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The “lightbulb” moment behind Electronic Music Club (EMC) started when Erik Carlson, founder of EMC and a piano teacher of 12 years at the time, was in the middle of a lesson when his student announced that he was “sick of piano” and would rather be making techno instead.
Years later, Electronic Music Club offers hour-long after-school lessons on site at over 30 schools in the Portland area, and continues expanding throughout Portland, Beaverton, and Eugene. Instructors provide laptops preloaded with Ableton, a popular music production software, and walk students through the basics of the program before giving them time to experiment on their own. Projects each term range from making beats to creating a producer tag to scripting and recording fictional radio broadcast ads, each lesson teaching new functions within the program. At the end of the term, students take home a flash drive loaded with everything they’ve created.
In traditional elementary education, visual art has a lot more room for experimentation, while music has more “prescribed paths,” Carlson says. Electronic Music Club allows kids to suspend music theory for a little while and have fun with questions like “does this sound cool?” Over the five years he’s run the program, Carlson has received feedback from kids and parents alike about how EMC was the highlight of the school year, and how it helped with difficult transitions.
For Andrea Caudill, a parent of two, the after-school program was a way to get her kids excited about making music outside of the more structured classical music pedigree she grew up with.
“Music is a big deal in our house, but I haven’t had any success in having either one of [my kids] be interested in a more traditional approach,” she says. When her son, Henry, was interested in signing up for Electronic Music Club, it was a new outlet for him to explore and learn music.
“I didn’t realize how fun it would be to create all this music on a computer,” Henry says. Through EMC, he gets the opportunity to experiment with different sounds and the freedom to have control over everything he makes. “It’s my music, my way, the entire way.”
Cole Johnston, administrator and substitute instructor at EMC, says the biggest thing Electronic Music Club does is build students’ confidence in their ability to create. They learn new hard skills
and can leave with a song that they really like, he says.
Another instructor, Alina Kulakevich, has watched students stand up and dance while presenting their song to the class.
Sauvie Yurek-Naiman, an EMC student of three years, decided to present one of her songs she created through the club for her school’s talent show, using Ableton and a Novation Launchpad. Leading up to the talent show, Carlson, along with other members of EMC staff met with Sauvie to help her feel well-prepared. Sauvie says she plans to create a new song for her talent show this year as well. “It’s like a little community,” says Emily Yurek-Naiman, Sauvie’s mom.
Electronic Music Club also offers more specialized summer camp programs such as “Video Game Music Camp” and “Pop Star Boot Camp!,” in which students write, record, and produce their own original songs. At “Intro to Electronic Music” camp, kids are introduced to—and taught how to produce—a new electronic music subgenre each day.
Electronic Music Club has the same struggles as any after-school club: The kids are sometimes tired after sitting in class all day, hungry, restless, and ready to go home. It also has challenges unique to the program. For some students, especially those on the younger end and long past the days when schools taught mandatory typing classes, Electronic Music Club is their first time working with technology that isn’t centered around a touchscreen. Alongside learning how to create their own beats, kids are also learning skills like file management and how to use a laptop’s trackpad.
Despite that, instructor Skyler Pia says students have done an impressive job figuring out an “admittedly daunting interface” like Ableton.
Another instructor, Jonathan Nasrallah, echoes a similar sentiment, and sees Ableton as a cool introduction to computers in a context of self-expression and autonomy. “I want kids to know that technology is something that empowers them,” Nasrallah says. “Not something that has power over them.”
While Nasrallah emphasizes the importance of learning traditional analog instruments, through EMC, students are able to reduce the mechanical learning curve of the piano or flute, and jump much faster into the creative self-expression part of playing music with synths and software.
Pia also says that it’s been a fun challenge as an educator to balance the needs of students who are “prodigious” and super interested in music, and those who are starting out.
“Finding a way to explain [music production] to kids of all levels of skill and interest is not easy,” she says, “and I think Erik and Cole have done a good job of giving us a template for how to do that.”
As for the future of Electronic Music Club, Carlson is hoping to expand its programming into middle schools, as well as introducing more advanced lesson plans for students returning to EMC year after year.
The summer camps, once based out of Lloyd Center, are finding new homes at Childpeace Montessori in NW Portland and Marylhurst School in Oregon City. For parents and adults wanting to participate themselves, EMC offers “Beats ‘n Brews,” a hands-on class with catered food and drink.