Day 42

Date: June 25, 2011
Time: 11:22pm (PST)
Playing on iTunes: "Baba O'Riley" by The Who








Location: San Lorenzo, CA
Recent Trip: 180 Miles

After a very short trip north, we got a decent amount of floor time (5 hours) coming into San Lorenzo, CA. Today's schedule was a fairly decent show day. We had about 5-6 hours of rehearsal throughout the day before getting ready to leave.

The San Lorenzo Rebels

 The pit found a very close, semi-shade zone right near the truck. This helps for us because we can just like quickly to the pit when we're done with whatever is going on. When we are unloading in the morning, even before, our instructor Ian will go around looking for a good zone to set up in. Picking the right zone is essential since it determines whether we'll be baking in the sun all day or cooped up in the shade. Personally I like the sun because then I can get tan but the rest of the pit doesn't seem to agree with me!





Today was a very big day for changes in the pit. There's a lot needed to be worked on as far as electronics go in the pit. As you remember from my previous blog, drum corps is adding more and more electronic samples, patches (sounds), and electronic substitutions lately. Our good ol' friend Iain Grom is the master of samples and electronics. He came in a few days ago and will be with us til next week. He helped us a lot today by getting us a boat load of samples to put in the show to help fill up some gaps that are needed to be filled. Let me tell you, he's a genius. These samples sound really cool. He just takes the sampler machine away for a few hours, plugs it into his computer and writes his own samples. Then once their loaded on the sampler, we just have to hit a button and his creation comes out of the samples machine. Every he's done for us thus far is amazing and he's a genius.

Iain working on the asmpler

We had a GREAT surprise today. There is this donut shop across the street from the high school we're at, and the pit jokingly said "We should all go to the donut shop at lunch and grab some donuts!!" But no more than 15 minutes later, an alumnus of the corps (who absolutely adores the pit) went to the donut shop and got us a box of donuts!! Chocolate covered, glazed, coconut, sugared sticks, you name it. All amazing tasting. I love being in the pit!

Tonight was a big show. It was our first regional show; DCI West. You can think of it like the finals in MLB; the NLCS (National League Championship Series) and ALCS (American League Championship Seris). Tonight was the NLCS. I know we're from the east but we were part of DCI West. I'm not exactly sure how everything works with scoring as far as how that works into finals but I know that these scores are important. Taking the walk down to the stadium was as usual very important as far as mentally preparing myself for the performance. We took our trip down the VERY steep hill (which really was horrible rolling out instruments down by the way) and rolled into the full stadium with a huge crowd. The largest I've ever performed for. It was just an amazing feeling seeing all of those people in the stands waiting for you to come and perform for them. I loved it. Bu it was definitely a different listening situation since there were empty seats all behind us and to the sides of us (since they don't use that seating anyways) and the sound just bounced off the seats and came right back at us. A very large echo to say the least. But nonetheless we still performed another great show! Here is the outcome of tonight's performance:


DCI WEST - Standford, CA
1) The Cadets - 76.95
2) Blue Devils - 76.45
3) Phantom Regiment - 73.94
4) Santa Clara Vanguard - 73.4
5) Blue Knights - 70.45
6) Madarins  - 62.9
7) Pacific Crest - 62.2




Thought of the Day: "Be proactive. Take charge and don't hold back."