REMIX REVEALS THE METHOD BEHIND THE MAGIC
Atlanta After-School Program Brings
Young Artists Into The Recording Studio

Story and photos by Lane Wilson, Atlanta Chapter Director

(Sounding Board, October 2002) There is a standard of excellence in popular music that is respected by even its youngest connoisseurs. Grammys are great and gold records are cool, but the hit recording that goes multi-platinum - that's the ne plus ultra, the Everest of accolades, and it earns a recording artist the ultimate admiration.

Yet most young fans of popular music can only speculate about the mysterious process by which stars achieve this status. They are impressed by the glamour and the financial rewards of such success without fully understanding the time, training, craft, and collaboration that go into achieving it.

REMIX participants from the Lawrenceville Boys & Girls Club lay down vocal tracks with recording engineer Dede Vogt (far left) and composer Susan Ottzen (far right) at Atlanta's The Sound and the Fury Studio.

This spring, the Atlanta Chapter's REMIX program gave members of two Boys & Girls Clubs the chance to find out exactly what it takes to create and record a CD. REMIX was an unprecedented program - the chapter's first after-school initiative and its first collaboration with Boys & Girls Clubs. It also represented the first composer residency for Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Atlanta, an organization that has provided after-school programs and facilities since 1938.

Boys & Girls Clubs currently has 20 locations throughout the Atlanta area, serving more than 26,000 kids each year. Sixty-six percent of those young people come from disadvantaged backgrounds. The clubs' programs focus on three core areas of personal development: health, education, and employability. REMIX was designed to fit within that focus by giving club members a chance to learn about career skills in the music industry while creating their own compositions.

The chapter's other partner in REMIX was its funder, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. The Blank Foundation has a strong commitment to supporting after-school programs that reach at-risk youth in need of special opportunities for development. The grant provided for a pilot program that would test the concept of a musical residency with a vocational slant. The concept was further developed with Youth Art Connection, a division of Boys & Girls Clubs that coordinates its arts-related programs.

Through Youth Art Connection, two clubs were selected for REMIX - the James T. Anderson Club, in the northwestern suburb of Marietta, and the Lawrenceville Club, located on the opposite side of the city. Composer Susan Ottzen - a Kentucky native, harpist, and music teacher - was chosen to work with the Lawrenceville Club. Miguel Romero - who was born in Cuba and currently leads [the] Miguel Romero Ensemble - was selected as composer-in-residence for the Anderson Club.

Youth from the James T. Anderson Boys & Girls Club, along with composer Miguel Romero (second from right), explore the technological side of recording at Allgood Productions, an Atlanta recording studio.

The goals of REMIX were both challenging and unique. The composers would meet with club members weekly, for four months. They were to work with the youth to create three short pieces of music, write a commissioned work of their own, and help the kids produce a professionally recorded and mastered CD of the music.

Ranging in age from 10 to 13, the eleven club members who joined the program were willing to take a chance on REMIX and test their interest in writing and performing music. Although their formal training in music was limited, most had participated in sign-and-mime choirs, step dancing groups, or a school band class. They were keenly aware of the latest trends in popular music, and they knew what they liked.

Ultimately, the REMIX concept worked exceptionally well - in part because both composers acknowledged and responded to the kind of music that the participants found exciting. At both clubs, the source of that excitement was the rhyming verses and powerful pulse of rap. Several of the kids had already experimented with writing rap lyrics, and their talent for language shines through the songs they created.

The composers also deferred to the kids as creative choices were being made, giving participants the chance to experiment with their own ideas and learn from their decisions. The REMIX participants all started from scratch - creating a concept for a song, developing the lyrics, and working out the supporting accompaniment. The options they explored for accompaniment were wide-ranging - from rhythm tracks created on a drum machine to plastic paint buckets used as percussion instruments. The composers also worked with professional musicians to create acoustic tracks using drums and bass guitar.

A total of eight pieces, four from each club, were completed. The subjects range from autobiography ("I'm The Boy" and "The Key") to friendship ("BC Stunners" and "Hot Fries") to sheer fun ("Shake and Bake Your Chicken Steak"). Ottzen added her own signature harp to "Hot Fries," the piece she wrote for the Lawrenceville participants, while Romero composed a piano solo, "Children's Song," for the Anderson Club. As they rehearsed and refined their songs, both REMIX teams began to understand the process by which music of any style comes to life. As one participant commented, "I learned that music is not just a beat with nice words. There's quality, meaning, and different instruments."

After weeks of preparation, both clubs entered professional studios to record their music. For the kids, this proved to be the most compelling aspect of the program - the chance to make a CD of their own songs. They all put on headphones and learned how to perform in a sound booth in sync with the pre-recorded tracks. Through demonstrations of the mixing console and Pro Tools editing software, they saw how the music could be influenced as much by technology as by the human performance. They also learned that being a recording engineer was a potential career. And the permanence of the recording, as well as the public nature of recorded music, reinforced their determination to match just the right words with just the right beat.

As each group listened to the final mix of their music played back in the studio, their excitement registered in grins of glee and quiet smiles of satisfaction. Their reactions left no doubt that the work had all been worthwhile. By their own efforts, they had been transformed from awestruck fans into budding recording artists. For these young people, it was a life experience that could only be described as multi-platinum.