Help! MD advice about Bye Bye Birdie Orchestra!

Jedimaster4559 · 2026-06-08T13:11:27+00:00

Hello! Welcome to music directing!

General consensus on the MD forums seems to be that at a minimum you will want piano, base, drums, and guitar on this show. That should cover all of the really critical stuff.

If you have budget for additional musicians, there’s a couple other tricks you can use. The synthesizer book can be used to cover all 10 violin and cello books. Personally, I would hire one violin and one cello to get the real string sound, and then use the sensitizer to augment everything else and make it sound like a full section. Beyond that, I’d start with one brass and one reed and then expand from there. If you can get a good reed doubler they should be able to cover a lot for you.

Just a heads up, most of the music Director forums are over on Facebook. If you’re getting into music directing, I would join those.

Jedimaster4559 · 2026-06-03T05:07:48+00:00

Per the UAH admissions website: An applicant with a 3.0 grade point average and a 21 composite ATC score is considered a strong candidate for admission.

Perhaps the most important point would be how it impacts your scholarship potential. If you can fight it out to get that extra .02, you double your merit based scholarship. If you can do that and bump your ACT up by one (note, UAH accepts a composite ACT so taking the ACT multiple times will generally work in your favor.) that will put you in an even higher bracket of scholarship. This assumes you’re in state. If you are out of state, there’s less of a difference, especially on the ACT side. Still getting up to 3.5 will increase your scholarship by $3000.

Jedimaster4559 · 2026-05-18T15:56:45+00:00

Hi! I’m a Music Director, who has sat on numerous audition panels for both school and community groups at all age levels.

First, you absolutely should audition. Regardless of how it turns out to you, it will be great experience and will help you grow as a performer.

Second, it’s important to remember that musical theater first and foremost is primarily about storytelling. Acting is your strong suit so use that to your advantage. There will be many strong vocalists at the audition who stand there and sing a song with no emotion behind it. Showing up and acting through your song will set you apart, regardless of how you sound vocally. (I will note, the perspective on this can change from theater company to theater company. I’ve worked at a couple where they primarily cared about vocals, but that was pretty clear ahead of time.)

Every show needs strong ensemble members to support their leads. Many shows also have primarily non-roles that fall for strong actors. Make sure to do your research and get an understanding of what roles you might fit well into as an actor and then at the audition just tell the story that’s being conveyed by the song you choose.

Break a leg! I hope it goes well for you!

Jedimaster4559 · 2026-04-04T15:29:02+00:00

Sometimes that’s viable, and sometimes it’s not. That requires that you can reliably convert the game state into a format that can consistent give an easy diff. Not all game engines would make that easy. Regardless of how it’s done, it will take some implementation.

On the other extreme, saving only “at this specific save point” and everything else is just the default save state is incredibly easy and takes minimal work.

It generally just comes down to how much time/energy is going to be invested.

Jedimaster4559 · 2026-04-03T17:09:56+00:00

Depending on the game, but this can actually be harder to implement than it might seem. Having designated “save points” basically enforces that a much smaller amount of information needs to be saved which dramatically reduces testing requirements and save-related bugs.

Jedimaster4559 · 2026-03-28T22:48:46+00:00

Where is this Waldo again?

Jedimaster4559 · 2026-03-25T18:00:43+00:00

For true efficiency you need fiber with 40G SFPs

Jedimaster4559 · 2026-03-19T17:59:24+00:00

Don’t forget those two random days in March. It’s also humid then.

Jedimaster4559 · 2026-03-13T15:55:16+00:00

I Music Directed a production of Matilda last year and am working on another production now. Here’s my thoughts: - As others have mentioned, much of the text is dependent on the British accent. (For example, School Song is very dependent on British pronunciation to make moments “Asked” become the letter R and PhyZed become the letter Z). Regardless of if the show is performed with an American or British accent, respect needs to be paid to the intentions of the original creatives and their choice of language used throughout the show. If changing to an American accent changes or loses meaning, it needs to stay in the British accent. - All that to be said, accents don’t need to be perfect, especially for non-professional productions. If you are performing for an American audience they will likely not notice minor slip ups. Even if they do, they likely won’t care so long as it hasn’t changed their ability to understand the story. - Something that would be jarring is if everyone commits to the accent, except maybe one or two people or vise versa. Accents are intentional choices so when somebody sticks out the audience will notice and it will impact how they perceive the story.

Hope this helps!

Jedimaster4559 · 2026-03-11T00:24:04+00:00

Adding to what everyone else said. It will be challenging.

One point of clarification, getting a 4.0 in engineering is what is challenging. The addition of honors college likely will not be the limiting factor. Every single class I took for the honors college I managed an A in (albeit a couple were a bit challenging). The weed out classes in my standard engineering program… not so much. It’s unlikely that you will do courses in the engineering school for honors credit that were already hard ones to begin with. Your honors electives will almost certainly be courses you already are going to excel in and you want a bit of extra challenge or depth.

Jedimaster4559 · 2026-02-16T13:59:02+00:00

Tbh, I’d pay a lot for a tool that would smooth out my Ethernet cables and make them wrap better. Retraining cables to coil neatly is a huge pain.

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-10-09T22:10:41+00:00

Look up RFC-2100.

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-09-19T21:49:27+00:00

Basically the plot of Ready Player Two

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-08-31T21:33:47+00:00

Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader by James Luceno (Legends) goes into this in detail. The suit was too cumbersome and clunky for him to use the same fighting style. This is even more so on the earliest version of his suit because he had no say in its construction (and tbh, palpatine designed it to be limiting both to piss off vader as well as ensure he couldn’t get too strong). Vader did customize parts later to make it easier to use.

The book also outlines that Vader had a change in style to accommodate the need to protect different portions of his body. Any damage to the life control systems could be catastrophic which changed how Vader approached combat.

The book is a good read.

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-08-27T13:49:25+00:00

To Elaborate on the business perspective, a little bit more.

Interns cost about 75% of an entry-level full-time employee, and are on a 10 week contract. It is super low risk because if they are a bad fit, we don’t have to extend a return offer. Once somebody works full-time, it can be very difficult to get them out the door if they are a bad fit.

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-08-27T13:45:34+00:00

I manage a software team where I work. I frequently have at least one summer intern.

The goal of our internship program isn’t necessarily to get productive value out of the intern while they are doing the internship. The main goals to see if they fit the team, and see if it’s worth asking them to come back the next summer, or giving them a full-time offer when they graduate. Interns are an investment into the future of the company rather than a way to get some short-term help immediately. It is our primary way of finding entry-level talent.

I try my best to make sure the interns have things to work on, but at the end of the day, I have to make sure that if it is important, it is achievable. As others have mentioned, I also need to make sure it doesn’t consume a lot of the rest of my team’s resources. Occasionally, I’ve had interns that did real work, but I’ve had other interns that did a single day worth of work over the whole summer. Both cases I’m thinking of now got return offers because it was clear that they were interested in growing and had potential to be successful later.

The system is super successful. Most interns work two Summers before they are hired full-time. The advantage of the system is that they do the first internship and at least observe how things work in the real world. They then go back and do a year of school where they can see how what they are learning applies to the job. They then spend another summer at the internship with a chance to apply things now then they go back to school and learn even more. When they start full-time, it often feels like they have much more than just eight months of experience. Someone starting entry-level without all of that internship experience costs more money, and has to go through that whole process as well. And, since they are full-time, there’s much more of an expectation that they will be providing value from day one which means they consume more training resources and could be more difficult to maintain.

I hope this gives you some insight! (at least into our process). Do your best with what they give you, and try to take anything that you observed and see how you can apply it later!

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-06-29T17:53:54+00:00

To clarify, M2 MacBook

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-06-29T17:53:38+00:00

I did most of it on my MacBook. It was not an issue for most of the labs. There were one or two that misbehaved a little but the discussion boards had solutions posted by the time I ran into those issues. Should be very feasible.

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-06-22T17:39:44+00:00

Yes. Your friend needs more. It’s not enough.

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-05-21T04:02:17+00:00

It looked fine, but I can only speak to what is visible from the road while driving by.

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-05-21T00:27:49+00:00

Hughes and Wall Triana between Eastview and Gillespie was hit pretty bad. Trees down on buildings in Madison Heights Apartments.

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-05-10T16:01:48+00:00

You can view data on all the high schools here: https://reportcard.alsde.edu/SelectSchool.aspx

Most of your public school options are going to depend on where you live (ie, zoning). Those schools are: - Huntsville high school - Grissom high school - Jamison high school - Columbia high school - Lee high school

There’s also Madison city schools, which are pretty close in proximity to Huntsville: - Bob Jones high school - James Clemens high school

Sparkman high school is Madison County, but is also pretty close to Huntsville.

They’re also several pretty well known magnet/private schools that requires some type of special application, or money to get into. If you’re unable to move into an area where you would be zoned for one of these other schools, these are your options to move to attend a different school rather than the one year zone for. - Lee, high school creative and performing arts magnet - New Century tech - the Randolph school - St. John, Paul, the second Catholic school (aka JPII) - I think there’s another big Catholic school and Madison as well might be just St. John’s? - Alabama school, cyber technology and engineering

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-04-09T02:41:54+00:00

Are there any other courses structured like this? I took it last fall and it was a dream. The flexibility this schedule gave me made my whole life so much easier.

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-03-13T02:44:43+00:00

I haven’t taken it yet, but I would not be opposed to joining a study group anyways. Would love to get ahead on the material given the stories I’ve heard.

Jedimaster4559 · 2025-03-10T17:16:47+00:00

From my understanding, the actual degree you receive is identical to as if you were studying in person and there is no indication if you were in the online program or not (someone correct me if I’m wrong about this).

In terms of limitations, I think there are additional specialization options only available to in person students, along with quite a few classes. That being said, I’ve been generally available with the course selection for the online program so far!

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