WHAT WE DO
Each day at Carolina Studios, members are greeted upon entry to the studios and reminded of the safety and conduct guidelines. After they have registered, the first participants head over to a digital workstation. If there are more children signed up that day than available workstations, then they are encouraged to write lyrics, use the other recreation facilities available, and wait until the first round of sessions is over.
For the next two hours, the children are assisted at their request. At various times in the process, they are given tutorials on computer operation, navigating the web, and using digital media arts software. To the right is a young girl using one of our workstations to create music.
In Carolina Studios, members are given a brief tutorial on the program with which they will create songs to burn on a CD. After they demonstrate that they have an understanding of the software, students enter Level 1 of our five level program. Each level marks a milestone in the student’s understanding of the program material. The intended result is to produce a compact disc which would be a culmination of the beats they created and the lyrics and other things they added using the high-quality microphone in the studio’s isolation booth. Students always have the opportunity to come back another day and add more vocals, add instruments, replace old vocal tracks, or just start fresh with a new song.
This rewarding experience provides the participants with an on-the-spot result of their work, provides instant gratification, increases their self esteem, and motivates them to repeat this process and share the results with family, friends and the larger community. Because of the complexity of the music production software used in the program, children automatically learn basic and intermediate computer skills, which can be applied to their educational interests as well as their careers in the future.
