WGI

From The Ground Up, Part 2: 'The Writing Stage'

From The Ground Up, Part 2: 'The Writing Stage'

Dan Schack dives into what he calls "the writing stage," or, the second part of the process through which he designs indoor percussion shows.

Feb 21, 2019 by Andy Schamma
From The Ground Up, Part 2: 'The Writing Stage'
Dan Schack is the Battery Coordinator/Choreographer of Carolina Crown Drum and Bugle Corps and the Creative Director of George Mason University Indoor Drumline. Outside of his musical endeavors, Dan is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Delaware.

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Dan Schack is the Battery Coordinator/Choreographer of Carolina Crown Drum and Bugle Corps and the Creative Director of George Mason University Indoor Drumline. Outside of his musical endeavors, Dan is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Delaware.


As the 2019 Winter Guard International season kicks off, designers are finally beginning to see their projects materialize, experiencing the ultimate litmus test for effect: live performances with real-time crowd response. 

Thinking about my own group and our design and implementation process, something occurred to me: even though what we all see at the end of the season is a bunch of well-crafted percussion ensembles with many similarities, HOW the organizations arrive at WGI finals is mostly a mystery.

What jump starts a show idea? 

Where does a designer go from the initial idea phase? 

What kind of ideas will make good indoor drumline shows? 

What are the next steps to composing, arranging, drill writing, choreographing, costuming, set designing, and the million other little details that need to be accounted for to design a show thoroughly? 

These questions come to my mind as I realize that there is no single way to design an indoor drumline show “correctly,” and that each show demands its own attention, effort, and experimentation.

In order to tackle this head on, I will take you through a perfected step-by-step process that will guarantee you perfect scores in all your sub-captions.

Just kidding! 

What I will do is walk through some of my own processes as to how to design an indoor drumline show. My contributions, as always, are highly subjective, and it is up to the reader to pick and choose what works for them and what doesn’t.

Down the rabbit hole we go!

Read Part 1: Answering The First Questions


Part 2: "The Writing Stage"

Who Goes Where?

One of the biggest challenges to writing an indoor drumline show is knowing where to start. Somewhat inexplicably, the design “sequence,” as far as I understand it, has traditionally started with the front ensemble music, adding in the battery music second. 

Next is the drill, which is layered over top the score, and last is the choreography and other physical, vertical events on top of the drill.

I am here today to say that this order, and any arbitrary order, is wrong. That’s right. You can compose your show in any sequence you see fit.

Up to a certain point, I myself subscribed to the above-described sequence. I believe this is because as a member, it is the order in which you interact with the elements: learn the music first, the drill second, and the choreography third.

My first taste of doing the design process differently was while marching in Rhythm X. 

The Battery Arranger Tim Jackson would frequently re-orchestrate music for the needs of the drill, or the Front Ensemble Arranger Andrew Markworth would make sound and front ensemble adjustments to align the audio and visual qualities of a choreographed moment. 

Here is where I learned that there is no correct order to put things together. Whichever is the best idea is the one that should become the dominant driving force behind the other ideas.

Thinking Narratively

Indoor percussion is a medium unlike any other... but let’s be frank. The moves that designers use to keep audiences at the edge of their seats are the same moves that artists, creators, and entertainers have used since time immemorial. 

We want audiences and consumers to believe in the worlds we create, the characters that inhabit them, and the emotions they experience. Even though these worlds aren’t real, the more you invest yourself, the more you will react. 

The trick is you allow the audience to find themselves within the medium they watch. That transforms spectatorship into real engagement. Something like empathy.

The story or concept could move linearly—Pulse Percussion’s 2017 production The Uninvited comes to mind. Shows can also swirl around single concepts that are examined in as many ways as possible; think of Rhythm X’s 2013 production Man in the Arena. 

Both of these shows are examples of effective shows, but they are communicated in very different ways. There is no correct answer here. Ultimately as a designer, one should focus their efforts on communicating their message clearly, and this message should be one that is digestible to a general audience.

Collaborating Across the Team

Now that you’ve dismantled the conventional design process, where do you go from here? 

This is where collaboration across the design team is integral. For Kevin Shah, the Front Ensemble Arranger of Blue Knights Drum and Bugle Corps, Broken City Percussion, and owner of projectRISEmusic, writing the music goes beyond just, well, the music:

”One of the hardest things to do is to sit down and know that you have to write a section of music, but feel like you are just staring at a blank page without a very clear direction on what you want to do. Generally there are a couple considerations on any given section of music: What purpose does this section serve? What does the instrumentation look like? What is the visual identity of this section? How does this section relate to what came before and what is coming next? How long does the section need to be? Asking these questions really help give parameters to the moment. This is a good place to start when suffering from ‘blank page syndrome.’”

Shah articulates a need to collaborate with the visual elements of the design so that the writing is targeted and framed from moment to moment. 

Instead of just sitting down and writing music-for-music’s sake, the design team must have solid ideas as to what is happening in any given section, why it’s happening, how it’s happening, and where it leads next. 

All of this is to say that big picture visual ideas must be somewhat fleshed out, if not fully known, before the music goes on the paper. Otherwise, you will be stuck attempting to structure drill and vertical ideas to a score, rather than constructing a score around visual ideas. 

Drill needs are inherently less flexible than musical needs; knowing what those visual demands are will allow you to frontload the music-visual synthesis and avoid logistical problems or drill overhauls later down the road.

For Richard Hinshaw, drill designer for the Cavaliers Drum and Bugle Corps, Avon High School, and Monarch Independent Percussion, collaboration differs team-to-team and is heavily dependent on technology.

“[For Avon], I’ll get the full battery and pit mp3, and then we add all the sound design stuff afterwards. For Monarch... Bryan (Harmsen) will write the pit and battery and a layer of sound design, and if there are voice overs or lyrical sound effects, he will do that after the drill, which is cool because he can react to what I do visually”

Hinshaw demonstrates a need to work back and forth during the composition process to ensure maximum synchronization when the show starts to get put on the floor. 

Rather than considering writing a “closed” process, active designers will give each other feedback and make changes as they go. This “open” attitude towards writing makes for better first drafts, higher levels of audio-visual alignment, and an overall better understanding of what the show is "saying" at any given moment. 

The use of technology such as Slack, shared Google documents, Facebook, and Dropbox enable this sort of collaboration even from remote locations. That being said, looking at the top five ensembles in Percussion Independent World proves that in-house design is generally preferable.

Constructing Visual Ideas

As I’ve said in past articles, the days of arbitrary drill pictures has met its end. To be thorough as a full-fledged design team, drill designers must understand the motivation behind what they are writing (identical to Shah’s point above) within the context of the larger picture.

Mere counts and music will leave the best drill designers asking “why?” It is necessary to supply the overall motivation behind every moment so that the drill writer is providing a map to a story, rather than images that fit counts. This requires having a strong idea of the total arc of the show so that the moments lead seamlessly from one to another. 

Think about the word “staging” as it relates to a play—a more literal story—and how we have adopted the concept of staging for our own paradigm.

For Lindsey Schueller, drill designer for Legends Drum and Bugle Corps, Genesis Percussion, and Q2:

“As the design continues to the staging phase, a visual designer’s primary goals should be to put the musicians in a place where they can succeed, and to lead the viewer’s focus and interest to and through events. A viewer should be able to watch a show with a zoomed-in camera lens and be guided from event to event by the velocity, facing, color, space, and density of the performers. Where the audience is looking should be determined by the visual elements in conjunction with the musical elements, not one element alone.”

It is the drill designer's job to lead the audience member’s eye from stage to stage, and the drill designer must know the arc of the show before the composition process begins. That way, they have the foresight to logically arrive at vertical moments and also think backward for how the drill and horizontal content connects and builds into the vertical events. 

One thing's for sure: Schueller echoes both Shah and Hinshaw in the need for collaboration across designers throughout the design process. 

Designers cannot simply write and be done. There is always more work to do to sweep the final corners to ensure absolute integration of all the production’s elements.

Considering Student Skills and Logistical Possibilities

One of the essential (and easily ignored) elements of designing a WGI show is considering student skills. It is important to think about the maturity level of your students when it comes time to pick a concept.

Ideas that are intellectual and difficult to convey through moving and playing are generally not the best bet for the youngest, most amateur students. Conversely, overly simple ideas that rely on just playing and moving gimmicks may fall short for an Independent World ensemble. 

Keeping your student’s skill levels in mind is important to designing a show that “fits.”

Similarly, designers must consider the logistical possibilities of your specific ensemble. Groups who have unlimited financial resources are likely capable of pulling off more grandiose designs that require a greater investment into props and set design.

Likewise, groups with a limited budget and in-house prop construction should keep the realities of material design in mind. 

Many ideas are good as mere ideas, but actually implementing them can become a serious setback. It's important to have some foresight in your initial design stages so that impossible ideas don’t run rampant too long.

Arranging the Music

While arranging the music seems like it should perhaps come first in a section about “writing,” I put it last because I believe that if you have put all of your other design ducks in a row, the big picture ideas will trickle down to the writing stage. 

Overall, I think this is one of the less convoluted and interpretable parts of the design process, and you will set yourself up for success if you frontload the “why” of each musical phrase, as highlighted by Kevin Shah above.

Every music composer and arranger has a different process, and none of them are perfect for everyone. Artists yield their best results from configuring their own processes, and it is up to you as an arranger to figure out what works best in terms of laying the music out.

For Ian Grom of Pulse Percussion and Chino Hills:

“Everything usually happens at the piano in the beginning... If I’m transcribing, it happens at the piano with my headphones on. If I’m composing from scratch, I’m at the piano noodling melodic or harmonic ideas...[When] I need to create something that uses synths/samplers as the lead voice, I’ll start a blank track in ProTools . . . Once It becomes a more solidified idea, I’ll send it our for feedback or map it out in Sibelius to start making it a reality.”

With accessible technologies like ProTools, Ableton, Sibelius, Finale, and Virtual Drumline, the music arranging and electronics composing process is more immersive and complete than ever. 

Constructing a WGI percussion show is like composing a song, but, listening is only one part of the viewer’s sensory engagement. Considering your music as the soundtrack to the visual will keep the different elements of your show contained within the singular concept.