JessiandMatt.net

Phantom Regiment

Welcome to my Phantom Regiment pages. This page shares a few pictures and thoughts of my two years marching with one of the best drum corps in the world. It was a time during my life that has had a great impact as to who I have become. But first, here’s a bit about Phantom Regiment.

Phantom Regiment is one of the best drum and bugle corps in the world. It is for people aged 14 to 21, from anywhere in the world. The group is based out Rockford/Loves Park, Illinois. For more info about the group, surf over to their homepage at www.regiment.org. If you don’t know what drum corps is, it is a good idea to check out some info about it. You should start with Drum Corps International. This is the organization that governs junior drum corps in North America, mostly.

I have Phantom Regiment to thank for introducing me to my wife, Jessi. Phantom Regiment wasn’t her first drum corps. She marched with Americanos, Phantom Regiment, Pioneer, and finally aged out from Santa Clara Vaunguard.

Read on to learn more about more experiences, or to see pictures from my two years, click on the links on the navigation menu.

For a blog post about my decision to march the corps, click here.

FAQ about Matt and Drum Corps

• Why did you choose Phantom Regiment? There are closer corps top twelve corps, namely the Colts and the Madison Scouts.
  
I knew I wanted to march Phantom Regiment after I first saw them in July of 1989. They were in Minneapolis at a show called Drum Beauty. My high school band director, Jeff Goldsmith, took me and several other students to see these activity that he thought we would be interested in. He was right, we were interested. I couldn't believe my eyes and ears. I saw three top twelve corps that night. They were the Madison Scouts, Phantom Regiment, and the Blue Devils. Surely these people must be incredible musicians I thought. I would never have the talent to do something like this. I was wrong. Talent is not the most important thing to getting into the corps you want. It is persistance and dedication. Talent just determines what part you play.

• Why did you march?
  
Something inside me said that this was something I needed to do. I had a lot of encouragement from my brother and close friends. In fact, one of closest friends (Aaron Fisher) and I decided that we should do it together.

• What did it cost to march?
  
Well, back then, Phantom Regiment charged 600 dollars for a full season of drum corps. That was a pretty cheap way to spend the summer. Even so, I still had to take out a loan from my older brother to cover my first season. While on tour, I only carried about 200 dollars for the whole summer. We didn't have many free days, so this turned out to be plenty.

• Where do you stay when you’re rehearsing before tour?
  
When we were in town for camps or during the summer, we would either stay at a host house, or at the facility we were practicing at. I was lucky enough to get put with a wonderful gentleman named Earl Dean, who lived in Rockford. Earl had been a volunteer with the corps for several years, and he had several of the staff and members stay at his house. I stayed with Earl whenever I was in town.

• What were the most important things you took away from corps experience?
  
There's three major things I learned: 1.) Ordinary people can do extraordinary things if they work at it hard enough 2.) You can pack an amazing amount of stuff in a suitcase if you have to. 3.) It's possible to sleep almost anywhere, in any position.

• Are you glad you marched?
  
I'm very glad I marched. I will treasure those two summers forever. I think the best part of marching those two years was that people still have 1991 and 1993 on their lists of favorite Phantom Regiment years. I will never forget the feeling I had when I was standing on the field looking a wall of people who were going crazy over our show.

• Aren’t you unhappy that Phantom Regiment lost both years you marched?
  
No, I'm not unhappy. I saw how the crowds reacted to our show. It didn't matter if we won. They loved watching the shows and I loved performing them.

• What was a typical day like for you in the corps?
  
There were two types of days, practice days and show days.


Practice days typically were 12 hour days with an hour for lunch and an hour for dinner. They always started off with a half hour to forty five minutes of stretching with the marching staff. This almost always was followed by about a half an hour of warming up on the horns in the horn arc. Once we were warmed up, we would usually spend some time doing practicing our playing technique, usually while marching around the track at the field we were on. Then we would move on to playing on some portions of the show while still in the horn arc. Here we would make changes or work on passages that just needed to be tweaked to sound better on the field. Finally, with maybe an hour left before lunch, we would move the hornline to the field and practice marching and playing the passages we had just polished in the arc.


After an hour for lunch, we would start marching rehearsal. This was always the most tedious part of the day if there were no drill changes. If there were drill changes, we would learn them and that could easily consume the time until dinner. If there weren't drill changes, that meant we would be cleaning drill. This meant long periods of doing nothing while another section worked on a piece of drill. It wasn't free time, because we usually had to stay in our spots on the field. Unless we were told otherwise, it wasn't ok to sit except on break. If we weren't being worked with, we could kneel. Marching practice usually involved the whole corps, but not always.


Finally, after dinner we put the whole corps together on the field and rehearse pieces of the show. The purpose here was to integrate the days changes into the whole group as well as to improve spots of the show that were related to how the sections interacted with each, namely general effect. Lastly, we would end the evening rehearsal with a runthrough of the whole show as sort of a final test of the day's activities.


Show days had the same basic layout, but compressed so that the entire day was squeezed in before dinner. After dinner we usually had about 45 minutes to get the housing site cleaned up, our stuff packed, and our horns and uniforms ready for the show. Once at the show site, we followed a ritual to get ready for the show. After performing the show, we usually had an hour or so to relax and have a snack, then it was back on the bus to move on to the next town.

• What was the before show ritual?
  
I'm sure ours was fairly similar to most other corps. The corps was expected to be in full uniform once we got the show site. Once horns, drums, and quard equipment were retrieved, we all marched to an area to warm up. We started by doing some stretching and marching practice to get in the mental state of mind. Then we would "arc up" the hornline and begin our musical warmup. This ideally lasted for a half hour or so. During that time we would play some exercises and even maybe a show piece. Lastly we would tune the horns to tuners carried by the music staff.


During the warmups, there was usually a little time for each section to do a little bit of their own psyching up for the show. For the baritones, this involved forming a circle and doing the "guitar move". We would all play our baritones like they were electric guitars and a select few would get to solo for the group each night.


Once we warmed up, we would march back to the show field and then we would get a pep talk from one of the members of the staff. There was also usually some time for hugs and wishes of good luck to our friends before we stepped out onto the field. Lastly, the kitchen staff always had some fresh lemon slices for us to suck on before we went out. From there, we put on our game faces and marched out to face the crowd.

• What did you do to pass the time on the bus?
  
Well, we didn't have all of the comforts that young people have today. There were no TV's on buses, no MP3 players, no wireless email, no cellphones, and certainly no portable DVD players. The best we could hope for was a big collection of CD's and a lot of batteries. While I'm sure not every kid carries all of this fancy technology with them, they are certainly a lot more connected to the world than I was.

• Why did you wait until college to march?
  
As I said earilier in this page, I wasn't introduced to drum corps until 1989. At that time I was just about to begin my senior year in high school. I still thought you had to be a god to march in corps. It wasn't until I met some people who marched in Minnesota Brass my first year in college that I realized it was possible for a person like me to march in a junior corps.

• Which year did you like better - 1991 or 1993?
  
1993 hands down. Why, you ask? Well, for starters, I was a vet in 1993, so I had a bit more status in the corps than I did in my first year. Does that really matter? No, but I felt more comfortable with the whole process because I had survived a year of it before.

The show was also far more challenging both in music and marching than it was 1991. It seemed like we were always running in the drill and no matter how many times we marched it, it never got any easier. And in the rare case that it would get easier, Tony Hall (our drill designer) would change it making it hard again. I love that kind of constant challenge.


Lastly, I started dating Jessi, who would later become my wife. It was incredibly fun to have someone to date during the summer. We practially spent every waking moment off the field together. It was one of the happiest times of my life.

• What did you think of the brass instruction you received?
  
For me, this was one of the great things about corps. I had always been an above average player, but I never took any private lessons, and my band director didn't have a lot of time to work on technique because of his workload. Well, a good portion of the summer in the brass arc was all about technique. These guys were incredibly patient and demanding that we learn to play in a manner that was consistent and correct. My skills as a player improved dramatically those two summers I marched.

• What did you do after Phantom Regiment? Did you instruct or continue to play?
  
I always wanted to instruct, but the opportunity never presented itself. So, instead, I continued to march for two years with Minnesota Brass Incorporated. Some day I will march again I think. I just need to get my kids a little bit older.


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