..that doesn't look on the screen the way I meant it. Not a dig at you at all.
What I meant was that every cadence I hear sounds a bit like something I played way back when.
The level of talent has certainly come up over the years. Before my tenure on bass drum at the university, I played tenors in high school & jr college & was considered pretty decent at the time (this was the mid-late 80's) but some of the high school age tenor players I hear now just blow me away.
Basslines have come a good ways too, though I still think some of the stuff we were playing was cool back then...that was when taking the drums off and playing them horizontal was new stuff.
Man...I miss marching sometimes!
-Mike
I was a high school student in the mid-80s and what I was playing was considered very advanced -- lots of flam combos, way-off-the-grid phrasings, etc. I was a the king of the hybrids. I won more than a few rudimental contests and had a box full of scholarship offers. I never got to do the DCI thing, but I had invitations from instructors to join their snare line if I could clear my summer obligations (never could). One came as late as May.
I'm convinced if I had to try out for a Top 12 snare line now with my skills then, I would probably play bass. They didn't play a lot of flams and double strokes on bass back then, but they sure do now. The stuff the snare lines play
during the show on the field is 100 percent more complicated than 20 years ago, and guys who would've been lead snare back the in mid-80s are at the end of the line now (or in smaller corps). Watched the 2005 solo for Casey Brohard, who's now the BD B-corps drum instructor. I don't know if I could pull that solo off with a year of dedicated practice. It's just insane. Even the 5th place solo had a passage of inverted flam taps and unusual flam combos in 32nd-notes at about 138 that made my head spin.
It makes me wonder how much teaching these real competitive corps are doing these days. I'm beginning to think these kids get all their instruction and experience in B-corps and lesser corps before moving on to BD or Santa Clara or Garfield or Cavaliers or wherever. I read Scott Johnson's message board recently where he was doubting a 17-year-old was likely to make the snare line, that it would take someone with unreal talent to pull it off.
