“Hi, I’m Gabby Russo, I’m an incoming freshmen and I’m from Manton Michigan. I’m here today to audition for cymbals in the CMU Marching Chips. Definitely nervous.
I’ve been in band for 8 years and honestly there’s just, there’s no other place like a band um it’s like a family anywhere you go and it’s just one big support system and I think that that’s really important for people to have when they’re going into a new situation, especially something like college.”
“Hi, I’m Doctor Jim Batcheller, I’m director of the Chippewa Marching Band, Associate director of bands here at CMU. And today, we’re auditioning new members for the Marching Chips. We’ll have about 40 potential new drummers. Later on in the day, half a dozen potential new color guard members and another couple of dozen brass and woodwinds. And then of course because the drumline is a little more complicated, we got about 25 of our returning members in the drumline over here as well.
They are the pulse, quite literally, of everything we do. They’re our rhythm section they set, they set the tempo for us. But more than that, the different types of drums we have play a crucial role in the, in the counterpoint of the music itself, and we’ve got a very talented drumline and lucky a very talented percussion arranger, Tim Mocny, who gives us lots of great beats to play.
They’re going to demonstrate their ability to play certainly, also, their ability to move a little bit, make sure their feet and their hands move in coordination with one another. And then throughout the day, we’ll determine which instrument they play. We have four elements in the drumline. Snare drums, tenor drums, bass drums and cymbals. And the reason the drummers are all here at the same time is so we can find out what the best fit is. So, by the end of the day we will determine, first of all, who’s ready to join. And then, ultimately, which section they’ll be in.
This is our 97th year. We’re the marching band associated with football here at CMU. J. Harold Powers, who is head of the music department in the early part of the 20th century, decided along with Charles Barnes, who at the time was Dean of men and registrar at CMU that our football team needed a marching band at ball games. And so, they got together with a couple of dozen students, local musicians, some public-school kids, and started a marching band for football games. The campus embraced the band immediately. The campus paper at the time said it raised the level of spirit at games to new heights and they looked forward to what the band would do in the future and that’s been our legacy to uphold ever since.”
“So in order to get to that point where we can do all that moving around, and all the cool stuff, make all the fans go ‘ahhh,’ we gotta sit and do the dirty work and just (drumming)”
“Fire up chips!”
