Marching Band Practice

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Matt Goms, and again I'd like to talk about marching band and choreography. The last thing I'd like to cover now is talking about practice. What needs to be covered in practice, what needs to be done. Well, obviously in practice what you want to focus on the most is the things that you don't do the best. A typical practice though for a marching band, what I would say that you'd want to start with, is maybe start with some, a little bit of stretching, something like that to make sure that you've got students or members who are not going to hurt themselves in anything, it's a very physical activity, and they need to make sure that they stay very stretched and so they don't hurt any muscles or pull anything. It's very easy to roll an ankle or hurt something when you've got an uneven field or something like that. So, I'd start with that. Start with some marching basics. Maybe move, you know, everybody in a group, have them move in a block or something, just doing front and backwards marching, something like that to get their feet going. Then spread out into your drill and work on some drill cleaning, where they're not playing any of the music yet, they're just moving around in their drill by counts, in small sections preferably. Start with small, little groups of just one or two sets, and then towards the end, start doing larger sets like even whole productions, like whole songs, whole opener, whole middle piece, you know, things like that. Then, I would move to having them warm up as a group, as far as playing their instruments, and warming up on their musical warm ups. Then, play through a few of the areas that you've worked on in your drill. Again, it doesn't have to be the whole show being covered in one practice, you're going to want to cover little pieces at a time, and then put it together later on. After that, then go out on the field, once they're warmed up and they've played through a few things, go out on the field and put it together, now you've got marching, and music. And, probably you, as the director are going to want to be up somewhere high like in a stadium or in the stands somewhere, on a scaffolding, a ladder, anything you can get to get up high, so you can watch the forms as they moves, and perhaps help them to make it better. And, you'll want to continue on from there, just trying to clean it, and perfect it as much as you can to make it look like it would if it was running itself on the computer program."