Day 77

Date: July 30, 2011
Time: 12:58am (EST)
Playing on iTunes: "The Music of Barber and Bartok" by Star of Indiana 1993


Location: Atlanta, GA
Recent Trip: 230 miles

Welcome to Atlanta. We near the east coast more and more everyday. Now that we're back in eastern time I don't have to worry about waking my friends up when I call them after a show! It's great to be heading back home. My Uncle actually lives in Atlanta, but he's out of town this weekend so he was not able to come see the show.

The pit was able to find ample shade for the entire day. But our plans were drastically changed when we heard about the chance of rain...lots of rain. After lunch, we moved from our shade zone to the football field so we could get ensemble finished before the rain came. 

The lunch today! Absolutely mouth watering chicken
with broccoli, spicy refried beans and a cupcake to top it off.

Before ensemble, a former pit member from 2008-2010, came to visit us and she bought the entire pit and pit instructors cheery limeades. It was awesome!! So anytime there was a water break, the pit would drink our cherry limeade. Here's some funny pictures:

So before every show, the marimbas need to put on a different set of marimba bars. The reason for this being that since we use rosewood keys and have all summer, the constant sunlight makes the keys go out of tune and makes them sound dead (muted). So we have to make sure that we use a 'practice' set of marimba keys during our long rehearsals since we rehearse during the day and perform at night. We use synthetic kelon marimba bars for rehearsals. The difference between kelon (a.k.a. acoustelon) and regular rosewood aside from their actual materials is the kelon do not go out of tune as easy and they are made to stand the heat and crazy weather. The kelon bars are much more resonant than the rosewood bars but the rosewood bars give you a much truer marimba sound. A lot of drum corps now are starting to use all rosewood bars for their marimbas. 

These are the bins we store the set of bars that
we are not using at the time.

          Hello Atlanta!!                 

Tonight was a huge regional show for the Southeast! We were performing in the Georgia Dome for about 20,000 roaring audience members!! The energy from the crowd just walking in was enough to get us going. After the amazing performance we put on, the crowd went absolutely wild. As I stood there soaking in the applause, I could just feel myself tearing up because of how amazing the show was and how much the crowd loved it. We did it right this time. We took everything we could do anad put it into the show. Only thing to do now...is get better!

DCI Atlanta

1) Blue Devils - 94.800
2) The Cadets - 94.100
3) The Cavaliers - 93.450
4) Carolina Crown - 92.600
5) Phantom Regiment - 90.500
6) Bluecoats - 88.650
7) SC Vanguard - 88.250
8) Boston Crusaders - 87.550
9) Madison Scouts - 86.200
10) Blue Knights - 84.750
11) Blue Stars - 84.350
12) Spirit of Atlanta 82.450

Thought of the Day: "By being yourself, you put something wonderful in the world that was not there before."