GRAMMY Camp

What it is

GRAMMY Camp is the GRAMMY Museum's summer program for high school students who are serious about careers in music. Students choose a track — audio engineering, electronic music production, video production, songwriting, performance — and spend the week doing the actual work, ending 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, the building that houses the historic Columbia Studio A and the Quonset Hut.

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

Why I keep going back

The students arrive already knowing what they want, which is rare and worth protecting. My job for the week is less about teaching signal flow than about making sure nobody decides in the first hour that the technical side isn't for them. Most of what stops people isn't aptitude — it's the 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.

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 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.

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 the experience became the subject of my doctoral research — a study of how audio engineering faculty actually taught through COVID, rather than how anyone assumed they did.