I've noticed personally that it seems like show bands tend to have the opposite of what military/corps bands do. Thats not true in all cases, but it seems like military/corps bands use dark-dark, light-light, while show bands use light-dark shoes.

Like I said, its not true in all cases, it just seems like the majority around me.

Our uniforms are green on top with black pants. We use black shoes. If we had white pants, we'd probably use white shoes. People think that they are So hard to take care of, but really al you need is bleach. Thats what Phantom said on their '05 DVD i think.

The Bottom Line: white shoes are ugly!!

white shoes are much easier to see on the field. our band uses white and white is !not! ugly...it's very distinguished and classy with the right uniform. if u have a bad band, black shoes it is, im not saying ur a bad band if you have black shoes. it isn't a biconditional statement.

Aesthetically, I'm not really partial to one or the other... whatever goes with the uniform.

When I'm trying to judge visual, I still don't care much. Black doesn't have the same visual contrast as white, but it's still easy enough to spot mistakes if you're looking.

From the standpoint of a marching member or instructor, black all the way. It's so much easier to keep them looking clean. It's not super difficult to keep white shoes looking clean (until you come across a muddy field), but not having to deal with it is one less thing to worry about for show preparation.

my band wears white shoes, but we should probably wear black because some people are not great marchers

Our band pretty much has to wear black because of our uniforms, but when it gets hot out, the shoes can really burn your feet!

i like our black shoes. I don't like cleaning them as often as I would have to with whites.

yeah cleaning the whites isn't fun because if you want to keep them clean hypothetically you should clean them after every performance, but who wants to do that? our band should have black because we have loads of people who don't march well but with our band colors of red white and blue, it just doesn't work.

Our band used to have white shoes, but they sucked. They would get so dirty. We had to clean them and they would get inspected after every performance. Now we have black uniforms and black shoes. They are so much easier to clean and like someone already said if you step in mud right before a performance they are less likely to get noticed. But i have to say the white shoes looked so good when we had perfect alignement. But the black ones look decent and are much less of a pain, so I like them.