UIL 6A State Marching Contest 2025 (Nov 3-4)

[bassboneman]

1 minute ago, natertater21000 said:

Important to keep in mind that the judges are now judging ONLY their specific caption. Ensemble music has no bearing on the percussion score. 

IK. But normally they are still with in the same range of each other. 

[dullbanddad]

6 minutes ago, bassboneman said:

IK. But normally they are still with in the same range of each other. 

Look at Vista too. 12th overall in music but much lower in each caption. 

[Tubalord11]

Good morning, everyone!! Congratulations our 14 finalists!! Really happy to see Cy-Fair and Prosper in, not super shocked about prosper after the season they've had but wow Cy-Fair, way to ig bounce back from area, super happy for both. and 7L almost getting in. After seeing recaps, not anything super crazy. Vista's visual scores though...after winning visual at TMC and then both 2s at area, idk, just seems off to me but again i'm no judge. Happy to see Bell and Johnson (both of them actually) be so close. Bridgeland as well. Keller that low was not on my bingo card, I really like the show a lot and think it's way cleaner than they got credit for. Everything else seems about right. Their definitely wasn't someone last night streaming end of prelims on YT, hope they do the same for finals bc if so I should be able to catch the back half. Either way congratulations to everyone who performed yesterday!!

 

Oh and congrats to Dripping Springs, saw their run and WOW is all I can say. and to Reagan making top half, big ups after area and TMC, they def not going anywhere anytime soon 

[bassboneman]

6 minutes ago, bassboneman said:

Welp that PERC judge made his thoughs known.

10th to hebro

11th to RR

15th to cedar ridge.  

16th to pearland

1st to Marcus 

4th to bridgeland 

6th to prosper 

after looking at it a bit more, all the judges were very all over the place. 

[tubapop]

41 minutes ago, dullbanddad said:

 

 

Suggestion for what I've seen be effective on other sites.  Small membership fee to remove ads, and then for others add a small amount of advertising to try to drive some revenue to support the cost to run the servers.  Just my $0.02

I know nothing about IT but I wonder if a second dedicated server can be used for people who pay. You pay a membership fee, you don’t have to deal with the site being inaccessible. 

[bassboneman]

4 minutes ago, Tubalord11 said:

Their definitely wasn't someone last night streaming end of prelims on YT, hope they do the same for finals bc if so I should be able to catch the back half. Either way congratulations to everyone who performed yesterday!!

yeah.... That's a good sign. hopefully they do I will be looking for it lol. 

[bassboneman]

1 minute ago, tubapop said:

I know nothing about IT but I wonder if a second dedicated server can be used for people who pay. You pay a membership fee, you don’t have to deal with the site being inaccessible. 

That would be interesting there is a forum for suggestions. 

[hsbandnerd212]

14 minutes ago, HagsTPT said:

My friends in Bridgeland were saying the EXACT SAME THING LIKE HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN and there needs to be a rule for this kind of thing like they got 3 judges making them into finals and just the other 4 just had them so low 😭 

Well, there is a rule, but it's only for the 5-judge system (which the 6A contest does not use) and it applies in very specific circumstances:

"If there are 40 or more bands in a state contest the top 14 bands will advance from the preliminary round to the final round. In addition, in the five-judge system only, any band below fourteenth place that receives a ranking of three or higher from at least two of the music judges and one of the visual judges will also advance to the final round."

From https://www.uiltexas.org/music/marching-band/marching-band-scoring-and-advancement-procedure

[bassboneman]

1 minute ago, hsbandnerd212 said:

Well, there is a rule, but it's only for the 5-judge system (which the 6A contest does not use) and it applies in very specific circumstances:

"If there are 40 or more bands in a state contest the top 14 bands will advance from the preliminary round to the final round. In addition, in the five-judge system only, any band below fourteenth place that receives a ranking of three or higher from at least two of the music judges and one of the visual judges will also advance to the final round."

From https://www.uiltexas.org/music/marching-band/marching-band-scoring-and-advancement-procedure

So if they got a 3,21,2,17,3 they would have gone to finals. (they prob would have with this score anyways. 

[AshTru9]

51 minutes ago, HagsTPT said:

My friends in Bridgeland were saying the EXACT SAME THING LIKE HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN and there needs to be a rule for this kind of thing like they got 3 judges making them into finals and just the other 4 just had them so low 😭 

There's multiple schools that had 3 judges put them in "finals" range, while the other judges did not. I dont think it was anything nefarious against one school in particular, it's just the way math works.

[dullbanddad]

It was asked further up, but does anyone know the adjudicators for the finals?

[tubapop]

We need to experiment with a marching contest with GPT, Claude, and Gemini as the judges. Input a video and audio feed and see where they land. I wonder if they’d be more consistent. 

[FaultLineBlues]

24 minutes ago, tubapop said:

We need to experiment with a marching contest with GPT, Claude, and Gemini as the judges. Input a video and audio feed and see where they land. I wonder if they’d be more consistent. 

I think AI judging would be crossing a line for me, feels Anti-art lmao

[natertater21000]

17 minutes ago, tubapop said:

We need to experiment with a marching contest with GPT, Claude, and Gemini as the judges. Input a video and audio feed and see where they land. I wonder if they’d be more consistent. 

I think it is always important to remember who is judging these events. It can be really easy for someone to watch a live stream and say that they know better than the person judging. The people judging this contest have degrees, and years of experience (sometimes decades) of both teaching and adjudicating these kinds of ensembles. That is not to say they don't make what some may call mistakes, but I think it is dangerous for anyone to flatly say they are wrong or can't be trusted. 

I may have disagreements based on pre concieved notions, but if Richard Saucedo was in front of my band you better believe I would be taking notes on every word he said and taking his advice to heart.  

The more I teach, and judge, and talk with qualified people, the more faith I have in the judging community as a whole. 

[WanderingTraveler]

43 minutes ago, FaultLineBlues said:

I think AI judging would be crossing a line for me, feels Anti-art lmao

I agree, this would be crossing a very strange line.. There is subjectivity in a lot of judging, and sometimes you have to remember that the goal of a prelims is to get the right bands to finals, which I think in this case they did...Was there some weird scores, sure, but there is usually never a contest that has "perfect scoring", which is the exact reason that multiple judges are used, to average out.

[WanderingTraveler]

48 minutes ago, natertater21000 said:

I think it is always important to remember who is judging these events. It can be really easy for someone to watch a live stream and say that they know better than the person judging. The people judging this contest have degrees, and years of experience (sometimes decades) of both teaching and adjudicating these kinds of ensembles. That is not to say they don't make what some may call mistakes, but I think it is dangerous for anyone to flatly say they are wrong or can't be trusted. 

I may have disagreements based on pre concieved notions, but if Richard Saucedo was in front of my band you better believe I would be taking notes on every word he said and taking his advice to heart.  

The more I teach, and judge, and talk with qualified people, the more faith I have in the judging community as a whole. 

I also echo this sentiment, with a few friends I have that judge these competitions. They commonly express how mentally taxing it can sometimes be since they don't want to "screw it up". These judges put care and focus into each time they rank and score each band, and they have each bands best interest at heart, which is why they are apart of this activity. There are some absolute legends that get to adjudicate some of these contests, so I will always trust what they say over my Minor in Music

[waynet2010]

This was my first year to watch 6A bands at State on the NFHS network coming from a 4A parent.  There was so many bands that are good.  I feel like so many bands could make it to finals.  It is amazing to watch these bands play and compete.  Love all the talent.

[bassboneman]

1 hour ago, natertater21000 said:

I think it is always important to remember who is judging these events. It can be really easy for someone to watch a live stream and say that they know better than the person judging. The people judging this contest have degrees, and years of experience (sometimes decades) of both teaching and adjudicating these kinds of ensembles. That is not to say they don't make what some may call mistakes, but I think it is dangerous for anyone to flatly say they are wrong or can't be trusted. 

I may have disagreements based on pre concieved notions, but if Richard Saucedo was in front of my band you better believe I would be taking notes on every word he said and taking his advice to heart.  

The more I teach, and judge, and talk with qualified people, the more faith I have in the judging community as a whole. 

I do agree with this statement. I do think a lot of people forget that there always is going to be bais. One judge thinking a shows better than the other. One thinks its harder. One thinks it easy. Your never going to remove that. To me, marching band would be boring if there was some Ai Rubic. Everyone would try to figure out the Rubic and just do the same thing. Half of show design is try to make it as cool to as many people as possible so its more likely to get judged well. 

[GasBabyOfficial]

Hebron or flomo low-key 

[GrigorySnare]

On 9/9/2025 at 7:19 AM, bassboneman said:

AND In 1st place with a score of 99.93 the Heb...

Not this year.  They have rather simple show…but they play it extremely well.  It’s FM’s to lose. 

[slowbrass]

Feeling vindicated rn, after seeing Hebron’s percussion at area j a few weeks back, I knew it would be a problem. Now it’s looking like thats once again the biggest obstacle between them and flower mound. Gotta figure that out.

[tubapop]

My comment about using AI has more to do with a technological curiosity about consistency, not necessarily accuracy. What even is accuracy when judging art? (As I said in another post previously, there is probably a notion of accuracy when separating tiers of bands but this probably becomes less meaningful within tiers.) I know judging is exceptionally difficult, and the concept of accuracy in judging art is questionable, which is why we see wide swings between judges. So would Ai models be more *consistent?* or statistically precise? that’s my curiosity. 
 

in other words, I’m not saying human judges suck and ai works better. I’m wondering whether ai model scores would cluster together more than human scores. 
 

whether this ushers in a dystopian marching band landscape is another topic altogether. 
 

[GrigorySnare]

1 minute ago, slowbrass said:

Feeling vindicated rn, after seeing Hebron’s percussion at area j a few weeks back, I knew it would be a problem. Now it’s looking like thats once again the biggest obstacle between them and flower mound. Gotta figure that out.

They have so many talented percussionists, but they don’t feature percussion it the show and it cost them in competitions like this

[HagsTPT]

Just a couple of minutes away from that start of finals and just want to wish the BEST OF LUCK to all performing bands and lets have a good finals run this afternoon!!!

[GrigorySnare]

22 hours ago, HagsTPT said:

HOLY MOLY MARCUS PERCUSSION!!! They stole the show in that insane percussion feature as well as that timpanist looking like they were having a great time. Very solid performance both musically and visually across the board though but its gonna be difficult to see them medal with performances from Hebron and Flomo being on another level

It’s hard not to be drawn to what The timpanist l is doing…and that’s throughout the show, not just the percussion feature.  The best part is:  he’s rather reserved off the field and incredibly humble even now that he has ‘groupies’ (no lie) 😉😂.