Tuesday, April 25, 2006

One Time At Band Camp

because blogs always have to have at least one post titled as such, to show that the writer is hip and with it

  • Last year, I mentioned that my arrangement of Brick House would be featured on the next Marching Virginians CD. When I went down to Blacksburg last weekend, I scored a free copy of the CD, irrevocably eating into the profits of the marching band and forcing them to march through cow dung for the rest of their days. You can now hear this buzzworthy arrangement here (505KB MP3). It's actually the first version I wrote in 2000, not the revised edition from 2001, because (as all musicians know) the version you don't want anyone to hear ever again is the one that gets recorded for posterity. The classical musician in me no longer likes the fact that the song ends with a long fall whose tempo is dictated completely by the whims of three-hundred and thirty separate musicians, 80% of whom have been drinking heavily.

  • On a side note, listen to that first trumpet player crack not one, but two high E-flats. No doubt they demoted him to the Mellophone section after that recording session. There is precedent for that you see -- one year we had way too many trumpets audition for the MVs and not enough horns. In this litigious age where one of the previous year's trumpet dads threatened to sue the band because we cut his kid (for being a jerk-off), they weren't taking any chances with cuts. So, we were told by the band director to dress up the worst nine trumpet players as horn players and let them play mellophone all year long. They always hung out with us though, because apparently there are more parties in the trumpet section. You can tell that by just looking at me -- don't I seem like a partying god?

  • On a side side note, I love the fact that my site's been around for so long that I can refer to previous blog posts to capture moments in time. I can pinpoint the exact day that someone found my site by searching for animated squirrels or the first day I gave you clowns the gift of speech by providing a comments section.

  • I don't really like the new arrangement of Carry On Wayward Son -- it's too symphonic and not Kansasian enough. All the filler music doesn't even sound like it came from the same song. What do you think?
    • New Version (873KB MP3)
    • Old Version (335KB MP3)
  • Dr. Sochinski is still up to his old tricks, surgically inserting classical repertoire into the field shows for an audience that doesn't even recognize Blood, Sweat, and Tears. Here's his latest stealth arrangement: The Toe Cutta (629KB MP3). Hopefully you can recognize it, even if you are Mike Catania who had never heard of Thriller.

  • I have to admit that it was fun playing the last movement of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony on the field. Not because it was a fine piece of art, but because it was fun to watch everyone pretend to be able to read music and fall down a lot. We probably sounded something like this: (299KB MP3).

  • I'm not sold on songs where the band has to say stuff during the song. I think Crazy Train (91KB MP3) and Crosstown Traffic (173KB MP3) were perfectly fine arrangements before the sound effects were added, most likely by a clarinetist disgruntled with her role as "warm marching body that we can't hear anyhow #327" in the band.

  • The fact that Carmina Burana is on this CD is tragic. We're supposed to make fun of the JMU band for putting it on their CD.

  • You probably didn't find this post very exciting unless you yourself have been in a marching band, or went to Virginia Tech. However, it is no worse than when I review a video game or talk about how hard the fourth note of the third Verne Reynolds etude is extra musical (and other retard trumpet topics).

  • House Blasted by 3,000 Gallons of Sewage
    An Internet video that shows someone spraying graffiti on Air Force One looked so authentic that the Air Force wasn't certain whether the plane had been targeted.
    TV show's sex jokes not harassment

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