The Kensington camp is at least the fourth rock camp to spring up in the county. East Coast Music Production Camp, now known as Bach to Rock, has sites in Bethesda and Gaithersburg. The Paul Green School of Rock in Silver Spring opened in 2006 and is part of a national chain of School of Rock camps.
At each camp, students perform live at the end of the program.
Aaron Rosenberg, site director for Bach to Rock in Gaithersburg, said the Bethesda program was popular enough to warrant an upcounty site.
‘‘They’re popular for a number of reasons,” he said Monday afternoon. ‘‘Mostly because they’re fun. They’re a lot of fun.”
East Coast Music Production Camp merged with Cambridge Information Group, a worldwide group of publishing companies and educational institutions, to become Bach to Rock and opened the Gaithersburg site last week.
Students write and record songs during one or two week sessions. Rosenberg said a number of campers attend one session and return again.
‘‘The fact that music is a gateway to so many different opportunities, especially when you want to link it with math and reading [makes rocks camps popular,]” he said.
Nearly 60 future rock stars attended the first-ever GIGS Summer Rock Camp with studio owner Sean Gaiser and other instructors, learning the ins and outs of the music business, and taking music lessons.
Campers formed bands and wrote, recorded and produced their own songs guided by singer-songwriters and touring musicians. Each Friday, the bands performed live for adoring fans, and Ian needed some rest before the next day’s concert.
‘‘Tomorrow’s show is gonna be awesome,” said Joe Krivda, 11. The Kensington boy was the new bass player for Running With Scissors. He learned how to play the instrument that week during camp.
‘‘I played guitar before, but this is my first time playing bass,” he said.
Ian, Joe and Jimmy Ronan of Running With Scissors are friends from Holy Redeemer Elementary School, and play guitar together after school. But it was their first time in a band together, and some take lessons at GIGS during the school year.
Gaiser, a Kensington native, wanted to find a way to keep kids in the studio over the summer. He, instructor Taylor Carson and others teach 160 kids during the school year in private music lessons, but just more than 60 keep learning chords, scales and progressions when school is out.
Gaiser said that while he wasn’t familiar with the other rock camps, he wanted to give kids experience with more than writing and playing songs.
At GIGS, kids learn to manage money, promote their show and run a band.
‘‘We run through the gauntlet of every single thing that a real band deals with,” Gaiser said. ‘‘You have all these things to do, and only so much time and money to do them.”
Bands are given a budget of around $10,000 in GIGS cash at the beginning of the week when they sign with one of the counselors’ recording labels. The cash goes to renting equipment, studio time and promotion.
While the boys in Running With Scissors rehearsed their songs, girls in another band, Cable, spent their final $300 dollars on touching up their vocal tracks.
Lori Koenick, 12, of Potomac said spending the GIGS cash wisely was a challenge.
‘‘We hired Taylor to help us write the lyrics for our song,” she said. ‘‘We also needed help with the songs and recording.”
By contrast, counselors at Paul Green’s School of Rock in Silver Spring emphasize performance and not management education according to Len Sitnick.
‘‘The kids have regular weekly private lessons, but are cast into seasonal shows we do at live venues,” said Sitnick, manager of the Silver Spring site. ‘‘And it’s full-on shows, too, not cute little recitals.”
By holding students to high musical standards and emphasizing the live performances, he said the School of Rock staff uses the songs kids learn as a gateway into more advanced musical concepts.
‘‘There’s no other way that these kids are going to get this opportunity at their age,” he said. ‘‘This really gives them a chance to do what they wouldn’t normally be able to do.”
Carson, a GIGS teacher and the camp’s music director, helped write the music and lyrics for Cable and Running With Scissors, but the kids did most of the work.
‘‘I came in with this riff that I played for the kids,” he said between takes in the orange recording studio. ‘‘They really just took the hook and ran with it.”
The eight counselors spend time the first day getting to know the campers’ talents and place them in groups of similar music tastes and ability.
‘‘I beefed up the staff on purpose this first year,” Gaiser said. ‘‘So if they see one kid is good at writing, I can get a kid and counselor together and get an original song rolling.”
Counselors aren’t the only ones teaching students about rock. There are band of the day quizzes on the history and stage presence of artists like Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
‘‘When I first walked in here I thought it was going to be cool. There’s all those guitars hanging on the wall,” said Eve Friedland, 11, of Kensington. ‘‘We learned a lot about how Led Zeppelin got their name ... and the counselors play for us at the end of the day.”
Gaiser said the afternoon performances show the kids how songwriting and playing an instrument comes together, and vents some creative urges they all feel.
‘‘This thing has gone so much better than I thought,” he said.
So well, in fact, that he plans to keep the ‘‘Rock Band 101” going throughout the school year.
Sitnick said the School of Rock has held year-round rock lessons since September. Some locations in the county hold one or two week summer camp programs. But at the Silver Spring site, demand was so high that regular, weekly lessons continue through the summer.
‘‘We didn’t even end up doing a summer camp because we were growing in enrollment so quickly,” he said. ‘‘The kids have regular weekly private lessons, but are cast into seasonal shows we do at live venues.”
The original School of Rock started in Philadelphia in 1998, he said, and expanded to 30 U.S. cities following a 2005 documentary ‘‘Rock School.”
Sitnick said there could be 100 Schools of Rock around the country over the next several years.
But in the Kensington loft above Howard Avenue, Gaiser was happy that the first summer of his rock camps went so smoothly.
‘‘This is just an ever-evolving thing,” he said. ‘‘I think kids are really going to enjoy it.”
