Just a periodic drum beat at least. Grew up with college games on ABC and the USC games always had a continual drum beat. Part of the college game experience.
No don’t need the whole Rocky Top 17 times just energy with a creative Duke flavor that’s just not there now.
I posted in thread on the game, and wanted to restate here: The Duke Band was better than Central at halftime today, playing with more power, more musicality and marching with more precision. Central is an historically excellent college marching band, and was better than Duke in some ways today, but on the whole, DUMB had the edge. This was amazing!
GTHC
I agree for slightly different reasons. D.U.M.B. was more balanced than NCCU's band - they had TEN TUBAS. Mostly that's what I heard when they played, TEN TUBAS.
Major respect and props to both bands who played, marched, and cheered in full uniform while sitting in the sun on a typically hot Durham afternoon in September.
-ramdevil
I was "recruited" by DU82 as a "walk on" beginning my sophomore year. I had never played in a marching band before. My high school didn't even have a football team. I did, however, play drums. I will be forever to DU82 for encouraging me to join DUMB. It became a huge part of my college experience. And as a snare drummer, I was in the basketball pep band during those days when we could lead cheers and play during play on the court.
We were also in the front row under the basket during what many may term the golden era of ACC basketball.
Please don't dis DUMB.
I remember Devil with the Blue Dress at football games back to the 70s I believe...anyway, a long time ago. I was small. I didn't know what the song was for the longest time, but it was that song where the brass section went through a routine of raising their instruments above their heads up and down at one part in the piece. It was really cool. It was something done one time a game I think, maybe twice, and everyone looked forward to it. I finally figured out what song it was.
This was long before K's basketball program helped make the song iconic with the BB pep band. I also remember before the 91 National Title game that CBS aired a battle of the bands - Duke v UNLV- and the featured Duke number was Blue Dress. Of course, competing with UNLV in music is kind of like competing with Southern Cal in music...but the Duke band was great.
As for Cameron not translating to Wade? Well that ship sailed when the university made the decision to renovate Wade to make it look pretty, instead of making it a home field advantage. Cameron seating 16,000 wouldn't be so great...shoulda downsized Wade, or right sized it, to say 30,000 and intimate (which may have not been possible physically given what they had to work with). The best thing to happen to Cameron was UNC moving to a dome...instead of also having a little bandbox arena that was always packed. At the time, they both listed sell outs as 8,800, IIR. Wrigley, Fenway, Camden Yards - smaller is often better.
For example, every crowd shot at ODU showed a full stadium. Doesn't matter on TV that it was 20,000 and not 80,000 - it was full. Meanwhile, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt - two schools who could reasonably recruit some of the same players ODU does, were both showing a whole lot of empty bleachers. Size matters, and not always in the same way, as you know...
Last edited by HereBeforeCoachK; 09-23-2018 at 12:01 PM.
My wife and I noted that pre-game. That was brutal and I probably sweated an extra litre of fluid simply watching and listening to them. A former DUMB member explained the how/why to me but it still made no sense. Why not let them attend and play in a t-shirt or polo and lightweight pants or even shorts for any game during which the forecast high is ~80 degrees or greater?
[redacted] them and the horses they rode in on.
I give them props this year! My friend captured a video, and I thought it was quite clever. Her son is a Sousaphone player, and dearly loves the DUMB. As a member of the Stanford Band back in the mid-70s, I'm not really used to this marching thing (the LSJUMB even back then was a scatter band), but I think they do a great job.
I was impressed with the performance of the band. I did notice the stadium piped in a lot of outside music between plays which limited when the Band could play. But they were strong at halftime and sounded great.
One question - where were the students Saturday? 3:30 kickoff on a clear Saturday afternoon for Homecoming, and there were less than 300 people in the student section. Looked like maybe 8 rows were filled. Granted it was a warm day, but c'mon.
Also, the away sideline was almost completely empty. Apparently NCCU fans couldn't be bothered to show up either. Aside from their band, there looked to be less than 500 people on that side of the stadium.
"There can BE only one."