While Baton Rouge Music Studios is a music academy, its owners prefer to see it as a “dream factory.”
Celebrating the school’s 10th anniversary this year, owner and founder Doug Gay has been reflecting on the unique opportunities it’s presented to young musicians—including performing at festivals such as the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and learning from pros like Kenny Neal.
Gay estimates more than 2,000 students have participated in Baton Rouge Music Studios programs during the past decade. Currently, the Studios sees 175–300 students per week.
“I don’t want to call us a school of rock, but we are an industry-centered music academy,” Gay says.
Offerings at the school include summer camps and the Young Band Nation program, which puts students in front of audiences. Students also can learn about audio engineering and take private and group lessons in contemporary music’s most popular instruments: voice, guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, woodwinds and brass.
Guitar remains the most popular choice for private lessons, says Carolyn Ray, the school’s operations manager. “We’re always looking for bass players.”
In January 2015, Baton Rouge Music Studios moved from a 2,200-square-foot space on Bluebonnet Boulevard to a 4,200-square-foot building on Burbank Drive. The new facility includes 10 private lesson rooms, a recording studio with isolation booths and the Blue Verse Room, a 1,500-square-foot performance and rehearsal space.
The new facility the music academy moved to last year features a recording studio with isolation booths.
Private lessons at the studios include Rock Lab, a program in which students learn songs they’ll ultimately perform with bands. The Young Band Nation program’s weekly band rehearsals are followed by performances in the Blue Verse Room and even at local events and festivals throughout Baton Rouge.
Baton Rouge Music Studios’ top-tier students are enrolled in the school’s Advanced Industry Training program.
“They take music business courses and play the most notable gigs we book,” Ray says. Those include Jazz Fest, Festival International in Lafayette and the International Blues Challenge in Memphis.
For certain bookings, the school shares a portion of performance fees with the student musicians.
“We want them to experience being paid after a show,” Gay says. “It feels good, like, ‘Yeah, I am a professional! I’m getting paid!’”
For the past six years, student bands from Baton Rouge Music Studios have played Jazz Fest’s Kids Tent.
“As they play, people walking by the tent come in,” Gay says. “By the end of the show, there’s like a hundred more people there than when [the show] started.”
In Baton Rouge, student bands performed several weeks at Lava Cantina’s Sunday brunch.
“It’s about creating a quality performance and a quality product,” Gay says. “The students create an electronic press kit. They’re on Facebook and Twitter. They get experience booking gigs.”
Music instructor John Mann works with a student during piano lessons at Baton Rouge Music Studios.
In 2000, Gay, a drummer whose credits include playing with Houma blues artist Tab Benoit, launched what became Baton Rouge Music Studios from his living room. When he had more students than he could handle, he found other teachers for them. When Gay realized he could earn referral fees for matching students with teachers, he made it his business.
“The draw for the teacher is that we handle all of the booking, scheduling and collections,” Gay says.
One of the school’s newest programs is the Minor Music Movement, a series of monthly Sunday jazz sessions. So far, local music pros Michael Foster, John Gray, Kenny Neal and Andy Pizzo have led these jams.
“We are fortunate to have access to an amazing pool of local musicians who have always expressed interest in helping us in whatever way we needed them,” Gay says.
The Minor Music Movement jam sessions are totally informal, he adds. Instead of following a lesson plan, the teachers use the two-hour sessions for spontaneous collaboration with the students.
“The students are introduced to local musicians they’ve never seen or heard before, or who they’ve known and always wanted to meet,” Gay says. “And the professionals are exposed to incredibly talented young musicians they may otherwise have never met or jammed with.”
Private lessons remain the backbone of the school’s curriculum. But Gay sees them as the beginning rather than the end of music instruction. And from there?
“The sky’s the limit,” Gay says. “We want to open young people’s eyes to the possibilities.” brmusicstudios.com
