Marching: Techniques and Principles to Move Beyond the Basics

Borrowing from the book, "Beyond the Basics," by Nick Benson, Adam Oswald, and Dylan Thompson, as well as sharing experiences from 39 years as a performer, educator, and clinician, Mike Lunney offers great insight for taking your ensemble past basic marching. Practical and applicable thoughts, tips, and ideas that will help you teach your group to be advanced level thinkers and performers this marching season!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I just think, Mike, that we really ought to give this is the Ask Mike podcast, and and you come every time with great information. But I just want to give a shout out to Rick in the chair. Nobody ever sees him, nobody ever really hears him. But he does such a great job of of making us uh sound with the material we give him, with with what the clay he's got to work with. But he does a great job, and I appreciate him so very much. Yeah, we love Rick. And you better leave that in the podcast, my friend. So all right. So here we are, uh in the midst of a series of episodes referencing uh our upcoming marching season, right? How do we get ready for it? Uh what are the uh I don't know if we call them best practices, but things that we could do to be successful uh with our students. So last week we kind of talked about how to create a winning culture or how to win at marching van. And uh, where are you going to take us this week, my friend?

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Well, a lot of this info from uh today's podcast is from a book called Beyond the Basics by Nick Benson, Adam Oswald, and Dylan Thompson. So Beyond the Basics. So you can get that and it's a downloadable PDF and you you pay for the download or whatever. Uh it's amazing. It's really amazing. Uh, plus a lot of info from my personal experience in messing up marching bands for the past 38 years. Um basic efforts, plus performing the previous nine years before teaching. You know what I mean? So it's based on a lot of mistakes and a lot of the times when things accidentally happened well. But those guys are just brilliant. But you know, teaching marching does not always receive the attention and respect it probably deserves. I'd agree with that. You know, it's it's like, and granted, it we call it marching band, uh, and it needs to be more about the music. It does, but we can't ignore the marching. Okay. Um, and marching is kind of a pretty big term nowadays, you know. Um, so marching includes any kind of body movement that we're doing, any kind of speaking we're doing, any kind of foot movement we're doing. It's a pretty broad-based idea now, but it's all important.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

You know, whether it's some vagary involved in the term marching band.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Yeah, whether it's an actual marching band, like our good old East Texas military marching bands, so I love watching those bands, or it's a drum and bugle core, you know, or indoor wind ensemble, uh, you know, indoor winds, like, you know, things for WGI. The quality of marching and movement training is often what makes it possible to create that type of music. It kind of conveys the show. Um, for me, the best approach to the visual caption, which is marching and choreography, um, is all about creating a certain look on the field. Okay. There has to be a look to your band, okay? There has to be a style to it. Today, and that's why I wore my nice little gray sports coat today. We want to convey a style. I I'm conveying my college professor. I need a, I don't have a turtleneck. I almost I tried to find a turtleneck because I was gonna wear a turtleneck and put a baton in the back, you know, like those real directors do at college. That's right. You know, so there has to be a certain look to what happens, and that look is going to be important to your band. Uh, the first part of that look, it has to demonstrate strength. It has to demonstrate strength. So even the way they stand on the ramp before they enter the field must demonstrate strength. And the question always comes up uh great, nice vague term there, Mike Lenny. Um, what are you talking about? You know, they're not wiggling around, they're not emptying water out of their horns, they're not turning around and talking to their neighbor behind them. They're not their heads not bobbing left and right, and they're not moving around, you know. Um, they they are standing in parade rest or second position or atheredi, whatever position you have them in, they're just simply standing there waiting to go. Can you imagine like an Olympic hundred-meter dash and everyone's wiggling on the starting blocks? No, it's not gonna happen because those are trained athletes, so they're absolutely perfectly still until that starter gun goes pop. And then every muscle in their body propels them off those blocks. They're not wiggling around and picking their nose and scratching their butt, you know, and like, oh, it's time to run.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Wave into the crowd.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Yeah, wave into the crowd. So it has to demonstrate that strength. Number two is actually to me, it's harder. Um, make the show look easy. It's got to you cannot feel, for better lack of a term, as an audience member, you cannot feel the difficulty of what the band's doing.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Right. And I'm gonna stop you just for a second because whether they believe it or not, whether you believe it or not, Mr. Miss Educator, that conveys there is an uneasiness in the audience watching an undisciplined and not strong a band that doesn't display strength, however that term is defined, it makes me uneasy to watch you. You're waiting for something to go wrong.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

There's there's or you're your expectation is this is not going to be amazing. Yeah, maybe that's a kinder way to say that.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

You're already thinking to yourself, I'm gonna applaud at the end because they're finished.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Right. Yay, that was another band.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

They're done. Okay, yay, they they finished, they finished. Red Riding Hood has run around and scared the wolf, and now we're gonna we're gonna run off the field. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

So I guess my point is though, is that that does communicate body language, 90% nonverbal communication.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

And we're not just um we're talking marching band, obviously, but doesn't that convey also to uh jazz band and to uh concert band and brass quintets and uh meeting someone for the very first time? You must convey some sort of strength, you know, uh a nice good handshake of what my daddy always said, you know, never shake a man's hand unless you're standing up.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Right. You know, it conveys strength. Tell me the truth. Tell me if I'm wrong, as an adjudicator, have you not written this line? Because you could tell something weird happened that day. That's a strong band, but something weird happened today. I could tell something was off that or so, you know. I I don't know exactly how I was gonna phrase that. Oh, I know exactly what you're telling me. If the band's not strong, you're like, hey, we need to work on some fundamentals and we need to and you're ready to write things negatively, but if they approach it with strength and they approach it with grace, and and you can tell that's a good band. I could tell something's just something happened. I'm not sure what it was, but I could tell this is a good band. Yeah. How many times have you written that?

SPEAKER_00 6:42

Oh, yeah. And uh, and nowadays in March and we don't write a whole lot. Isn't that interesting on that competition? You can talk, okay. That's what I mean. There's a tear in the tempo. So uh so they kind of look at that for whatever level you might be going to next or whatever contest you have in the future or Friday night football game, said look at that and kind of said, in my opinion, it's because the people, the brass are so far front field, they're following the drum majors, and they can't follow the drum majors, they must follow the drum line because they're in front of the hash marks.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

But your opening to that was I could tell this is a good band.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Yeah. Or conversely, if if you know it's a weaker band, you just like you said, you immediately go into let's talk about how we can make our fundamentals stronger.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Right.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

You know, because we just assume that they're, you know, and I I've said it too, like a band will play really, really well, and then they'll just hit a clunker. You know what I mean? And you go, man, this band plays so pretty. Even that bad note sounded pretty. That gets the message across, doesn't it? It's like uh you don't sweat much for fat people compliment, you know. Yeah, it's kind of a backhanded compliment made in jovial, you know, manner.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

I'm not sure I've ever heard that before. That was good.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yeah, that's awesome. You don't sweat much for a fat guy, you know. So you see, is that a compliment or an insult? Yeah, but but I love saying that to a band when they play really pretty and then they just do something kind of dumb. You know, we all do. You know, it's like, man, y'all play so with such a pretty sound and so well in tune that even your even your bad note right there sounded really nice. So they you've you've acknowledged they screwed up, but you've given credit to the fact that you know they're disciplined and you know that they've been taught correctly and they're they're working hard on stage. So um uh the next thing is achieving graceful body lines. Oh my gosh, just making sure that there's a continuity. It's it's really weird to think about this, but it's a continuity between all the way from the head and shoulders, all the way down to the toes, where um in traditional marching style, that's not a big issue. It's like from the waist up, we're a musician with good horn posture, of course, but from the waist down, we're marching machines. Right. And those days are gone. Okay. So it has to be where it it operates as one continuous unit the whole time. That how we do our hips, how we do our shoulders is going to also affect what we do with our feet because we want that line all the way from our nose all the way down to the tip of our toes. You know, that we we that have a certain way that are the bend of our leg, how we how is our pelvis right underneath our body? Are we not pushing our rear end out or leaning back? Uh, what things are we doing that look different on field? And you know, so it's just a matter of making it all look the same, you know, and we have to move through each phrase, whether that's a drill phrase. We're talking drill phrases here with purpose and having presence in the field. And that's it's one of those things that's easy to recognize, but it's almost impossible to describe. Isn't that weird? That's the that's the tricky part. You can watch a band, and you know, I I could maybe if I had 30 minutes, I could describe it, but we don't have that as an audience member. We just see them march, and uh, even someone who's not really well trained in music will go, that's a really good band. And you'll say, Why is it a really good band? They'll go, I don't know. And it's a good band. It's just a good band, you know, so that they sound really nice and they look really good at what they're doing. Well, what are they doing good? I don't know, but they just look good.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Whatever it is, they're doing it well. They're doing it well.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

You know, my dad was one of the best judges of marching bands and had no ability to play a musical instrument or sing at all. And he would say, uh, he could he could lay those first divisions and fifth divisions on a band quicker than anybody. And he was always he was always correct because he said, Oh, it's really easy. If the band really makes it look easy and it's fun to watch, that's a one. If you're a little uncomfortable, it's a two. If they make your butt pucker a little bit, it's a three. If you're embarrassed for the kids, or excuse me, if you're embarrassed for the director, it's a four. If you're embarrassed for the kids, it's a five.

unknown 10:53

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Not one musical comment at all. He could watch a band and go, that's a fifth division band, because I'm embarrassed for the kids right now. Or that that's a second division band. That's a little uncomfortable. Man, they really made my butt pucker. You know, that's it's there's some cringy moments happening out there. That's a third division. And you know what? That's a pretty good rubric. It has nothing to do with music, phrasing, breathing. Uh probably won't see it printed. Oh no, it won't be printed, but um, I hate to say this, but I judge a lot of marching contests, but that little rubric runs through my head. But Pucker. Well, what do what would my dad think? What would my dad think of this as an Air Force sergeant who loaded B-52s for a living? He loaded bombs, he was in charge of munitions. Um, so you know, that's the tricky part. You've got to see that in the band, okay? But it's our job as a band director to communicate these ideas to our audience through the way we move, because the way we move on the field transmits the concept of the show. Not one person dressed in a costume, jumping up and down and dancing around. That's not performative, okay? Right. That's just distracting. Okay. It has to do with every person on the field. If you've got a band with really bad posture and really bad horn position, and two people who are theater arts majors that are doing this great Shakespearean theatrical production in front of you, that's almost counter to what we're trying to do. Because you see uh the good with the absolute ugly. And I think it's like, oh, this sucks, you know.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

I totally ignore the soloistic type situation you're talking about because part of my cynical nature says you're trying to distract me from actually watching what the band's doing.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

If I follow that little Red Riding Hood all over the field, I completely ignored the other 50 to 100 people that I'm supposed to be watching. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

So yeah. And just uh I don't suggest doing this. You know, you're talking about trying to distract people, but we had a situation where our drill was not really strong on this one move in our band. And so we're at area finals. So I tell all the trombones to make sure to accidentally play an A natural there instead of an A flat. And they all looked at me. This is back when it was five judges. There weren't any captions. And then they looked at me, I said, because all five judges will talk about that A-flat for the next 20 seconds, they won't notice us falling apart on the drill. And it worked. Every cassette I got back in those days of cassettes, I got the cassettes and I played it for my trombone section. And they go, Oh, trombones? That's the wrong note. But man, this is a really good band, but you got to make sure you read your key. You can't just play uh an A-flat there when it's supposed to be an A natural. It can't be done. Meanwhile, he's like crashing burn. It's a train wreck on the field. They didn't mention one thing about the drill, all of a sudden the drill's fine, and they're like, This is a really good band. That's great. You dance to the state with the context, purposely playing the wrong note in the show to distract the judges. So judges, it's like I'm a judge, but it's like we've got a ring in our nose, and you can grab that ring and you can move that judge around.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Lead us around the field.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

You can force them to look at what you want them to look at if you're devious enough. Okay. So if you want more of those tricks, we'll have to do those over at the Marriott Bar at TBA.

SPEAKER_01 14:12

That's great.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

That's the quiet part.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Find me in the cafe.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

Yeah, just don't just don't turn me into UIL powers to do because they might uh ban me from marching from uh judging anymore. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

Yanked that certification.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Yeah, he just lost his accreditation. And to begin working towards this goal, it helps to recognize how the visual part of our program in our group overlaps with the various components of our marching band. It works with the music at the same time. And a lot of times directors think in terms of let's work the drill, then let's add choreography, then let's see how that affects what we do musically. When I know it seems like a slower process, but do all that to the best of your ability at the same time as you're teaching it. This is the drill move, this is the crescendo, this is the woodwind feature, this is how we're gonna stage this, this is how we're gonna do our choreo. Don't add it later because you most directors wouldn't do that in any other aspect of their job, but it seems like it makes sense to us in marching. And I don't know why it does, but it's not a sensible way to approach it, you know. Because um, I've gone, it's like I'll clinic a band like the week before region, and I'll say, man, just like choreography, that those body movements, it's not really together yet. Oh, yeah, we just put that in two days ago. Why? Just that move? No, all our choreography. We spent the last four days doing our choreography. What? Can you imagine having a concert band and going, all right, we've got all the notes and rhythms worked out to Moscow 1941. Now it's five days before contest evaluation. Let's do dynamics.

unknown 15:54

That's great.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

We wouldn't do that to our concert band, but give us a second, man. And we're we're crazy, we're crazy people as directors. We'll do that to the marching band. And you know why we do it, Derek? Because we're not comfortable with the body movement. We don't know exactly how to teach it. We know how to teach the music and drill. The body movement, that's a whole nother animal, isn't it? So you got to force yourself. That'll be another podcast. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

But look, I was gonna say, haven't I heard you say before that you incorporate some of this stuff into your warmup block?

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Oh, yeah. Yeah. These exercises that tend to focus on overlaps and stretching, strengthening, endurance training, movement skills, marching technique, ensemble clarity, that all happens at the same time. You can do an F. Remington warm-up or you could do a corral and you could do body movement to it. You can say, okay, we're gonna do eight counts of plie and then recovery, and then we're gonna do a Ram de Jam and we're gonna do this and this. And you can incorporate all that into your warm-up chorale from day one because they'll learn the notes pretty quick, you know, most things. If not, have an easier chorale. You know, the chorale only has like four notes in it. And there's nothing wrong with that because the chorale is not meant to wow.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Learn the purpose.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

Yeah, learn learn what the purpose is. Our purpose is not to do salvation is created, you know, and make it sound like an orchestral excerpt. You know, our goal is to let's make a pretty sound, play in tune, do our body movement, and incorporate all that together. Um, the best exercises cover multiple skill areas. However, a number of these exercises also focus on developing a single issue. You know, so it's like our goal right now is to get our prettiest sound possible on our on our Remington warm-up or our Clark study that we're doing, our lipslur exercise with chromatics in the woodwinds. We want to make sure we use our chromatic fingerings on clarinet and saxophone. But while you're doing this, you are gonna do a plie for eight counts. You're gonna do a rhom de jam, now you're gonna do an arabesque, now you're gonna do a coupe. So you give all this terminology to them and teach them how to do all this so they're doing one thing and having to do the other, much like a piano player forcing themselves to use both hands on the piano.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Right. Or I liken it to a lot as a guitar player, a lot of times I've heard people say this and I believe this. Don't learn the guitar part and then start trying to sing with it. Do them both at the same time, or you'll never be able to do it. I mean, it just became you've increased the difficult level. If you don't do it all at the same time from the beginning, you've just made things harder on yourself.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

And you're exactly right. If you if you wait till later to teach some kind of choreography or some kind of marching thing that you want to incorporate in your show, a big drill move, then all of a sudden they're gonna suffer musically, and it'll take them twice as long to recover musically.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

To recover, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:40

If you just taught it to them in the first place. Now, granted, we do have to change things as the season progresses, but try to keep that to a minimum. Um, it's also important that we develop clear, this is a must, clear and consistent definitions for everything we do. It can't be that the flutes call it a step off and the trumpets call it a get and go. I'm just making up stuff now. And trombones call it something I miss every time, you know. Um, but there has to be a definition for, you know, when we say uh uh let's say Ram de Jam for a body movement, if that's the terminology you want to use, use it. If you want to call it a toe circle, that's okay too, because it's kind of a toe circle. You know what I mean? So, whatever definition you have, you can't have 15 definitions floating around out there. At the end of the day, this activity focuses, this activity we do every single day in band, it focuses on uniformity. And only through uniformity do we get artistic expression. You look at a great symphony orchestra, all those bows move the same direction. At the same time. At the same time. Think about that. It's very uniform. And so I've heard people uh prophesy that uh, you know, said, well, you know, we just want to be emotive and musical, so it's not gonna no, no, the most unmusical thing in the world is not being uniform. It has to be uniform first, and then we can emote, then we can emote, and we can be artistic. Whether that's a jazz band or whether that's a trumpet ensemble, it doesn't matter. So the purpose of this whole podcast series, and then if you've if you dived in with us this far, here's our purpose. I'll be the educator. Here's our goal is to have the key points of our movement and our marching program eventually all in written form. And Mr. Rick over in the chair, he has a copy of the PDF that I've updated with um new terminology and I've changed a few things in it. He's gonna post that uh through the Tarpley system so we can kind of have people can download it. Um, it's done in a uh I have to check with Rick. I might have sent it to him as a PDF. It might be a I hope it's a word file. He did a get thumbs up, it's a word file. Okay. So with a word file, what I like about it is every director can change it. A PDF, you have to retype the whole dang thing. But you know, if you want to call it something different, you have my blessing. Everything on that page is stolen, stolen with a vengeance, okay? Nothing on that was unapologetically not stolen. Okay, so it was stolen and too bad, so sad. I just stole that. So feel free to steal it all. And if you want to erase everything but one sentence, you have my blessing, okay? But you need to have it all written down somewhere. It has to be written down where you can hand it to whoever's working with your band. Okay. Um, it'll help enhance the clarity and consistency of your approach to your band. It provides tools for each performer to maximize their development in this caption. All teachers, and that includes students who are teaching, all teachers in the program must teach exactly the same way. We can't have four different ways to step off just because the bear tones like to do it this way. You know, everyone has to be on the same page. That sounds obvious, but if you watch a marching band, now I'm gonna make some of you guys out there that uh you know tend to watch other marching bands, you know what I mean? You'll you'll Start to be more analytical when you watch them, you're you'll realize that the low brass have a different foot technique than the woodwinds. That's kind of weird. And they just kind of, you know, they we just kind of develop our own cultish pod of how we do things when we're brass players versus woodwinds versus front ensemble versus whatever, you know. Um, so you've got to make sure that we all teach it the same way and we stick to that. We just got to stick to that uniformity. Um, the focus on movement training, the way muscle groups and body awareness is developed in dance settings, offers an excellent means to create the look we're after. We're looking for a certain look. Our goal is to have a look to our band, at the same time, covering a full range of physical conditioning in a way that is relevant to our marching technique. Because I don't know how many times, you know, I'll I'll I'll see a band and I'll maybe work in like the day before state marching contest, believe it or not, just to kind of catch a few things and they'll say, What can we do on this body movement to make this better for tomorrow when we go to prelims? And I'll just kind of turn my mic off and look at them and say, There's nothing you can do to make that look better. They do not have the core muscle strength to make that look better.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:19

It's not going to look better. Um, so just have them do the best they can, which is fine because it was a really good band, by the way. Or or take that body movement out. I would rather a judge say, we could really use some body movement here instead of the body movement.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

That was bad.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

That really sucked, you know. So it'd be nice if we did that together, you know. And sometimes it's core strength. We're gonna have a podcast here somewhere along the way with uh with uh Denver City Michael Munoz. He is a whole system for core body strength with a resistance band. It's the coolest thing you've ever seen in your life. And we're gonna get him to do some videos for us and stuff and post those. But um, it's a real precise way for a band that's in class 3A, so it's not like some big old 6A monster BOA band, you know, that has the full eight hours a week after school to work that he's incorporated within his program has been very successful. His kids have core muscle strength. I judged them last year, and it was stunning how strong they were physically, you know, and consequently they did well as far as being a good band, and they did well as far as points on the sheet because they had the physical body strength to do the things he was asking them to do. Okay, so it can be done, and we're gonna utilize his uh brilliant because he did all this on his own, by the way. It's absolutely amazing. I watched him, I watched him say, Oh my gosh, this is amazing. Okay. Um, so our goal is to move well as humans first.

unknown 24:49

Think about that.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

To move well as humans first. We don't want it to look awkward, then apply those movement concepts to our marching. Do what we can with the allowed time and the student ability.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

Right. I think that's key.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

That's our limitations. You there if you're at a BOA grand nationals top 12 finalists band, bless you. Because those kids can do more because they have a culture built in, and if they have more, they take more time, they're more centered in what they're doing. But if if you I my first 13 years was 1A2A, and I was the only band director, there's only X amount of hours in rehearsal. And if it's after school, now you got ag and you got volleyball and you've got you know, the kids have to go work with their families, you know what I mean? So there's there's a lot of things going on. So you don't have the ability to go, we're gonna work for eight hours after school this week. You don't have that ability. Um so the lotted time. Um, you may have heard the distinction between marching well and moving well before. For our purposes, this is how I like to define the difference. Marching well, this is to me, this is a cool concept. So I'm I'm geeking out here on you. Marching well means separating the upper half of your body from the lower half. You're thinking, what am I doing with my above my waist? What am I doing from my waist down to my toes? That's what I call marching. If a band marches well, I can see that. If they're moving well, it means integrating the upper half with the lower half. So it's all one continuous motion. It's not separate entities that are moving on the field. Neither one is bad or good, but I'll promise you this out there in uh listener land. If your band is keyed as they move well, they will earn more points in the visual caption.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

Right. Well makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 26:43

And artistically, it'll fit the music better. It'll fit the music better. Okay. Can we do both? March well and move well? Absolutely. The biggest difference has to do with the approach, treating each each part of that um as an exercise as a full body experience rather than having separate exercises for the upper body and lower body. So we want to make sure that as we're doing a plie, maybe we're doing a horn move. Maybe we're doing something with our upper body with a horns coming down to trail and coming back up while we're doing a plie. So I'm incorporating what I'm doing upper body with lower body at the same time, much like our guitar players and piano players having to figure out two hands to play an instrument or a saxophone player. They can't just work on the fingerings of their left hand and then say, Well, I guess I need to use this hand also. No, they do it all at the same time, don't they? You know, so we it's up to us to make that happen. You know, utilize dance technique is often a new experience for us for especially a younger band. And uh, an ensemble's expecting, you know, they're expecting to march. You know what I mean? It's uh we're a marching band. We we march. You know, so at first they'll be resistant. Um, if they're resistant, uh we mentioned earlier, call these things by different names. Ram de jam is toe circles, a plie is a squat, a tondue is a toe point.

unknown 28:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:03

You know what I mean? So you just figure out what you want to call them, and that they can and you don't have to call them by their ballet terms. In fact, if you have some, if you're lucky enough to have people who dance ballet in your band, they will be horrified by your terminology.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Loose interpretation of their definition.

SPEAKER_00 28:21

It's like that is that's not even close to a Tom Doo. I'm sorry. Really? I I know you dance lead, you're Claire and Swan Lake or whatever, nutcracker, whatever it is. Nutcracker is Claire, isn't it? You know, so you dance the lead and nutcracker. I respect that. Just go with us and just kind of plug your ears and just pretend like it's a different kind of nutcracker. This is a different kind of nutcracker. That's a quote to remember right there. Baby, this is a different kind of nutcracker here. Just shut up and get in your spot. Get those stupid ballet shoes off your feet. We are wearing dinkle black shoes. Uh goodness. Traditional marching tends to focus on uniformity over technique. It does. And uh setting the bar so that everyone can achieve the marching style with relative ease. You know, if you're a military marching band, um, I say relative ease. I did not say it was easy. So don't kill me if you're a military marching person. But you got to admit that it's if everything's 120 beats a minute and our upper body never has to do any body movement other than horn position, that does simplify the process a little bit. And our feet do the same thing the whole time and we're marching six to five, never any different. You know, we face the end zone, we do our fanfare at a 45 degree oblique, we do counter left, segue rights. Um, we do our thing and we do it over and over and over to ad nauseum until it's totally uniform. And that I think that's awesome because I love my military marching bands. Okay. Um, but if you're actually looking at uh what is now termed as open class marching, open class in in at least in Texas, is I guess what most people call core style.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Yeah, I think core style is probably the more familiar term for the older folks, but yeah, for the older for old people.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

For young people, that's like core style.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

What what does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 30:12

Yeah, like we're all gonna carry drums. What are we talking about here? You know, um, and we'll present some of that later, but when it's applied correctly, the concepts presented in this podcast series as we get through all these different units, there's not a lot of them, uh it'll create body awareness, strengthening, flexibility exercises. Um, but again, only do what your group can handle in the time you were given. You might only be able to do one thing. Um, I can remember way you talk about way, way back in time, 1981, when I marched in the Skyriders. Lee Carlson, who right now is in charge of all judging in DCI, think about that. He he was our color guard person. Okay, and he decided the horn line was gonna do a visual. Uh, we were playing uh uh uh oh gosh, here's that rainy day. Beautiful jazz tune going into over the rainbow. And he said, after the drum solo feature, that date you too, drum solo, you know, we're all gonna turn and look at the sky and we're gonna hold our right hand up and we're gonna keep it in a cup and we're gonna look at our fingertips like we're looking for rain in the sky. That's the first time I'd ever heard of a visual. That's the only one we did the whole year. Pissed off the DCI judges to no end. Did it really? Oh God, we were so pissed off. How do I judge this? This is stupid. What are you doing? You know, they they've got their cassette players and they're griping at us, and I can hear them griping because we're sitting there staring at our fingertips. And the marching and maneuvering judges, isn't that funny? The MM judges.

SPEAKER_01 31:45

Maneuvering.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Yeah, marching and maneuvering judges or with their tick system are walking around us going, What are you doing? You know, they were just astounded by the stupidity of what we were doing. Um, but we did it, and uh, and then we weren't the only core, but it was kind of a movement during the early 80s of we're gonna start doing visual design in our show.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

And so those things And I bet the crowd effect was phenomenal.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The best one was when DCI, this is a rabbit chase. This is so hilarious because they were we were losing points and we thought it was political. And it was because we were just a core in the middle of the United States, we didn't have an East Coast judging preference or a West Coast, we were just kind of by ourselves in Kansas, you know. So at the end of the drum solo, our core director said uh George Todd Hilly goes, All right, now at the end of the drum feature, we turn around. Now, everyone kiss your fingers and slap your ass. That's a you know what to DCI. Kiss my butt DCI. And we did that, and the those judges were just incensed, and we didn't give them a pen. They were we didn't we didn't care at that point. It was uh it was definitely like kiss my ass, DCI, you know. So that that that it was it was a fun moment, you know, back in the day when you could be rebellious. Okay. So back to our podcast. Okay. Your keys to success. You reach a point of understanding the techniques and movement fundamentals that we've described. It'll take time, effort, and commitment. As you move through all these, um, you have to realize the core principles. One is realize, and I'm gonna name them here, and but I'm not gonna discuss them because that's gonna be the following podcast. This is your teaser for upcoming stuff, okay? The core principles relaxation, concentration, alignment, breathing, core strength, coordinate, coordination, fluidity, or as we said before, fluidity, fluidity, and stamina. Those are the core principles that we're trying to instill. Okay. So if we can instill those, which we might, you know, it's whatever bandit is, that's hard to get all that covered. You know, if all you can get is concentration and alignment and breathing, that's a that's a victory, my friends. But that is the holy grail, is to get all that. So our program overview, the big picture, it's important for each individual performer to understand how all these pieces fit together. Um, we're gonna use a technique called backward planning. Backward planning. It's a very corporate term. It's when you see what your goal is at the end and then you figure out what you're gonna do step by step to get there. It's much like if I decide I want to get my car and drive to New Jersey, then I'm gonna backward plan. I'm gonna go, okay, I'm gonna back out of my driveway. Then I'm gonna go down Rivercrest and I'm gonna turn right on 7th Street. You know, you know, you backward plan. So you go all the way to the beginning of the journey and you figure out what do I do first? Oh, I guess I need to start my car.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

Right.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

Because I can't back out without starting my car. So, band-wise, we're gonna do that. We're we're gonna go, we're gonna backward plan. This begins with the big picture. What do we want to have accomplished by the end of the season? Then we work backwards from that point to ensure that everything we do fits into that picture. Everything we do that doesn't fit in that picture is a waste of time, much like when I ramble on into a chasing a rabbit in our podcast. That is actually a waste of time to the podcast, but we enjoy it greatly, so we don't care, and it's our podcast.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

I would argue that that's yeah, that's great.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

But it's good stuff and it's it makes it fun to to talk about, you know. I mean, but as far as the context of giving information, it is a waste of time. It is. Um, but I don't care. We're gonna do it anyway. We're gonna chase right. Um, it is my hope that this series, uh I uh hope and pray that it'll give you tools to help your band be better and just as important, hopefully make your job easier, maybe take off some of those limitations that you think you got to do everything on day one.

SPEAKER_01 35:49

What a great statement.

SPEAKER_00 35:50

Yeah, and I would appreciate any feedback. Marching and visual work contains a lot of opinions.

SPEAKER_01 35:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

And we all know the the the saying about opinions, and we're not gonna say it on air, you know.

SPEAKER_01 36:02

But everyone I know you said it several times already. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

Yeah, but we'll we have to limit our the sensor. Uh I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

We'll use the word noses.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

Yeah. Does Tarpley have a sensor? Like uh I don't know. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 36:19

I bet they call Rick before they call us.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

Yeah, they probably will. I think we operate like the uh, you know, we're like an underground episode that Tarpley's aware of, but are they not pirate podcasts? Yeah, we're a pirate podcast, you know. Let's keep it that way. In fact, let's keep changing up what we're doing just to keep Tarpley confused.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

Uh well I think these are awesome. And uh I think some of this stuff you can't say it enough times. So except for the bad words, but yes, yes. Aside from the opinions comment. Yeah, but I I listen, guys, we really the goal, as Mike just stated, is is a community that builds each other up and and helps. So if you do have feedback, uh something you thought of, hey, I like that you said that, but consider this. Great, we're open to that. If you say, hey, I didn't understand that, give us talk to us, tell us how we can help. That's it's the whole point of what we do. It was the whole impetus for Ask Mike was offering an opportunity for people to get questions answered. So yeah, love to hear from everybody. Uh I'm excited. You know, I'm I'm that guy that most directors roll their eyes at. Marching is kind of my thing. I love it. Always have. So uh never had the opportunity to uh raise a salute to the panel of judges as you described. I think that's awesome. All right, brother. We'll do it again next time.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

All right, we'll see you later, man.