SUNY Purchase's precollege music programs are about to enter their fourth year, and we've got a lot of fun stuff planned that I wanted to share!
These programs are of course the Songwriting Workshop, Creative Vocal Lab, and Vocal Intensive. Songwriting runs from June 30 to July 11, Creative Vocal Lab from July 14 to the 25th, and Vocal Intensive from July 28 to August 8.
Songwriting Workshop
The first big announcement we have is that we have a new lead instructor for Songwriting Workshop, Mr. Tom Rosato. This guy does everything: he's a rock/pop bassist, drummer, keyboardist, and guitarist, he's even been a jazz pianist. But what he really does is produce & engineer. As front of house for the Bard Avon theatre he's mixed everyone from Ben Folds to The Temptations; as a producer he's worked on some of my favorite recent recordings, and recently we had delightful experience of making the Twisted: Twisted record together, which was a blast. In fact, just about anything that's well-mixed on my website was probably mixed by him. We've yet to find a genre he can't handle.
He's helping us to make the program even more hands-on. We're talking guided collaborations, group recordings, performance workshops, lyric-writing labs, etc, with more in-studio recording and songwriting challenges than ever before. We'll be analyzing a combination of classic songs and modern hits, figuring out what makes them work, and creating our own. This program is consistently the most popular and well-attended of all Purchase's summer programs, and it's a real hoot.
Other course instructors include myself, Evan Feist (scroll down for his redonk credits) and Blake Reynolds (who has created some incredible orchestral video game scores, and understands pop music like nobody's business), plus some other awesome peeps.
