Nathan E Adam
Project · 2009 to now

GRAMMY Camp

Seventeen years on the audio engineering faculty of the GRAMMY Museum's program for high school students, in Los Angeles, New York and Nashville, plus the two online curricula I wrote for the GRAMMY Foundation.

  • 50+ camps on faculty
  • 3 cities
  • 17 years
  • 2 curricula authored
GRAMMY Camp students gathered around a mixing console during a session
The format that hasn't changed in seventeen years: put teenagers on a real console and let them run it.

What it is

GRAMMY Camp is the GRAMMY Museum's summer program for high school students who are serious about careers in music. Students pick a track (audio engineering, electronic music production, video production, songwriting, performance) and then spend the week doing the actual work, ending up with original music and video they made themselves.

I've taught audio engineering there since 2009. Los Angeles at USC from the start, New York at the Converse Rubber Tracks studios from 2011 to 2018, and Nashville at Belmont from 2012 to 2018, including camps at 34 Music Square East, which is the building that houses the historic Columbia Studio A and the Quonset Hut. Teenagers, in that room. I never quite got over it.

That's more than fifty camps. The number in some of my published bios is higher; this one is counted, not estimated.

Eight people gathered at a single mixing desk during a GRAMMY Camp session
Eight at one desk. Photo: Tiffany L.
A full GRAMMY Camp Nashville class photographed together in a Belmont studio
A full Nashville class, in the Belmont studios.
Nathan Adam seated at a console with GRAMMY Camp students standing behind him watching the screen
Nashville. The bit that matters is who's standing behind the chair.
Nathan Adam taking a photo with GRAMMY Camp students crowded around a studio console
A camp group at the desk, mid-session.

Why I keep going back

The students turn up already knowing what they want, which is rare and worth protecting. So my job for the week is less about teaching signal flow than about making sure nobody quietly decides in the first hour that the technical side isn't for them. Most of what stops people is never aptitude. It's that one moment early on where the gear looks like it belongs to somebody else.

It's also the clearest test I know of whether an explanation actually works. A room of sixteen-year-olds will not politely pretend to follow you.

Nathan Adam with Shannon Sanders and Dave Haywood of Lady Antebellum at a GRAMMY Camp session
With Shannon Sanders and Dave Haywood of Lady Antebellum. The working professionals who come through are half the reason a camp week lands.
Nathan Adam speaking with a microphone in front of a GRAMMY Foundation backdrop
Opening a session. Photo: Tiffany L.

The curriculum

Camp reaches the students who can get to a camp. Two projects for the GRAMMY Foundation were about the ones who can't.

  • GRAMMY Career Pathways course dashboard showing Audio & Mixing, Video Production and Electronic Music Production tracks
    The Recording Academy Presents: GRAMMY Career Pathways
    GRAMMY Foundation · 2018 · online curriculum
    Three tracks — audio and mixing, video production, and electronic music production — built for students who couldn't get to a camp in person.
  • GRAMMY Camp: Weekends
    GRAMMY Foundation · 2016 · online curriculum
    The weekend format, designed to run in community spaces rather than university studios.

GRAMMY Camp Weekends, 2017

The Weekends curriculum ran in San Antonio, San Diego and Los Angeles in 2017, in partnership with Best Buy Teen Tech Centers and the Boys and Girls Club. More than eighty students across three tracks (audio engineering and electronic music production, video production, and songwriting) with video producer Hadaya Turner and performing artist Laura Donohue. Each weekend ended with ten original songs and a video the students shot and cut that day.

I also hosted the discussion panels, which put GRAMMY-winning artists and producers in a room with teenagers who had spent two days doing the same work.

A room of students working at iMacs with headphones and MIDI keyboards during a GRAMMY Camp Weekends session
A Weekends lab. Every station is a student making something that didn't exist that morning.

When it went online

The camps moved to video for the pandemic years. Running a hands-on audio class through a laptop is not the same job, and saying so out loud eventually turned into my doctoral research: a study of how audio engineering faculty actually taught through COVID, as opposed to how everybody afterward assumed they had.

Nathan Adam in a studio control room facing a video call grid of dozens of students on a large monitor
Teaching camp from the control room to a grid of faces. Same console, no room.
GRAMMY In The Schools GITS Fest graphic: The Art of Tech, Performance and Business, moderated by Nathan Adam
Moderating The Art of Tech, Performance & Business for GRAMMY In The Schools Fest.

Sources

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