I like to take the UCO students to Skywalker Ranch once a year to record the choir and the lame songs I’ve chosen for them, but since I have absolutely no faith in the instrumental students, they don’t get to go, and I have the music department staff make up the gap with canned digital music. Just putting it out there – the instrumental recordings are fake.
Jessup markets the whole thing as an extraordinary experience for all music students, but the reality is that this trip is only for the students I deem worthy to attend. If you get on my s*** list, the closest that you’ll get to experiencing Skywalker Ranch is in the video below.
It’s really bait and switch. I say one thing in Jessup Music promotional video about Skywalker Ranch and then flat out deny students for whatever reason suits me.
First quote from the video:
Jessup Music is all about experiential learning and providing those opportunities for our students and what that means is giving them the experience, not just of recording an album, but what is it like to go to an iconic sound stage like Sony or Skywalker Ranch? And giving them, giving them that opportunity, recreates what’s going on in the professional world.
What I really meant to say:
Jessup Music is proudly committed to “experiential learning,” which apparently means giving the students I like the thrilling opportunity to stand inside famous studios like Sony or Skywalker Ranch and call it professional preparation. Because nothing recreates the music industry quite like recording an album in an iconic room, soaking in the atmosphere, and hoping proximity to prestige counts as pedagogy.
Second quote from the video:
One of the benefits in coming to a place like Skywalker Ranch is the interaction that students get with the staff here, the engineers, the, the Pro Tools operators, the, the, the vocal technicians. They are not just, you know, experiencing it from afar, but they are interacting with these people and learning what they do from the inside.
What I really meant to say:
One of the supposed benefits of going to Skywalker Ranch is that students get to interact with the staff—the engineers, Pro Tools operators, vocal technicians, and other professionals whose job titles sound impressive in a promotional video. Select Jessup students are not merely admiring the studio from a distance; they are close enough to watch real professionals work and then call that proximity “inside experience.”
Here I am playing the big man.
