For the record: Arts magnet school in High Point now has recording studio
HIGH POINT — For eighth-grader DeCarlo Crowell, there are so many things to appreciate in the new recording studio at Penn-Griffin School for the Arts in High Point.
He loves the big speakers, the drum kit that’s available for students to play, and all the high-tech recording technology at his fingertips.
“It’s like you can experiment with anything,” he said.
The recording studio, which opened in the latter part of the last school year, is a collaboration between Guilford County Schools and the nonprofit Notes for Notes, a national organization dedicated to providing free access for youth to instruments, instruction and recording studios.
The group has designed, equipped and staffed recording studios in afterschool clubs in various cities, including Santa Barbara, Calif. and Milwaukee, Wis.
This is the organization’s first recording studio in a public school in the United States.
Penn-Griffin is a Grades 6-12 arts magnet school that resulted from the merger of Penn High School and Griffin Middle School in 2003.
According to the school’s website, students at Penn-Griffin get to explore multiple arts areas in sixth grade and then choose an area as their arts concentration in seventh and eighth grade. Penn-Griffin offers fewer slots for high school students, and there’s a required audition to get in or stay in.
Philip Gilley the CEO and co-founder of Notes for Notes, Inc., said the Country Music Association helped connect Guilford County Schools with Notes for Notes, when the district came to them looking for help in creating a recording studio along with a music production and engineering program.
Gilley said Guilford County Schools was, to his memory, the first school district to approach the group.
“People don’t think an organization like ours exists unless they stumble across us,” he said.
Gilley said they were further impressed after district leaders introduced them to Howard Stimpson, Penn-Griffin’s principal, who they realized was up for empowering a different sort of learning model. Learning that the school was the alma mater of John Coltrane was icing on the cake. (This paragraph has been updated to correct Stimpson's name spelling, 9:51 a.m. 10/4/2023)
It was a school he said, that the organization leaders realized, “we were really going to mesh and jell with.”
For now, it’s the students at Penn-Griffin getting to use the the studio, but the eventual plan is to open it after school to any teenagers with a need for a recording studio, potentially some time in 2024.
Gilley said that because even the most affluent school in the district doesn’t have this resource, the recording studio’s after-school availability should help bring together teenagers of all different backgrounds.
At Penn-Griffin, about 150 students are getting to use the studio as part of the school’s modern music class, but there’ve also been some students making use of it from other departments.
“We’ve got some great singers that are from the theater department and from the band program that come and do the jam band,” Lee said. “There are some orchestra students that really love to learn how to engineer ... so it just provides an extra access.”
Since the middle school at Penn-Griffin is bigger than the high school, middle school students make up the majority of students taking modern music. The idea is for them to get a taste of it, but the group that’s expected to use it the most is the high school modern music class, which has 11 students.
Lee said that the modern music class started as an online-only course during the pandemic, then in-person, but without the studio, and now finally integrated with the new studio.
Max Miller, a Notes For Notes senior producer and educator, is embedded at Penn-Griffin, helping Lee with the classes and serving as studio manager at the school.
On Thursday of last week, Miller had a couple students give presentations on beat making for the high school class.
One of those students was Camryn Hannah, a ninth-grader, who shared a short composition that she edited together by combining various electronic music elements in a computer software program. Hannah told the class that she listened to Michael Jackson’s music to help get inspired.
Students in the class fill all sorts of roles, such as sound engineers, beat makers, producers and recording artists. It all depends on where they gravitate.
Upcoming assignments include recording a cover song and writing an an original song.
For those assignments, Lee said, they’ll be pulling together various skills and knowledge from the modern music class, like chords they’ve learned and gear that they’ve learned how to use.
Later during Thursday’s class, the high schoolers gathered in the lounge area of the studio for a debriefing on a couple recent gatherings showcasing the recording studio.
One of the students raised a concern that it seemed like many of the adults they met were assuming that the students were all going to be going into the music industry, even though something like half the group isn’t planning on that.
Lee and Miller reassured the students that preparing students who want to be music industry professionals is far from the sole point of the having the class and giving them access to the recording studio.
Working on projects in the studio, the students are learning skills like planning, sequencing and problem solving, as well as artistic perspective. And they are getting a chance to let their creativity shine.
“There’s a power of walking into a space that makes you excited to be in it,” Lee said. “I hope that that even though the high schoolers are coming here only for the last quarter of their day, they are excited to be at school because of this.”