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A commentary on what's happening in the marching arts specifically around the Omaha metro area reaching into the surrounding states.
Inside the 50 (00:00)
So this is our first friend of the show. The man I try to convince to buy a prop way outside of his budget every year. He always finds a way to accommodate me, hailing from the one school outside of the Omaha Metro area to actually have a competing indoor drum line from Columbus, Nebraska. Director of bands at Columbus High School, the one, the only, Jeff Peabody. Round of applause for Jeff.
Jeff Peabody (00:28)
Thank you.
Inside the 50 (00:28)
Welcome, welcome to Inside the 50. You get to be the first friend of the show. You're the first. Not yet, you are the first. You get to hold that title for now as the number one. See? So I guess the first question, because we're in indoor season, also.
Jeff Peabody (00:36)
Is there more friends of the show or am I the only one?
Yay me, let's go team.
Inside the 50 (00:53)
I was gonna ask you a question. I mean, so how about props this year? I'm kidding. So is director of bands okay? Is that your official title? Is that what you put on emails? Plumice and the band director.
Jeff Peabody (01:01)
Sure. Yeah, that works good. I don't know Columbus High Band Director, a dude that does all this stuff. That's a pretty good title.
Inside the 50 (01:09)
I was going to put in there Fireworks Stand Extraordinaire.
Jeff Peabody (01:13)
That's right. Fireworks stand manager. I have a, I have a email signature that is multiple pages long with all of the different things that we try to do.
Inside the 50 (01:15)
Exactly.
should have looked that up and I could have said every single one of them.
Jeff Peabody (01:26)
And then the podcast would be over and I wouldn't have to say anything.
Inside the 50 (01:31)
So the first question I had was when and why did when did the drum line start indoor drum line start for Columbus and why did you feel like an indoor drum line was needed?
Jeff Peabody (01:45)
Well, I mean, the short answer is I didn't think anything of it. I had never even thought we would do Indoor Drumline. It was 2011. And we were coming off of what would have been my third fall as the high school band director. And so I'd been through three years of a marching band. And I had learned very quickly that I was not very good at it. And so I needed to go out and find
And so I'd started going to Music for All's summer symposium and some other places and I'd gotten in touch with a couple of groups that provide clinicians to come out and work with them to try and get the marching band going. And so I'd really invested a ton of my time in the marching band. And after that season, I thought, this is terrible. I don't want to do it anymore. In fact, I didn't even think I wanted to be a high school band director anymore. I'm like, I could go greed at Walmart or something.
Inside the 50 (02:41)
Yeah.
Jeff Peabody (02:43)
And I don't know, we were riding on a bus somewhere and a couple of my percussionists come up to me and they say, hey, we really wanna do indoor drumline. Can we do that? And I said, God, no, there's no way I'm not doing that. This has been a very challenging year so far. Why would I add more to it? And they're like, please Mr. Peabody. I'm like, I don't even know what we would do. What do we, where's the music come from? Do we need a floor? Do we need, I started asking all these questions. Do you know this? They're like, we don't know.
Inside the 50 (02:54)
Yeah.
Yeah, of course.
Jeff Peabody (03:12)
said, but we'll find out, we'll find out. And I'm like, no, I'm not doing it. So they left me alone for a while. And they come back and say, Mr. Peabody, Mr. Clee, who's the middle school director here, Mr. Clee says he'll do it if you'll do it. And I'm like, all right, fine. If you, so we have to answer some of these questions on when are we gonna rehearse? Where are we gonna get a show? How are we gonna, who's gonna design it? Because I don't know any of these things. I'm a tuba player from Wyoming. What would I know?
about any of that, I said, but if we can answer those questions and Mr. Clee is in, then I'll do it. So then they left me and they went back to Mr. Clee and said, hey, Mr. Clee, Mr. Peabody says he'll do it if you'll do it. So they totally tricked us into accepting and doing it. And so I went looking for when we could rehearse. We needed a gym. I talked with Ron Hardin, who is a judge within WGI and who was a band director in Bellevue at the time.
Inside the 50 (03:56)
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Jeff Peabody (04:12)
thinking about doing this, can you help me to find some resources? And so he pointed me in the right direction, and then he offered to write the drill for us that year. And so I told the kids, I said, look, it's not going to be free. You know, marching band at that point was essentially free. I think the kids paid like 50 bucks of a fee and that was it. I said, it's going to cost us about 300 bucks. Every kid will have to pay. Okay, that's fine. We'll do that. I said, and I'm not taking everybody. I only want the drummers who want it.
Okay, that's fine, we'll just take, everybody wants to, so that's not gonna be a problem. And they were right, everybody wanted to. And I said, and you have to come to all of the rehearsals and this is when the rehearsals are gonna be. So we were taking gym time when it was available, right? Nowadays, I can bump, I can bump like club basketball out of the way, and I have a certain standing. Back then we had no standing. So we were practicing at 8 p.m. on Friday night.
Inside the 50 (05:06)
Oh man.
Jeff Peabody (05:06)
and at 6 a.m on Sunday morning. I mean it was the craziest rehearsal schedule ever. And but they said yeah we will be there and they were and it was probably the most magical part and it's probably largely why I'm still a band director is that they I spent those months December, January, February, March with I think we had about 22 kids who all wanted desperately to be there.
who invested time into it, they were always on time. Those drummers hadn't been on time to marching band, I'll tell you. And they didn't learn all their music for marching band either. And a lot of that came from an inexperienced band director that wasn't doing the right things. And so, but they wanted this so bad that they showed up and they worked hard and it was everything you wanted band directing to be, right? You showed up, you had kids who worked hard and everything you told them they were willing to do.
Inside the 50 (05:40)
Of course not.
Oh yeah.
Jeff Peabody (06:03)
And so we ended up with it. We bought a tarp. We had some drill. We got, we bought a music from box six and put this whole show together. And we went out and we did it and we were having a good time. And I, you know, we were just learning as we go, asking a lot of questions. And, and, and Ron was very helpful through all of that. And we got to the end, there were about five drum lines in Nebraska at that point that were competing and we went to the championships that first year. And then we won.
Inside the 50 (06:09)
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Peabody (06:32)
And I'm like, oh crap, now I have to do it again. But it was nice that they won and that was really an amazing reward, but that really became secondary to the fact that it reminded me what I really loved about being a band director and what I really wanted to be able to do. And what can happen when you empower kids to do the right thing, right? Whereas I think what I'd been struggling with marching bands so far is I had not.
Inside the 50 (06:35)
Yeah.
Jeff Peabody (07:00)
realized how much I need to utilize and empower the leadership to do that. So it actually radically changed everything at Columbus. We did it that year and we had a ton of fun with it. And then the very next year with marching band, I said, you don't have to, it was a requirement up until then, right? If you were going to be in band, you had to march. No more after that. You only had to march if you wanted to. And then we empowered leaders to have more say in how the program was going to run.
And, you know, it just, all of a sudden marching band got to be more fun. And symphonic band got to be more fun because kids, you learned that while kids need structure, what they really want is a chance to be great at something and a chance to believe in themselves. And so that first year of winter percussion just did that.
Inside the 50 (07:46)
Well, I think, yeah, I mean, I think it's still true in your program. I mean, working with you guys and such, there's, I mean, it's not all just straight percussionists that are marching on the floor for you guys. You know, it's the kids that want to do an audition and, you know, put time in to make it happen because they want to be there and they love everything about it.
Jeff Peabody (08:11)
Yeah, we've opened it up to where I still don't require all of the percussionist to do it. It exists completely outside the school day. Because I do have a percussion class and that one focuses on concert ensembles. It is not a winter marching class. And so we open it up to who wants to do it. And so if we have a flute player or a French horn player or somebody who's like, I, hey, I had piano lessons way back in the day. I want to do it. Or I want to learn how to carry the 32 inch bass drum. You know, like, okay.
You know, we let everybody, anybody who's interested, they can all audition. And most of the time, I would say way more often than not, anybody that successfully completes an audition, we try to find a place for them. And so I don't know if we have five or six this year that are non-percussionists. And I have, I don't know, three or four of my regular percussion kids who just didn't, they wanted to play basketball this year, or they wanted to try.
Inside the 50 (08:39)
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Peabody (09:07)
Something else and we're like no go. It's fine We've got a place for you here to do this But we want only the ones who want to be all in to be part of the winner on side
Inside the 50 (09:17)
Well, so speaking of this year, what is, what's the show this season and how's it been going so far?
Jeff Peabody (09:25)
Well, this year's show is called Chaos Order. It's a box six show. We've really kind of stuck with their music for the most part because it comes readily available. Right. So we've dallyed in the marching band world with fully arranged shows just for us and that sort of thing. But with the winter percussion, we've stuck with stuff that we can get off the shelf and box six stuff is really good. The stuff out of Chino Hills and Pulse Percussion.
Inside the 50 (09:54)
not a sponsor of the podcast yet, but hopefully someday. We'll give them a free shout out today. There you go, exactly.
Jeff Peabody (09:56)
No, no, they can be. There you go. Feel free to invite them to be a sponsor. But that's where we get it from. And, and so the show talks about, you know, things coming going from chaotic to orderly, which I think is a great idea for a drum show is talk about I think that's their brains really, for the most part is mostly chaos and little bouts of little spurts of order that comes out.
We are going, we're going to go to the WGI regional in Denver this year. And so that's this weekend. And so we are just putting the finishing touches on the show. So we've put the whole show on the floor now. We're not a hundred percent done memorizing the music and that sort of thing. So there's still work to be done. So it's hard to ask somebody in the middle of a season, well, how's it going? Well, we're not done yet. We're, we're still working. There's still some work to be done. There's still some motivating to get done.
Inside the 50 (10:44)
Yeah. What? Ha ha.
Well, yeah, well, I mean, with this year going all the way to the end of the season, and you still got a good month or so, month, almost month and a half, it seems, month or so to get to that end product. Speaking of Denver, I mean, is everyone pretty excited to go out to Denver?
Jeff Peabody (10:57)
Yeah.
They are. Yeah, we always have enjoyed this. So we started several years ago going to a WGI regional ever since because our local circuit just doesn't have drum lines anymore. There's usually only one or two. I told you that first year there was five. None of those still do it. We're the only one that's still going from way back in 2011. And so we want to go and see other groups and compete against other groups. And so the first time we actually went to the Minneapolis regional and
Inside the 50 (11:21)
Yeah.
Jeff Peabody (11:38)
Now there's usually five or six. I think this year in Minneapolis, there's 10 A-class drumlines. And then we've started going out to Denver the last couple of years. Oddly, Columbus is situated halfway in between those two points. It's about the same number of miles either way. So we actually pick the regional based on where it falls in our spring break. And so, but the kids are excited. And some of them have very rarely seen the mountains. And so getting out there and seeing a new part of the country.
and competing against other drum lines other than, you know, we, we have good friends out at Bellevue that are in the A class within our circuit. And so we like seeing them and we, we compete with them and do our best to try to keep up. But it's always nice to go see some other folks too.
Inside the 50 (12:22)
Yeah, I guess what?
I mean, you kind of answered it already on why you guys travel out. I do think it's always, I think it's always important. You know, a lot of marching bands do it in the fall where they decide, OK, maybe I'm not going to go to the same four or five shows this year because I do want to see, you know, other people, other groups. And I think that, you know, especially for around this area, it is important to go, you know, Minneapolis, which has its own
You know same thing with Denver where they've got quite a few groups out there participating. It's it's a good way to I Mean to also motivate because you know you don't get you don't see the same couple of shows Every year even with our circuit locally You guys are mostly seeing guard shows because of how back-to-back everybody is on the percussion and wind side of things So what I guess what? You talked a little bit about the beginning, but you know what?
with some of the benefits that you've seen, you know, additionally, you know, having an indoor program, like with the overall, you know, student and with the program itself.
Jeff Peabody (13:37)
It's kind of a self recruiting activity and the school, the school district has inadvertently helped recruit kids to this because they go through this ACT test prep every year and try to help kids with because the ACT is now the state test for juniors. And so we give them all this test prep. Well, the test prep guy will come right out there and he'll say you need three things to be ready for college. So you need to take care of your grades. Number one.
Number two, you need to score well on your ACT. Do the best that you can. And number three, you need to be great at something. And so I have jumped on that every time. I'm like, I will give you a chance to be great at something. And so maybe we'll be great, maybe you won't be, but I will at least give you a path that will work for that. And so that's been a tremendous benefit at the school is kids stay in and they will do it for four years. I've had kids who no longer could fit band in there.
schedule at the end of their high school career because they are taking CNA classes or that you know they have a career path and so their day gets full who still come back and do the winter percussion on something like that. Yeah I can be there after school I can do all of that and those types of attitudes and that type of positivity is good for everything in the program. It helps the marching band continue to grow, it helps the symphonic band keep kids engaged and all of that. So
It's just you give them an opportunity, especially you want to attract the right kids, right? The ones who function the best in that type of a structured environment. And once you have that and they can be good at it and excel, then they just keep coming. And that's who comes back to the door every day.
Inside the 50 (15:21)
Yeah, I think it's always been interesting to see, you know.
this high school, I mean even me growing up in the Omaha area, right, you know, it's, you know, this high school from Columbus, which some people from Omaha would say from Western Nebraska, you know, because it just seems so far away from everybody that does the activity with, you know, indoor groups that, you know, you guys have been able to create the culture that makes students want to, you know, come back year after year to participate.
and continue to excel or try to excel at this activity.
Jeff Peabody (16:05)
Columbus is an interesting location. So we're about an hour and a half, two hours from Omaha, which means Omaha has, I don't know how many, are they at 20 high schools now in the Omaha metro area? There's a significant number of high schools. And so they can do all of this stuff and never really, they don't even need to get a bus, right? So just meet us over at this school today or meet us over at that school today. Whereas at Columbus, we just don't, right? And so it's unique that
Inside the 50 (16:17)
Oh, too many.
Jeff Peabody (16:35)
In order for us to do this activity, there's nobody else out here that does it. So we can't just get together with our friends from 80 miles north or 30 miles west and say, let's get together and compete. We have to go out looking and traveling to make it happen. And it's been really good for us, but it's put, it's definitely put the marching band in a weird situation, right? Because if we go compete with the marching band in the Metro, then that level of, or that
type of conversation, not necessarily level, but that type of competition is different than if we go west and compete with those because they just aren't doing that. They haven't invested in... The percussionists are way better now that they've been participating in the winter ensemble. They are way more skilled. And so when we go out west, and sometimes you run into some schools who don't have a budget for new heads, and so their heads are five years old and you can't tune them anymore, and you got...
They can't replace sticks and things like that. And so we get out there and we're like, holy cow, we're the greatest there ever was. And then we go an hour and a half the other direction. And like, man, we got so much left to learn. So it's kind of an awkward purgatory that we live in here, but we just try to take the best of everywhere that we can be and stay excited.
Inside the 50 (17:49)
Yeah.
of course. And I think that, I mean, I always think about ways to
to help programs, especially in the fall, get better. And with all the schools I've ever gone to, watched, or rehearsed for, the ones that have a pretty consistent drum line, it seems that everything else decides to click a little better because you kind of have something to rely on and then having indoor activity that helps continue the growth during the off season, per se.
Jeff Peabody (18:20)
Yeah.
Inside the 50 (18:32)
of fall that I think it helps even more to kind of have that backbone of a group going and continuing your career.
Jeff Peabody (18:39)
Well, and they walk in the fall confident and secure, even if it's new music that they're learning at that point. They've spent so much time performing and being on the stage, so to speak, that when your percussion ensemble can be confident and in time, well, you can forgive a lot of mistakes off of that, right? You can survive a lot of errors as long as the tempo and everything is steady, so.
It's made a huge difference for us for sure.
Inside the 50 (19:08)
You just gotta have a good enough drill rider to keep them in the center of the field. Not put them out in the 20s or something.
Jeff Peabody (19:14)
That's true. Sometimes you get new drill riders who are young and they will, they'll be more interested in what it looks like than whether it's going to keep the band together. And so they end up on the front left hash and over on the five yard line. And that gets problematic time wise.
Inside the 50 (19:29)
Yeah, sometimes.
Sometimes. So if someone, so say, you know, we've talked a lot about how you were kind of outside the area, you know, the Omaha area where there are these drum lines. If another say school was outside that area and wanted to, you know, start this thing or, you know, start to integrate it into their own program because they see, you know, benefits, what, you know, do you have any tips or tricks that you've learned along the way that you're like, you know what,
Help me if I would have known this before I started this crazy thing.
Jeff Peabody (20:07)
Well, I think if you really are interested and you take the long view, what worked for us was the kids wanted it. Right. So if you're maybe you just need your kids to know that it exists. Go to like we hosted a show out here. Find whichever one is close and take your kids to watch it and then see who wants it because they have to want to bad enough that they'll do the work. It's a lot of work and it's a lot of time. Although after a while they just hang out with each other so much that they don't know how to not.
hang out with each other. So, but I think that's maybe step one is make sure they understand what it is that you're talking about. Take them to a show, get a subscription to Flow Marching and watch the championships. We did, Mr. Clee and I did that once where we took two personal days off of school and we lived in my basement and we watched all of the A-Class championships just to see where, how everything was going. It was, that was a really nice spring.
Inside the 50 (21:01)
Oh wow.
Thanks for watching!
Jeff Peabody (21:07)
And I would start there. And then from there, you don't have to be all in, right? So one of the things we've learned from going to Denver is the groups that do standstill shows, right? So maybe you don't wanna get involved in all of it, but you wanna get started. So you can start with a standstill, or you could start with a concert ensemble. There are, all of those classifications exist within WGI. Or, you know, just...
jump on all in and go for it. If you've got kids who are willing to do the work, the resources we can find. It really isn't that hard. They are out there. You just gotta make a determination on what level you want and give it a shot.
Inside the 50 (21:51)
Yeah, I always think of the...
concert percussion section as something that's not quite as well tapped in certain areas. You know, because I mean, especially since this season, especially the end of it revolves around our district music contest within the state, it's almost like, hey, maybe there's an opportunity for some groups to even just get started by doing that, you know, just need to find a way to transport your equipment.
opportunities to say your concert percussion ensemble that you know maybe only gets to perform maybe once at a your own concert in the spring and then Desert Music Contest it gives them another few opportunities to one get feedback because I think that's such a huge thing is having percussionists from here around our area around the country that come in and it can actually give you feedback and make maybe turn on some light bulbs but then yeah more
performing it better.
Jeff Peabody (22:54)
I think the more opportunities we give our percussionists to get feedback from professional percussionists and percussion judges, the better off we can be. I think too often we put them in a room where they are judged based on their ability to play notes and rhythms, but what's really going on in their hands is far more sophisticated than that. And as I mentioned before, I'm a tuba player from Wyoming, and so I didn't comprehend most of what was going on.
But as we've spent more years doing that, having a percussionist who comes in and talks to those kids about what's supposed to be happening in their hands, what the stroke looks like, what the basic fundamentals look like, I don't think we're doing that anywhere near enough, especially outside any of the metro areas. There's just not enough folks going around to make sure kids know how to actually play the instrument the right way.
Inside the 50 (23:48)
Yeah.
I mean, it's tough, because I feel like most band directors are non-percussionists. I mean, there's just a few of them that continue on and then do it. And then especially at the high school level, where this activity is or these opportunities could be, it can be tough. Yeah, you've got woodwinds and you've got brass. Percussion is just its own beast. I remember going through percussion pedagogy class in college.
there's a lot of instruments to play a specific way.
Jeff Peabody (24:22)
Yeah. And a lot of stuff carries over, but it's, it's an art form to know which this stroke goes with what, which instruments it's multiple, but it's not all of them. Right. And this grip goes with which instruments it's multiple, but it's not all of them. So, um, I actually started by bringing in, there was a, I just, the internet was young, right? So I'm an old man. So I, way back when the internet was young and we still had dinner, dinner in order to connect. Um, I
Inside the 50 (24:47)
Yeah.
Jeff Peabody (24:50)
was looking around trying to find some way to help my percussionists. And I came across a website called Superior Marching Incorporated. And it's not even, I don't think it exists anymore. But it was a guy in Florida who would find experts in the, we found a guard person and a percussion person and they would send them out for a summer camp. And so we housed them for a week and they did a week long camp with ours. And so that's kind of where we started at.
It's funny, the guy that was actually in charge of that plays in the he played Indiana Jones at Walt Disney World. That was his day job. But then he would go home and then find specialists for bands. It was pretty awesome. But you know, he just in a world of the internet now and how easily accessible all of this is. You can find experts out there who you can either have them come in and spend days or you can do things kind of like you and I are right. I mean,
Inside the 50 (25:23)
and that.
Jeff Peabody (25:41)
We literally just found an app that we can communicate back and forth with on easily.
Inside the 50 (25:48)
Yeah, it's, yeah, it's.
It can be, yeah, it's cool. It's cool and I think sometimes it can be daunting, especially if, especially new band directors that are thinking, oh my gosh, there's all this stuff I have to do, but yeah. So, I mean, there's also, there's resources out there among their own peers that they can talk to. I think that's sometimes the first step is just, hey, talking to someone like you or someone, I mean, you did, you talked to Ron.
Jeff Peabody (26:13)
Mm-hmm.
Inside the 50 (26:21)
about it all and talking to somebody who's done it and kind of picked their brain first before deciding, okay, jumping in or maybe I can do it. Like you were talking about it at a more simplified level without having to go to world championships that first year to Ohio, you think you have to do it, but it's like, hey, there's opportunities or make them for yourself.
Jeff Peabody (26:37)
All right.
Or maybe that's never the trajectory. Maybe you're never going to Worlds, right? We didn't start a marching band because we were going to go to Grand Nationals. Right? We started a marching band and we compete locally. And I, I would love to have more of an ability to compete locally with our, my winter percussion as well. And so, you know, don't, don't wander into it thinking, well, I've got to go to Dayton, some of us just know, right, that those resources are hard to come by. That gets expensive. That may take more stuff than we have.
Inside the 50 (26:46)
Yeah.
Yeah
Jeff Peabody (27:12)
But there is a place below that. You can go to any regional you want. You can join the circuit and be part of the circuit. And you can compete and be 100% fulfilled from that and build. We did at one point think that we should go to nationals and we were gonna go, or to world championships. And so we had it all planned out and then it was in 2020 and they canceled it. So.
So we've decided we won't curse the world again with that for a while. We'll see when that opportunity comes.
Inside the 50 (27:42)
Yeah.
Well, thanks so much for being the very first interview on Inside the Fist. You are number one on the list. Number one on the list, the very first friend of the show. You're checking all the boxes.
Jeff Peabody (27:51)
So I'm the best one you've had. I'm so excited.
Yay!
I'll tell you, it was hard to squeeze inside the 50. So, but it was, it was, it was a joy. Thanks for inviting me.
Inside the 50 (28:06)
Oh yeah. Oh. Well you go- You also have the very first Inside the 50 joke, so you're doing it all.
Jeff Peabody (28:16)
Well, somebody's gotta explain why it's funny.
Inside the 50 (28:20)
Wow, we'll leave that up for the viewers. We'll leave it up for the viewers. All right, well, I'm sure we'll talk again at some other point because it's always fun and a pleasure. All right, for everybody at home, give a round of applause for the Jeff Peabody.
Jeff Peabody (28:23)
Sounds good.
All right, sounds good to me.