Do you remember seeing your Marching Band during a halftime show at a Football game back in High School, or in your College days? DCI, or otherwise known as Drum Corps International, is that to the extreme. People spend thousands of dollars to go to camps and become a part of these Corps to put on an amazing show for people, and for competition. Recently, they held one such show here in Utah, and I happened to go see it. It was amazing, as expected. These guys are literally spending 24 hours a day working on this stuff for their entire Summer Vacation, and once you hit age 21, you're no longer allowed to be a part of it. Here's a few pictures of the Corps that came out (and my personal favorites of the evening).
So what's so special about this, besides them spending their entire life doing this stuff for the Summer? Well, they're memorizing Music, playing it to very large stadiums at very high volumes, and moving across a field in memorized lines and spots and circles, all whilst adjusting to every bit of human error, of which is almost completely eliminated by the end of the season. Yes, they practice to the point where human error stops occurring.
It's really an amazing feat, and the amazing Music can make for a great show, such as Phantom Regiment's very beautiful show called "Juliet" and the very creative show of The Cadets(who won that night) "Between Angels and Demons".
Now, here's a little trick if you're ever trying to play fast. It may seem like your fingers can't actually move that fast, no matter how hard you try, but in general, it's actually not a muscle problem. It's actually a muscle memory problem. Recently I've been working on Donna Lee:
A rather quick bebop tune, as well played by Jaco Pastorious, originally written by Charlie Parker, it's great stuff, and a great song to learn how to play fast. The key to doing so, though, is to start slow. Maybe as slow as 80 bpm, or even 60bpm, I personally started at 100bpm since I've worked on a few other fast songs. It gets easier as you learn more fast tunes, but you have got to start slow and speed up slowly. Play it at one tempo perfectly for 3 or 4 times in a row, and then move it up two clicks.
Anyways, that's my spiel on playing fast. I mostly learned this because, in my sickness, I was forced by my weakened body to play slowly, and it definitely helped overall.
