost cried during their rendition of Stairway to Heaven. :')

EDIT: btw, Sahuaro's drumline this past season was AWESOME. They probably won't be that great next season because all of the amazing people have graduated, but they would have made you proud this year.

I remember when Vincente was still in High School... man times are flying by. And yes he's a very cool cat. Level headed and determined, with GREAT chops. Is J Gallegos, or R Leva still around?

The Chili Peppers was '96, then Pink Floyd in '97, then Pumpkins in '98. Damn, that WAS a long time ago. That was some really awesome stuff that Reese did with those shows. He's a pretty amazing director, but a bit self-righteous sometimes. Still, he's done some amazing things with that group.

And Sahuaro's success last year was all because of Swanson. He's not sure about doing it again though, after many battles with their director, lack of pay, lots of unnappreciated time, etc.

Do you know who D Rodenkirk is?

Do you have it written out in a PDF or something? If so, I'd love to get my mitts on it ...

I'll try to get it and send it to you. It's really good. Long, but good.

How do you write music on a PDF?

U of A hijacked my thread...

The easiest is to find it that way. Other than that you can buy Adobe whatever it is and have at it. The reader is free but I don't know if you can draft anything with it.

IATYQ you can add your scribbling to a PDF doc as an image file.

I'd imagine you could write the music with Finale or Sibelius and save it as a PDF file.

Write it out on a piece of manuscript paper. Scan it in. If you have PDF Writer, print it to PDF. If not, use a site like this to convert it to PDF:

https://www.pdfonline.com/convert_pdf.asp

Kids. Don't they know anything about computers ??? :):)

I know very little about computers...

Thanks, though; finale broke on my computer, so I might do that when I write music.

Finale broke? Reinstall it.

You'll get over it. Besides, I thought this thread was about you having superiority over your "loser" snare line.

If you already own Finale, doesn't it come with some kind of support? It's not cheap software, I would assume that they have something for you. Does it error out when you launch it? If the re-install doesn't work, you can try doing a system restore back to around the time that it stopped working.

Do a FULL system scan for adware, spyware, viruses, etc. If you aren't running anything, get on some free stuff. AVG anti-virus, Adaware, SpyBot, there's all kinds of stuff out there now.

HELL YES!

We had a drumline meeting, and I got the snare line practicing Greivous' Groove. There's no way we'll be able to play that clean, but that warmup's a chop-builder if I ever saw one.

I'll post a vid of myself playing it, if anyone's intersted.