Or simply have the marching band and the concert band be separate units. At my first high school, the marching band and concert band were the same group, just at different times of year and in different uniforms. I think that was the standard practice for HS, at least in that school district.
At my second HS, in a different city, the band director (“Sarge”, everybody called him) directed three groups: the Wind Ensemble (WE), the Jazz Ensemble (JE), and the Golden Apple Band (GAB), which was the marching band. (This HS also had a full orchestra, but that had a different conductor). Each group had a different purpose, and Sarge handled each group differently. Naturally, there was a lot of overlap between the groups; everybody in the JE (except for the bass player and the pianists) was also in the WE, and the WE and the GAB shared most of the same members, but there were plenty of kids who played only in one or the other.
Keeping the marching band and wind ensemble separate also avoided a problem we had at my first HS: what to do with band members who were also on the football team. At my first HS, football season meant that the whole focus of the concert band was on marching music and rehearsing halftime shows - halftime shows that, naturally, the band member/football players would never be performing in. So these guys really had nothing to do in band class during that time of year. Sure, they could play the music during band class, but when we rehearsed the halftime show they just had to sit out. At my second HS, this wasn’t an issue - the musician/football players simply didn’t play in the marching band. Instead they played in the WE and/or JE.
Can’t have a thread like this with all this Malagueña in here and not have a link to Alla Barocco!
Hmm, can’t find a decent performance I can link to directly, go here and find Alla Barocco about the 5th song down and hit the play button.
What I remember about being in band was that in marching season the music took a back seat to the marching in every respect. In concert season, it was different; then the music mattered.
Well if it’s anything like the college marching band my friends were in in college, probably because tone and intonation were pretty much secondary to getting completely wasted and cheating on your boyfriend or girlfriend as much as humanly possible.
They STILL owe us two seconds from the end of that game :mad:
Just curious: I can’t imagine that a marching bands over all progress would make a noticeable pitch change to anyone’s ear (as Bill Door pointed out). But as has been pointed out, there’s a lot of horn swinging going on. This changes the focus and direction of the sound very rapidly. Would the Doppler come into effect on a fast horn swing?
Doppler is the right idea, wrong answer. They are out of time more than out of tune. They are usually spread out a long way front to back. Each end hears the other a significant fraction of a second late. The bass drum usually keeps them in time. Listeners hear front and back of the column with significant difference in time. It’s not consciously noticible but unconsciously we know something is not quite right
FAMU Marching 100, hell yeah! Grammys, Superbowl, the Inauguration parade - you name it, they’ve played it. For my money, the finest marching band in the states.
This is true, but the band should be doing what it can to minimize this problem. Musicians in a marching band should never listen to each other for tempo, they should be focused solely on the conductor.
I hope this tread isn’t dead, because I finally have an excuse to post this supernaturally good high school marching band from Japan.
I noticed someone else made the comment on the video about the circular breathing. I’m aware of what circular breathing is (at least in regards to, for example, a didgeridoo)… but at what part are they using circular breathing on the horn? I must be missing something, but could you please just let me know where that is so I can listen for it more intently?
EDIT: oh, they’re talking about the horn in the intro… I just skipped past that on my first listen.
1 / (1 - v/u) gives the multiplication ratio. Sound moves at ~340m/s. Going with .5 m/s for walking speed. u=340, v=.5, v/u = .00147.
1/.99853 = 1.001 times the frequency. 2 would be an octave, ~1.06 is a semitone. A pitch discrepancy of 1.001 or even 1.002 is too small to make a perceivable difference outside of an anechoic chamber - it’s 1/60th of a semitone (or 1/30th if they are maching in different directions) or 1.7 cents.
Not much. Even if you swing at double walking speed, it’s still going to be nearly imperceptible.
Sound goes 340 m/s, and at a football field your max distance between the front and back players is going to be 50 meters. Time diff is .15 seconds. Marching band tempo is about 120 bpm, so 2 beats per second or .5 seconds per beat. So an eighth note is .25sec and a sixteenth is .125 sec. I imagine a sixteenth’s difference between the very front and back players would muddy the music a little bit. But I don’t see what that has to do with the doppler effect
I think the real answer is that bands (or whatever) sound out of tune because the sound is bouncing off things that reflect or absorb, because of wind and changing air density, because the band is spread out, because the players are moving and that affects their playing, because there is a lot of extraneous noise, and because the instruments are slightly out of tune due to them being exposed to mechanical and temperature stress or just plain user error.
None of what anyone said has made any sense whatsoever. It is simply The TEMPERATURE affects the instruments. I play flute and I can barely stay in tune sitting in a chair.
Did you read the post from the person that was actually there? Also, TEMPERATURE has been mentioned throughout the entire thread, including by the person who was actually there.
Since you said none of what anyone said has made any sense whatsoever, I’m assuming you didn’t actually read the thread, but just skimmed over the OP and posted this comment.
(And since someone is going to say it, it might as well be me. This thread is three years old, can we just move past that, it’s irrelevant.)
