During the beginning steps of scheduling last year, students at RHS learned that many new classes were going to be introduced with the coming school year. The favorite pick seems to have come in the form of assistant band director Craig French’s class, ‘Music Technology.’
“It’s something that I’ve always been interested in personally. I think it’s a great way for me to teach one aspect of music that probably doesn’t get covered a lot,” French said.
French’s passionate interest in everything music and his determination to teach new and useful material led him to this idea.
“The goal was, well… When I got hired they told me I would have to teach this class called ‘Music in Our Lives’ and I think it was honestly a really bad idea,” French said, “I wanted to create a class that students desired to do, not some class they just wanted to dump in so they could get an easy credit.”
As the assistant director of the band, students speculate as to where French obtained such a wide range of knowledge over the recording side of music. But he reveals to us that it’s nothing new to him.
“I worked in college doing sound production,” French said, “Actually there was a guy who owned a company that recorded everything for the university, and he hired me to work with him. We did all the recordings for two and a half years.”
When new classes first appear in the booklets at RHS, there’s no telling how much of a response the student body will trigger. However, RHS kids found themselves having to battle it out for the class.
“My ideal was to have four or five studios set up, but financially, we could only afford one. I wanted to do sixteen students max,” French said, “There was a flood of students that wanted to do it; over 80 kids registered for it. So I went to administration to decide how to whittle that down, and long story short it went from 16 to 20, now to 25 and I think we’ve actually got about 23 students now. It’s probably still a little bit too big!”
Without a doubt, Music Tech is becoming a very influential class at RHS, and French has many reasons to praise it.
“Hopefully this is going to introduce them into fields like audio engineering… basically being the ‘studio guy’ or a sound engineer that works in the studio. I want this to inspire at least a few people to do this for a living. I hope this opens doors and makes them excited about it,” French said, “Secondly, there a lot of kids in our school who love to play music; we have band, some rock bands, and they don’t have any avenue with which to record their material. They can’t afford a professional studio, and they can’t afford to buy their own equipment, so maybe this is a way for them to get that.”
