The Original Logo

The very first Tulane University Marching Band logo was developed prior to my hiring in 2008. This functioned pretty well within the brand philosophy of Tulane University and our association with it at the time – the TU shield is very strong and is also prominently displayed on the front of our marching band uniform. The fleur-de-lis that separated the top and bottom half of the words established New Orleans as its flavor.

That said, even when I was first hired I felt like the logo didn’t stand out as a TUMB brand. I also didn’t like that the full text was in a circular logo that did not scale well – as a social media thumbnail, the text on say, a mobile phone, could be so small that you had to strain if you wanted to read it, and the TU shield was so dominant that it made our thumbnail virtually indistinguishable from the broader Tulane University thumbnail.

So after a couple of years in the program, I started asking myself, “How would I change this?”

The 2013(ish) brand shift

While changing the brand was in my head early on, it wasn’t until the 2012-2013 school year that I started to actually experiment and open up Creative Cloud with a fresh vision for the brand. As I started development, a few conceptual components coalesced as its foundation.

1. Stylizing the TUMB

The TUMB acronym was well-established both internally and with the community, so I wanted that to dominate the brand presence more than the fully spelled out “Tulane University Marching Band”. I also wanted to move away from using a circular shape for the full brand logo – while circular was good for social media thumbnails, it wasn’t great for banners or headers. I imagined that the visual icon/element that I was building into this could eventually stand on its own once it was well enough established with the brand text.

When conceptualizing how I would style the text, I wanted to establish a stronger link to Tulane Athletics. At the time, their primary brand revolved around a stylized slanted T, something that we had incorporated into our pregame drill sets – we made a “straight T” that linked to the Tulane University T and then moved to the “slanted T” that mimicked the Athletics T as the end of our performance of the Tulane Fight Song.

So I decided to use that slanted T as the basis for the TUMB text design. While there were certain aspects of that slanted T that were a direct mimic – the slant angle, the double-color border – I made a few deliberate differences to make it feel like an homage rather than a straight copy:

1. Although the official TU logo and the Athletics T used serifs, I decided to go non-serif. This was because the TUMB’s pregame drill set lacked serifs for ease of readability based on the number of members we had at the time, so I wanted our text to reflect that. I also felt that the serif was too formal for the overall image of the TUMB I was trying to project.
2. Color choices. The Tulane Green was considered by my boss to be an important part of our brand identity, so I decided to lean in on that and make the fill of the text green. The border of light/Newcomb blue and off white were a part of Tulane’s official brand colors at the time (while pure white was not), which I thought worked well – the muted white accentuated the Tulane green better than pure white.

(As an aside, a very subtle thing I did with the final version was shift the “UMB” two pixels to the left from the default spacing from the T, necessitating creating two separate text blocks for the “T” and the “UMB”. I felt like the default spacing made the negative space between the T and the U too far apart in comparison to the space between the other letters.)

2. The Visual Image/Images(?)

The other primary conceptual element revolved around answering the question, “How do I create an image/symbol that people can immediately associate with the TUMB?”

A single color silhouette of a marching band member in uniform was one of the first things that popped into my head, but unlike what ended up happening, my original concept was not to associate the brand with the trumpet player as the sole silhouette. Instead, I wanted a more advanced concept of brand identity – to allow the silhouette itself to be flexible and changeable every one or two years, unifying it as the TUMB brand more by having it always include four elements:

1. The official Tulane dark blue as the silhouette color
2. The silhouette always being clearly a TUMB member playing an instrument, dancing with poms, or spinning a flag
3. Always having the TU shield be present in the silhouette
4. Always have the silhouette be placed in the same spot relative to the TUMB text

I pitched this to the staff at the time, taking prominent action shots of various TUMB instrumentalists and turning them into silhouettes – a trumpet player, a bass drummer, a flute player, a color guard member. My boss in particular was highly resistant to the introduction of this new brand in the first place and was even more unconvinced about the silhouette being ‘flexible’, so in an effort to compromise and to try to push the brand forward at all, I said, “let’s table that piece of it – for the time being, we can use the trumpet figure and we can revisit whether we use other images to replace it in a couple of years.” Eventually, my boss reluctantly agreed to move forward and so the new brand was established and launched. In the first two years of its implementation, I tried a few times to revisit the idea of swapping out the silhouette for a different one over time, but I eventually gave that up when it became clear that I wasn’t going to win that fight.

Despite losing that part of the battle and despite the shift being a little shaky to start and more gradual than I would have liked, the new brand eventually became an invested part of the TUMB identity for the staff, its members, and its community, and a strong and dominant brand force that I had intended it to be from the very beginning.

Naturally, once it reached that point, I was already thinking about a change.

Rebranding for the TUMB Centennial

Sometime in 2018/19, I was itching to redo the brand logo that I had created, and decided that using the band’s centennial in 2020/21 would be a good vehicle for that change.

Part of the desire for the rebranding came from external factors:

• Tulane Athletics shifted their brand away from the slanted-T to its current Riptide logo.
• Brands at the more professional level were shifting to be softer, particularly when it came to text fonts and styles.
• Tulane University reinvented its brand philosophy to include more modern color schemes and nuanced brand concepts, particularly around the TU shield and what they called the “TU shield abstractions“, a flexible use of the TU shield outline that could be customized for varying purposes. I gained access to those assets, as well as Tulane’s official fonts (whereas the font i used for the old TUMB logo’s text was something that was bundled with Adobe PS/Illustrator’s default font set, a font I chose because I felt it was the closest mimic of the Tulane Athletics T in style).
• The Tulane Bands staff wanted to shift away from considering the “TUMB” as the overarching brand for the entirety of our organization. since the brand didn’t quite fit as the parent for the Concert Band, Soundwave, or other parts of us that weren’t exactly “marching band” related.

However, more of my desire to change the brand was motivated by my heightened understanding of brand even outside of these external factors. While I’ve always had an instinct for branding concepts, my execution particularly when it comes to logos has been mostly self-taught, and there were things about the visual logo part of the brand that the less-experienced-me from 2012/13 created that the more-experienced me realized were glaring errors.

Some of those errors were easy and subtle to fix – the green glow around the silhouette was at times eliminated entirely, particularly for certain printing processes, use of monochrome versions of the brand, or embroidery that couldn’t translate that glow in a meaningful way. The TU shield was used incorrectly according to Tulane’s brand guidelines (because I put it on a slant and distorted it to mimic how it would be viewed on an actual uniform), so we took that out of some of our designs.

But what became clearest to me over those years was that the trumpet figure itself was both philosophically and practically too complicated.

When i created the original silhouette, I simply took the original trumpet photo, trimmed it to encompass the player only, then applied a solid fill overlay.

Practically, the plume in particular with all of its detail was hard to replicate in embroidery situations or when the resolution of the end result was limited. I was already bothered by the fact that we had some versions of the icon that had the glow vs didn’t, had the shield vs didn’t, but the complexity of the physical shape not translating to certain printing situations meant that even the physical look of the icon had variants which always rubbed me the wrong way even if it was only barely perceptible to the human eye.

Introspection about this and more direct observations of brands both successful and unsuccessful over a period of many years led me to better articulate the philosophical understanding of why the brand I created was not as strong as it could have been:

Brand logos are symbols, icons, and successful ones are clean in their symbolism. No successful brand icon is photorealistic.

While the 2012/13 TUMB brand was done pretty much completely on my own, the office dynamic had since shifted to be more collaborative in general, so the staff came together to talk about the new branding in meetings and email exchanges. When we all sat down to initially discuss my rebranding ideas in conjunction with theirs, I advocated strongly that we eliminate the trumpet figure and start completely from scratch. I wanted to create something more abstract that could encapsulate our program, leverage clearer shapes and lines that could be synergized with the Tulane color palette. This was met with strong resistance – my boss in particular had grown to love the icon and associated it very closely with the TUMB brand (which in one sense was incredibly gratifying), and Andrew, the other Assistant Director was leaning in that direction as well.

After a few back and forths about it, I decided to try to find a middle ground. “If we’re going to keep the trumpet figure,” I said, “let me at least try to clean it up and fix what’s broken about it.”

So I fired up Illustrator and did just that.

Phase 1: Everything but the plume

The first iteration of this was to ignore the plume issue because I wasn’t sure how to tackle it yet and simply take the bumps and creases around the bottom half of the body and in the negative space between the two arms and smooth them out whilst keeping the same overall shape. I also opted to simplify the trumpet and take out the valve pipe detail.

While that last decision was subject to debate, even smoothing out the bottom half got positive response from the rest of the staff who now had a clearer idea of what I was trying to accomplish. From there, I went full speed ahead and started fine-tuning the curves, balancing the left and right sides, and a myriad of other micro-changes to how all of those vector curves were built while simultaneously exploring bigger picture modifications with the plume detail. This turned into a series of back and forth stages where I would mock up three or four different revisions of the current design, send them to the rest of the staff (which now included our newly hired Program Coordinator) for feedback, discuss the changes, and then mock up new versions based on the feedback.

The process ended up being incredibly fun and engaging as a group playground/project, one of the more enjoyable full-staff collaborations I’ve had with this job. I played around with a few different elements:

• protruding hat brim – in the original image, the brim of the hat was present as a three-dimensional protrusion. I wanted to switch the approach of the image to be more like a symbolic straight profile, so I modified the shape of the hat brim to reflect that. It went through several different iterations/shapes – between curves vs rectangles vs triangles. At one point, Andrew suggested taking the brim out altogether. When I tried that, i didn’t initially like it because I felt like the loss of that detail and separation between head and hat was important.
• trace hat brim – one way that I tried to compensate for this was to create a break in the head and hat with a trace line. I had originally thought about this as being white before changing my mind to conceive of it as transparent. This was met with mixed reactions – including my own. I didn’t open up that rabbit hole necessarily because I felt like it was right, but I wanted to put it out there as something radical that could still help retain the separation I was looking for if we eliminated the brim entirely.
• nose – the other way I tried to compensate for the elimination of the brim was to add a nose protrusion. The protrusion was meant to be subtle, a true ‘edge of nose’ that was not overly noticeable unless you focused on it, but would clearly be missed if it wasn’t there.

As the drafts and processes moved forward, however, I became more and more convinced by Andrew’s suggestion that having a straight line with no nose/brim was simpler and cleaner and that the detail didn’t confuse or muddy up the clarity of what was actually happening. In the end, the straight line with no brim, nose, or trace hat brim ended up being the consensus for all of the staff, a conclusion that I didn’t expect when I first started, but I was ultimately very happy with.

Phase 2: The Plume

At the same time, I was tackling the plume, and I decided to approach it similarly – take out most or all of the detail to make it cleaner. I went as far as making it into a clean oval with no feather detail. While all of us eventually came around to the straight line for the face, that same pure cleanliness for the plume faced stronger and more persistent disagreement. While reducing and simplifying the plume detail was fine, eliminating them entirely eliminated the one organic and unique character that the other staff didn’t want to abandon. While I didn’t completely agree with this, enough of the direction of the image was going my way and my feeling about this was not so strong that I consented. I played around with where that feather detail was located on the plume, sometimes influenced by earlier stages of the brim/nose, before arriving at its final location and overall shape.

The final piece that we discussed and drafted centered around how much division there was between the head/hat and the plume itself. In the original, the head/brim/plume all bled into each other particularly as a three-dimensional profile, and with the new cleaner look and with the loss of the brim, my boss made a suggestion to sharpen and indent a curve that more clearly separated the hat and the plume. I drafted a few versions of this separation, some very extreme, which I liked, but Andrew really didn’t like. In the end, I landed in the middle, giving the curve some definition and separation, but not so much as to make it completely independent from the top of the hat.

Finalizing the brand logo with other brand elements

The final brand took that trumpet figure and wrapped it around the Tulane shield abstract and stylized text – a design that was lifted directly from our custom “100th anniversary” logo we developed the previous year. I knew that I wanted to include Tulane’s new shield abstraction assets as a part of the design, and it was also a no brainer to use “Tulane Bands” as the text to fully embrace the change in our program’s conception to make the “TUMB” an entity within the parent organization of Tulane Bands.

Accompanying this was an alternative “header” that could be used to label sub-ensembles or emphasize certain highlights in print or online. We had talked about unifying this header to be the primary driving force for all of our sub-ensembles, but we eventually steered away from that concept because we wanted some of the sub ensembles to be able to retain their own sense of identity despite being a part of the arching Tulane Bands umbrella, not unlike, for example, Kellogg’s cereal. The Kellogg’s K is printed somewhere on all of their cereal boxes, but the sub-brands of the cereals themselves are all unique and don’t necessarily have direct ties to the K’s brand design. In this new context, Tulane Bands is the Kellogg’s where Soundwave, the Green Wave Brass Band, Shockwave, KKY, the Color Guard, and now the TUMB is the Frosted Flakes/Frosted Mini-Wheats/Cracklin’ Oat Bran/Honey Smacks. They all deserve their own independence under the Tulane Bands primary brand.

Final Thoughts

There’s still work to be done with the branding – I want to redo the Green Wave Brass Band logo from its current design as it suffers from some lack-of-cleanliness issues that plagued the original trumpet figure (since I designed it around the same time). I also am starting to think more about how we approach the potential reintroduction of a TUMB logo – something that doesn’t feel right at the moment because I think that would hinder the pace and understanding of our rebrand since the trumpet figure migrated from the TUMB brand to the Tulane Bands brand.

That said, I’m pretty proud of the work that I’ve done to create and harness the brand of this organization – not just this change, but even the older brand change and the band’s conception of our brand identity over the years. I’ve made my mistakes, and I still have a lot to learn, but I also trust in my intuition and my introspection when it comes to brand establishment at this sort of scale, something that I’ve tried to do not just with my job with Tulane Bands but also with nienteForte and myself. I have no doubt that over time as brand concepts and my comprehension of them continue to evolve, I’ll want to shake things up and reinvent my branding somewhere again, although I imagine that it will come not from my work with the Tulane Bands brand over some of my other projects in the immediate future. My own personal brand logo hasn’t changed now in almost a decade and a half and while a part of me is still in love with it, another part of me is ready to take a step back and blow it all up.

This article was lightly edited after initial posting.

Full Service Awards are awarded to members that will have completed eight semesters in the TUMB by the end of that academic year.

Extended Service Awards are awarded to members that will have completed over eight semesters in the TUMB by the end of that academic year.

Outstanding Section Member Awards: The student leadership (section leaders and drum majors) are given a list of the TUMB membership minus themselves broken down by section.  They all vote independently against that list, and the majority votes win for each section.

KKY Awards: The entire KKY Rho Chapter discusses the potential candidates and decides via committee who receives the awards; for the senior award, all seniors in KKY are excluded from the discussion.

Outstanding First Year Member, Section of the Year, and Spirit Award:

The TUMB staff (including the Shockwave and Color Guard contractors) individually picks two Section of the Year nominees and three Outstanding First Year Member and Spirit Award nominees to be considered for the award.  Those get compiled into a new poll where the staff then votes independently on their first and second choice for all awards.

Any first choice vote earns 5 points and any second choice vote earns 3 points.  The highest point total wins the award.  This process has created at times a rare result where an individual with no first place votes has won the award (when the first place choices are diverse but the second place choices are very narrow).

Director Award: The Director of Bands requests from the TUMB staff a list of up to three nominees for the Director Award.  From that list, he handpicks the award recipient.

I never intended to make any commentary about the national anthem protests that started happening as a result of Kaepernick, but recently the ripple effect of this has bled into my profession in the marching band arena. (For those not aware of what i’m talking about, members of the ECU marching band and the SMU marching band have recently created headlines due to individual members deciding not to play and/or kneeling during the national anthem.)  Because of that, I feel a responsibility to voice my opinion in that context as a representative and potential influential voice for band directors, members, athletic fans, and marching band fans.  I preface this with the caveat that this is not meant to disrespect views contrary to my own beliefs on the matter; I respect any organization’s choices for how they run themselves.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that my personal opinion about Kaepernick’s protest is that regardless of the reasoning behind the protest, he is in his rights to protest and express that protest however he damned well pleases within the context of what is permitted in the NFL and his franchise. To me, the protest draws parallels to Tim Tebow’s public expression of his Christian faith, something that I as a non-Christian always found annoying but still respected for similar reasons to this current protest, and it’s clear that in both cases, both players have enough conviction in their reasoning and their beliefs that they are and have always been prepared to deal with any potential backlash. Both forms of expression started important conversations at a national and somewhat global scale, and i give them kudos for being bold enough to risk such a potential negative spotlight because of the strength of their conviction.

I should also say that the idea that all americans should feel pressured to represent their patriotism by standing for the national anthem and to assume that someone who opts not to do so is therefore unpatriotic, unamerican, or anti-military/police makes me immensely uncomfortable. I am a strong believer that one of our country’s strengths is the diversity of our opinions and our ability to freely express those opinions no matter how controversial, and controversial expression does not equate to something quantifiable regarding patriotism.

That said, there’s a fundamental equivalency disconnect between football players who choose to express their individuality by kneeling for the national anthem versus a marching band member or even me as a director.

I got my degree in composition and I consider myself a politically active contemporary art music advocate – my passion for wanting to expose and educate more people regarding contemporary music is why I started nienteForte in the first place.  As the primary music writer and show designer for the Tulane University Marching Band, I could opt to use the TUMB as a vehicle for that political position by incorporating that into my show design – Mark and I had always joked about the idea of doing 4’33” on the field, but more seriously, it wouldn’t be completely outside reason for me to have the TUMB do a classical music show every now and again for my own personal agenda of educating my audience to my field and my passion.

By doing that, i end up placing that personal agenda ahead of the agenda of the TUMB, an organization that I strongly believe belongs to the members and the community more than myself, and that is therefore simply the wrong choice for me to make. This past year, a fan committee expressed about the game day experience that they wanted the stadium and the band to embrace the culture of New Orleans more in their style and their musical choices.  While the TUMB is never going to convert to a show-style band over a corps-style band, we, along with the athletic department, made some executive decisions that fall in line with that desire in our programming choices.  I am a strong advocate for that sort of conversation and that sort of change because I recognize that college marching bands as a collective single entity are a strong brand that belongs to a large body of individuals and entities collectively and equally.

Therefore, my own sense of individualism even as the director of the program is always a lower priority to the brand that I represent for Tulane.  To do a classical or wacky avant-garde show would go against the primary mission of my job, which is to provide excitement and entertainment for our athletic events, to hopefully be the best educator I can be for my students, and to help continue a legacy that will sustain the organization beyond my tenure here, serving the needs of the organization before I serve myself.

As an individual who generally breaks a lot of stereotypes in weird ways, I strongly celebrate diversity and individualism within the members and the staff of my organization.  But the fact of the matter is that the public performance output of the marching band is about the group as a single entity and not about them as individuals.  That’s where the equivalency disconnect between the football player versus marching band member comes into play: the national anthem for a football player is a part of a game’s opening ceremony.  They are preparing to perform.  The national anthem for a marching band member is their performance.  If a marching band member protests the national anthem during their performance, the equivalent for a running back is to decide that he has the right to stop running in the middle of a play if he was crossing over a painted American flag on the turf as a part of his route.  At the point when the helmet goes on and the game starts, individual beliefs – both positive and negative – always come second to the play performance and execution.  And at the point when a marching band member puts their uniform on, they should be held to that same standard and understand the distinction between what is “performance” for a marching band versus a football team.

Is there any place for individualistic expression in the context of a college marching band performance?  I don’t believe so.  The Tulane football program has a had a long standing history of losing records since my tenure here, and even when we’ve been down by 40+ points, the charge I have for myself is that we are Tulane Football fans through and through and we’ll keep cheering, playing, and supporting our team no matter what. I instill that philosophy in every individual that is a part of my program both on and off the field.  You’re not a football fan?  You are now.  You think that the coach sucks?  Keep that to yourself, or spin it in a positive way that’s still supportive of the program.  For me that’s a 24/7 mentality – i’ve been recognized more than a handful of times by random strangers in the New Orleans community as being associated with the Tulane Band program, so I’m always careful about how i approach any commentary I make about anything related to the TUMB or Tulane brand.  It’s only in the past year or so, for example, that I’ve felt comfortable stating publicly that Bob Toledo was a horrible coach for our football team, and his last year here was over five years ago.  Anything that I say or do, anything that the band says or does is under potential scrutiny, and that demands that everyone associated with the program who wants to take advantage of the privileges of being a part needs to fall in line with the TUMB’s brand even if it is contrary to their own.

I think that some would interpret this approach as a position of extreme conformism and compliance; i’d like to instead believe that it’s more about what I feel is a standard of professionalism within our performance art activity and how that links to something that is much bigger than we are as a single entity.  I’m fairly confident that many TUMB members past and present know how much respect I have for their individual lifestyles and life choices. I allow a lot of freedom for individuals to discover themselves, express themselves, and be themselves in a nurturing and fostering community environment whether Trump or Hillary, normative or alternative gender lifestyle, Marvel vs DC, whatever.  But the organization as a whole can only support that level of diversity and individualism long-term when it can rally that diversity together as a unified and cohesive singular when we are representing the TUMB, Tulane Athletics, and Tulane University.  “Roll Wave” is not just a declaration, “non sibi, sed suis” is not just a motto; both are beliefs down to the very core, and i’ll defend the vigilance of those beliefs and everything that they mean in the contexts that I believe best.

1. my wind ensemble piece entitled beauty…beholder is almost done. I feel a lot better about it than i did about a week ago because things in the end finally started to click into place. It’s not my best work mainly because i’m out of practice writing original stuff for large groups – the last large ensemble piece i wrote was somewhere around ten years ago, and between 2004-2009 i wasn’t writing any music at all. I’m happy enough with the piece generally, it’ll just need some revision if i ever get it performed again. Hopefully it’s well received, i’m a bit tickled with the shock moment towards the end of the piece. John Cage would be proud.

2. This spring i’m going to try to start writing a percussion quartet for the Portland Percussion Group. Originally i was going to have it be all thematic about my family, but these days i tend to do better writing music based on a musical concept that i then translate to a real one as opposed to starting with a real concept that i then translate to a musical one. I think that will change as i start writing more music again and get reacquainted with how my voice translates to solid ideas.

3. Also this spring i’m planning on putting the pieces together for my musical internet installation project. Basically what i’m planning on doing is buying some muscle wire and playing with it in the hopes that i can attach it to some guitar strings and have a mechanism for heating/cooling the muscle wire and a mechanism for playing the strings that is controlled and activated by both random and controlled actions from the internet. This is very early experimental stages so i can figure out what’s possible.

4. Aside from my nienteForte concert happening this spring, Mark and i had a conversation earlier about trying to pitch playing a percussion duet for the percussion ensemble concert run by Doug Walsh, and we’re already talking about trying to write a duet for the nienteForte concert in 2014. I already have a guest ensemble tentatively lined up for that, and i want to write a piece for *that* group too, which i’ll probably start in early summer right after Jazz Fest.

5. Also in mid-spring i’m going to start thinking about marching band arranging again for Hermiston. Paul was very happy with what i did this past season, so i don’t doubt that i’ll be able to write for the group again.

6. I’m planning on putting together a new music seminar class sometime in the spring semester, a volunteer thing since i can’t officially register a course with the university at this point. I just want to get people excited about some of the music that got me excited in college as well as going out there and finding other music, newer stuff that i don’t know to keep my own creative brain fresh and current.

7. Also this spring i imagine that i’ll be in some final talks with Galaxy Interactive to figure out exactly how my contract is going to work for TerraLife, a project that they anticipate will start occupying a lot of my energy this summer.

8. Sometime a year ago, Tyler and i talked about trying to put together some sort of DDR reunion this coming summer. Originally it was going to be another sight-read tournament, but the context for that sort of thing has died out as far as we’re both concerned, so more and more i’m thinking about making it into some big Johann Sebastian Joust competition or something.

I know i’m missing something, but that’s okay. Brain will continue firing off on all of this probably until next fall. Then i can relax.

In general something that’s come to light from this past fall is that I shouldn’t try to tackle a lot of creative projects in the fall. Thankfully i had the foresight to turn down an opportunity to write a piece for Kim Walker’s fianceé who wanted the piece by around christmas. I said no mainly because i knew that the wind ensemble piece was going to take a major chunk of my time, but the thing that i didn’t anticipate was how busy the fall season was – partially brought on by my rather sudden medical issues, but also because the marching band season was much busier than i anticipated it would be and i didn’t have a whole lot of energy to devote to independent projects.

Granted, it’s not like my spring and summer isn’t occupied a great deal as well, but the method behind that busy is much more in line with creative and original efforts as opposed to the fall semester teaching and administering a marching band organization. Clearly a lot depends on exactly how the football schedule falls out, but i’m starting to come to the conclusion that my creative calendar should be much more dense in the spring and summer than in the fall.

We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, much needed website updates coming soon, time to try to send my Timpani piece off to another publisher for consideration of publishing, and keep the ball rolling.

Sometime last week, i decided to walk instead of drive to the store. The main reason was that i was in the throes of trying to figure out how to arrange Hermiston’s ballad, which is My Immortal by Evanescence.  I didn’t know the tune before it was brought up, so i had to listen to it a few times to get a feel for what the tune was about.  I put the whole framework into the computer, but i was dissatisfied with it for some reason; the pacing felt weird, or the climax felt weird, or something else entirely that i couldn’t identify.

I played the original tune a couple of times, then played my version.  Then i had both of them fixed up in my head pretty well so i didn’t need to physically play either back anymore, and i started pacing my living room, running both versions in my head, experimenting in my head with different variants of my own arrangement to see if i could figure it out.  I think at one point i stood up on my chair and looked down from “higher up”, as it were. It was the first time i had ever really done that; i’m not sure why it was a part of my thinking process.

At some point i realized that i should get something to eat/plan out the whole dinner thing.  How to make the ballad work was still in my brain and i knew that if i drove i would have to lose some of that focus, so that’s why i decided to walk.

Along the walk i ended up running into a friend of mine who lives close by named Gavin. He’s originally from San Francisco and basically works as his own construction company. He’s also a fairly talented guitarist who back in his heyday recorded a punk version of the entire musical “West Side Story” that developed a small cult fan base. He was out walking his two dogs.  We exchanged pleasantries and a couple of brief stories of our recent travel, and then went our own separate ways, and i went back to running music in my head while i walked.

I stopped thinking about the music briefly while i was actually in the store trying to figure out what my dinner plan was.  I think i ended up defaulting the salad bar which i’ve been doing usually these days, but i also bought some ground beef for cooking the next day.  My time in the actual grocery store was maybe ten minutes max, and then i started walking home.

The kind of focus i had during the walk and being in that particular creation space is an incredibly exhilarating and zen-like sort of feeling. My brain felt like it was working out some very intricate and fine details, fragments and pieces of this larger puzzle that i was slowly putting together in a way that would hopefully make the music sparkle.

Somewhere in the middle of the walk on the way home, i figured out how to make it work (take the chorus out of the middle, swap it with the B section that currently resided at the end, move these four measures to there instead).  I ran it through my head several more times before i got home. Once home, i put the groceries away, then immediately went to put the changes i made in my head into the Finale score so i could play it back and see if i liked the pacing and the general new intent.

And yeah. It was much, much better.

the challenge is how to write the parts in the full band score that make it easy to distribute the parts. Typically a marching percussion score consists of pit vs. battery where pit is one person per staff but battery is one section per staff. Since the percussionists are only playing as a battery for two sections of the show, having a single staff dedicated to bass drums makes no sense since it will contain a lot of empty measures and make it so that players have to shuffle between different parts to figure out what they’re playing when &c.

solution: each player gets their own individual staff, more like a pit score. The times in which they’re playing traditional battery, duplicate all of the parts on each staff.

resultant problem: to help with overall design for the color guard designer, the dance team choreogrpher, and the cheersquad, plus to aid with memorization and visualization of parts and tempos for the members, all of the parts need to actually sound like what’s going to happen on the field. Because of the roles being played, some players need to have assigned to them two different percussion channels for the sounds to be accurate (one for marching percussion and one for general percussion). This falls outside of my normal percussion notation paradigm of only needing two layers to deal with stems up vs. stems down; playback and notation together would require at least three if not all four layers that are available in Finale, and i’m limited in how i can configure layers 1 and 2 because they’re already being used by the wind instruments (and i can’t therefore manipulate global stem direction, treatment of ties, &c without mucking up how they appear elsewhere in the score).

Additionally, in the battery sections there are three staves that have the same snare part and four staves that have the same bass drum part. This is unnecessary duplication of MIDI output which will a) affect balance of the final MIDI output and b) cause dropped notes when the full ensemble is playing because of MIDI’s limitations, but i can’t just mute a particular person’s track or even a particular layer of a track because that layer may have unique parts in other parts in the show.

solution:

First, i created a single percussion map that encompassed all of the instrument sounds and notation for those sounds that i needed to use in the score:

I applied that map to every individual percussion staff in the score. Placement on the staff and notehead type of each individual sound is defined by the map, so use of a MIDI controller is necessary to ensure that the correct map path is used. (In other words, mouse-clicking a note on E4 could mean either bass drum 2, snare, snare rim shot, snare crossshot, drum set tom 1, cymbal player crash, cymbal player hi hat, or cymbal player slide choke, and determining which is a pain. Playing the correct “map” note on the keyboard will place the note on E4 but also ensure that it’s mapped to the correct sound.)

Once all of the parts are placed in the score, I muted all of the percussion staves. I created a new stave, called “playback”, and had the first layer assigned to the marching percussion channel and the second layer assigned to the general MIDI percussion channel. I copied a single version of all of the necessary parts into that playback staff and then made that playback staff invisible in the final score.

The playback staff doesn’t look pretty, but it’s not supposed to. FOr some of the more layered sections i might try to separate some of it into a spare layer just for the purposes of easier debugging, particularly if there are ever any changes that are made to the score that i will then need to change in playback.

originally posted on darkblog resonate.