24/7/2009 Post-mortem.

Ok, now that most of our members have rationalised and hopefully snapped into their senses, I write this overview and conclusion on last Friday's competition, based not only on my own analysis, but also from various sources, mainly ex-members, current members, facebook, blogs, youtube, and multiple band forums.

Solely based on Videos, my comments:

Music: Balancing was very good for my taste, but I must say that I prefer a stronger bass and stronger counter-melody. Dynamics were good, but can be better.

Sound: Impact, that has been the biggest disadvantage since the start of the season. Despite improving drastically that evening, the impact on general was able to hit people, but not enough to brake walls.

Formation: Clean, very tidy, amazing! But do remember: I'm commenting based on videos, so maybe there might be some optical inaccuracies. But back on subject, the shapes are very clear and visible. Curves looks like curves and straight lines seem effortlessly achievable to us. Basic footwork was good, the steps are clearly uniform, our strong point since the past. Keep it up, and try making it more impressive.

Brass: Good sound, well balance, no more over-blown. But like I say, could use more bass sound from the lower brass.

Winds: Very nice, impressive sound to me, I like 2nd and 3rd movement wind parts the most. And no more "wek wek wek" sound, the sound I heard during preliminary.

Percussion: I did mention it was perfection... It is NOT, I lied to comfort some people... If I may say, Snare solo was messy at first, quads were close to messy, basses need more tighter sounds. But on the plus side, this year's percussion is cleaner then the years past, and considering the challenging songs we had to play, being that tight is very close to clean.

Colour Guards: Like I said before, stunning. Maybe because their usual practice attitudes gave me a low expectation, which made me so shocked by their amazing performance that night. But they were not immune to mistakes. After reviewing the video, one CG member drop the flag at the first impact throw. Angles of the flag still needs improvement, and members can improve on their sportingness. But nevertheless, the grabbed the best CG title, and there is no questioning that it was a stunning performance with the CG that night.

Other comments:

Nan Hwa indeed had a good show. Aggressive and yet neat and tidy drills, strong music projection, and great visual highlighted a maturity in their show this year. In fact, if u looked closely, theirs was the nearest rendition to a drum corps esp their brass line. Use ur binoculars if u need to, they did not feature any trombones With ALL marching brasses, this made their brasses looked the BEST in Malaysia.

Music - no doubt they have very good projection, but i felt their balancing suffered a little at the apex of the pyramid. Trumpets were heard loud but not to say their trumpets were overblasting, they were simply imbalanced without the richness and brilliant voice from the trombones. (One weak factor of trombones in the marching band was improper intonation esp if the band marches at tempo 160 onwards. Students find it difficult to adjust their slides. And hence marching baritones are usually being replaced in the USA). Alas, Nan Hwa was showing their true professionalism in the field!

from someone on voteband, I found this piece of comment very reasonable, true on the overall, and most importantly, constructive.

on their song arrangement. It's the closest to corps style arranggement especially the opener and the closer.

A good piece of encouraging words.

improvement is very subjective..it depends on the space of improvement you have,for me nan hwa has their basic marching perfectly done

Continue working on our steps, our signature trademark XD.

Nan Hwa has clean formation no doubt, over all show better than last year alot! sound wise, maybe intonation is not as good as last year... from my opinion, is due to their more complex movement. Sound wise is not soft at all, very big sound actually. but then I do agree that nan hwa lack a bit in showmanship and weak attack. Not much surprise

I can say that when he says showmanship, it means the way we present our show... That we leave for the instructors to decide, can't do much about it...

Ex-member's comments can be summarised that our show this year was leap of fate. Most of their reaction that night on first impression was that we did our best, and that our show is comparable to that of 2005.

So, aim for next year, as I said. Nothing is perfect, so no need to take the above comments too personally, just do our best in all aspects.

Latest updates include:
Small possibility in NHMB to participate KLWMBC 2009, Drum Battle as well.
Increase in Tubas from 6 to 8 by next year, 2 Marching-Tubas as the new addition.
Increase of percussion in total of 4 Tenors , 7 Snares and 5 Basses by next year.
Possibility of inclusion of pit-percussion if permitted by next year.
New batch of Colour Guard members.