Alright, so it's been awhile.....
For some reason July is always jam-packed for me. And this year, the first three weeks I had camp and then I was sick all last week from a combination of being away from home, not getting enough sleep, and not getting a lot of nutritious food. You know how camp goes....
So now I just have a little bit of congestion and I'm ready to recap Camp Electric for y'all!!
I have some depressing news first: I lost my phone. The wailing may now commence.
I lost it at Carowinds THREE DAYS before I left for camp, so I have no pictures. None.
On that note, the story shall continue. My parents and I drove up (over??) to Nashville on Saturday morning. We were originally supposed to go on Friday so we could do some sightseeing, but that didn't work out. We stayed at my dad's cousin's house on Saturday night and I got to see some distant cousins. Then after church on Sunday we went to a Greek diner for lunch and drove around Nashville until it was time to go sign me in.
There are three different weeks for Camp Electric; two of which were in Nashville and one that was in Ohio. The Nashville camps are hosted by Trevecca Nazarene University, which is a beautiful campus. I registered for the vocals track(more on those later), so when I signed in, I got my little packet of vocals info, my name tag, and my dorm key. After meeting my 3 roommates, we walked to the opening concert across campus.
Now I've had a lot of questions about what I learned during my time in Nashville, but the structure of Camp Electric wasn't about learning scales and bars and theory; it was more like getting to peek into the lives of the artists that were teaching and learning their "tricks of the trade" and where their love for making music has taken them and how they got to where they are.
Anyway, my three full days at camp went something like this:
Bible study at 7:30
Breakfast at 8
Worship at 9
Voice clinic at 10- this class was taught by vocal coach Marjory Searcy, and it was basically about vocal warmups and cooldowns(apparently those are important), ways to keep your voice at top performance status. Ms. Searcy was really awesome and helpful and I really feel like I benefited greatly from her class.
Tom Jackson at 11:10- So where Marjory Searcy worked with us on fine tuning our voices, Tom Jackson showed us different little ways to tweak a performance to create moments with an audience and connect with them, which was amazing.
Lunch at 12:20
All camp session at 1:30- basically a mini concert where we were put so all the leaders could have a meeting(:
2:30- Instrument specific class- This is when the different tracks are split up into skill levels. I was Class F, which is intermediate. I had a different teacher each day, all three focusing on different aspects of music and the business. I can do a separate post on these classes if y'all would like that, but there's waaaay too much info for this post.
Dinner alternated every day at either 4:30 or 5:30
Free time was in between 4:30 and 6:30 depending on dinner
Concert doors open at 6:45
Concert ends at 10:00
Lights out at 11- this didn't actually happen(: my roommates and I were up until 2 or 3 every night/morning. When you're sharing a tiny dorm with 3 other people you get real close, real fast. I loved having intense conversations with these girls that I'd only known for 48 hours.
But my favorite part, hands down, was walking around the campus and just hearing music from every direction. There were little jam sessions happening everywhere. People were walking and playing guitars and ukuleles and singing and it just made me really happy to hear and see that.
So that's an overview of my time at Camp Electric! If you want me to go into detail about any aspect of camp, than just comment below or email me at cjhearts98@gmail.com
Much love to all of you and Happy Music Monday!!
Callan
