Featured Camp of the Week: Backbeat Music Academy

From our friends at Backbeat Music Academy:

Backbeat Music Academy is a year-round music school that offers a range of music camps all summer and private music lessons all year at their Raleigh Hills facility. We offer full-day and half-day options, and also combo camps where kids can combine camps, such as the Try Everything+Rock Band camps.

Try Everything Camps

Often described as the Children’s Museum of Music, Backbeat takes their collection of hundreds of different instruments and lets the campers try them all out in their unique Try Everything Camps. Of course, these include the standard-issue piano, guitar, violin, drums, vocals, trumpets  etc, but they also have the less common:  Banjo, bandura, channgo, charango, guzheng, hammered dulcimers, hurdy-gurdy, kora, lyre, moog, theremin, tro, shamisen, shofar, and much, much more

Kids also learn the fundamentals of how sound works, how instruments produce and amplify sound and the goal is for them to be able to look at a new instrument they’ve never seen and figure out how to play a song on it without instruction.

Rock Band Camps

Backbeat offers Try Everything camps as standalone half-day camps, as well as full-day combinations with one of their Rock Band camps (which get their own half-day options as well). In the Rock Band camps, kids rehearse songs they like in bands and put on a concert at the end of the week. Rock band camps are split by age and skill level — with some camps for total beginners and others for more advanced players, teens, etc. Backbeat also has band classes all year.

Write Music for Computer Games Camps

Another unique camp is Backbeat’s Write Music for Computer Games camp. Featuring teachers who have written for top-shelf games like Assassin’s Creed and God of War, these camps are for total beginners to intermediate songwriters, although we can customize the material to some degree for the interest and skill level of each camper. These camps harness your child’s energy for video games and leverage the fun-factor to learn the hidden rules of how music works, and write songs that affect how people feel. Campers write music for open-world games, boss battles, side-scrollers, and learn how to adjust the music to change how the player should react. Through this camp, students will start to understand how music works, how songs are built, and how they can play the music themselves. Rounding out the experience, at the end of the week, kids will play games with their own songs.

Instrument Building Camps

New this year are camps where kids get to actually building musical instruments of their own and play them! They’ll learn the physics of how song and resonance work, how to physically manipulate the sounds to make music.

Backbeat also offers Songwriting camps, Strings camps and more.

Camps have versions for total beginners and for seasoned musicians. Some camps are full day and some are half-day. Group classes and private lessons are available year-round. Ask about options for before or after care.