Marching Band: Reading a Chart

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Matt Goms and again what we're going to do now is go ahead and take a look at a chart. Now that I have told you that you need find a computer program, probably the easiest way to do this, what I'm going to do is show you now how you read the charts once you have that program and you start creating your own drill. When you look at these charts, see down here at the bottom this is looking from the perspective of this bottom part of the page being the front to the back of the field. So if you are looking at a football field and this would be the fifty yard line, here these little numbers give you the yard line numbers. We've got fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty-five and so on, on down the line on both sides. The director or the drum major would be standing on the fifty, usually right on the sideline. Each one of these is one square or one step and the easiest way to find where a person's spot is on the field is to count the squares. If I'm looking for this person right here, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to start right here down at the bottom at probably the closest yard line, which is the easiest way for me to remember and I'm going to count up. I'm going to go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and then I'm going to go off of that yard line I'm going to go, one, two. So this person right is eleven steps from the front sideline and two steps off of the fifty. Again, you would want to count that off by pacing that off yourself using a 22 1/2 inch stride, which again we'll talk about later. Basically just counting one, two, three, four, five and so on and then count that up the yard line and mark off the spot of where the person would be standing."