At first glance, an on-campus recording studio may seem like an extravagant distraction from your core program. But in fact, when a recording program is created and used correctly, it will enhance every aspect of your music program. We'll look at some of the main advantages of having an on-campus studio, and then examine how to make the new studio pay for itself.

I used the studio at Pinewood School in Los Altos, California, to enhance the high-school students' musical education in every course I taught. Consider just a few of the Pinewood program's accomplishments as a result of adding a studio, and you'll see the potential for your program.

For example, we did the following:

• Produced and sold CDs of the school choir, orchestra, concert band, and jazz band, as well as compilations of student compositions.

• Released a new CD each semester of student compositions from my Students Writing and Recording Music class. Top music students had the opportunity to stretch their creative and technical skills and become on-campus recording stars.

• Made audition and demo recordings for students applying to college and summer school programs.

• Recorded choir-rehearsal CDs so that basses, tenors, altos, and sopranos could learn their parts at home.

• Compiled specially tailored listening CDs for music-history courses. You can assign a new CD track to each new section of a piece's musical structure so the students can easily answer listening-assignment questions.

As well as making possible these substantial enhancements to our program, the studio inspired me to creatively and uniquely enhance my curriculum, from my disco rap on Beethoven's Fifth (a student favorite) to examples of monophony, homophony, and polyphony that I recorded live in front of a classroom of students, based on their composed melodies.

The benefits of a recording studio go beyond creating CDs, DVDs, and the like. A recording program raises the students' musical standards and skills. When students hear their performances and compositions recorded, their critical-listening skills sharpen. They hear when they're sharp or flat in a performance, or when they produce a poor tone, and they want to improve it without a word from the teacher. Students who learn the art of recording and composing in the studio develop exceptional ear-training skills that allow them to process music at a new level of detail. This prepares them to be better musicians and even creates new professional options for your serious students: audio engineer and producer.

Perhaps most important, a recording studio can strengthen your ability to teach composition, the creative heart of music. You will find that the studio becomes a home away from home for your most creative music students, and some of the music they compose will astound you.

Having put together a basic studio plan, you still have a big problem: how to raise seed money. Pinewood School's studio cost less than $5,000, but that was a bit more than my entire annual music-program budget. I got the funds by making a three-part proposal to my school administration that consisted of the following:

• A detailed outline of my proposal for a studio and why it would benefit the music program.

• A complete list of the studio tools I wanted to purchase, and their prices.

• A plan to earn the initial funds back by selling CDs of student performances and compositions, after which the studio would become a consistent fund-raising source for the music department.

You can complete the first part of this proposal by following up on the advice that I've already provided. The second part requires research into what you need for the studio, which is beyond the scope of this article but will be covered in future issues of MET. The last part of the proposal is the really tantalizing part, and the part that made my school administration quickly get on board and approve the necessary funds.

The economics of the plan were quite simple to convey. My proposed studio cost about $5,000. I planned to make and sell student CDs for $15. We had the students share the responsibility of burning the CDs; many of them had CD burners at home. Including packaging and printing materials, each CD cost less than $5 to make. That's a $10 profit per CD, which means as soon as we sold 500 CDs of the students' music, we earned back our investment. That many CDs are not hard to sell to an entire school community over several years. And from then on, it's all fund-raising for your music program, minus any additional investment in the studio.

The best way to sell recordings on campus is to treat your campus like a microcosm of the larger world: make, promote, and sell the recording just the way a professional record company would — but on a smaller scale. In one of my composing classes, for example, we loosely based our CD promotion and sales plan on Diane Rapaport's book How to Make and Sell Your Own Recording (Prentice-Hall, 1999), produced by Jerome Headlands Press. The students enjoyed the entrepreneurial side of it all, and the class unintentionally turned into a good introduction on how to run a small independent record label (or other small business). Here is the process in a nutshell.

First, you have to make a good recording that you and your students can be proud of. To make it more appealing, put together some nice packaging materials so that the CD looks good. You need CD labels, jewel cases, and jewel-case inserts. You can get very inexpensive CD packaging-design software for all of these things at any electronics or computer store, such as Fry's. I recommend a color picture and design on the front cover and black-and-white liner notes with song names, composer names, and performance credits inside.

I bought an inexpensive color printer for the music room to print the front covers. However, I soon found it was more trouble than it was worth; each cover took several minutes to print, and I had to change the color cartridges constantly, which was costly. So we took the covers to Kinko's and made color copies of them on the cover template sheets we bought at Fry's.

Next, identify your target market. In our case, we are targeting students, teachers, and parents. I've learned a few things about the target market after doing this for five years. Parents are your big bulk buyers, because they have money and deep pride in their children. Some of them will want to buy ten copies of the CD to send to everyone on the family list. Make sure that you send parents a flyer about the CD and the concert(s) surrounding it, and — this is important — include an order form for them to mail back. You want to make it easy for them to buy.

I'll be honest: only a few teachers buy the CDs. We teachers get invited to a million performances, sporting events, and so on, and are often pretty good about going to them, but our donations to the students are generally in spirit and attendance, not in money.

Students want to buy the CD but will do so only if you stage big events that get them all excited about buying the CD immediately. If you don't stage a big event, they'll “plan” to buy the CD but will never actually do so. Younger students — the lower grade levels — consistently buy more CDs than older students. That is because the younger students look up to the older student-musicians and see them as the “stars” of the school. So make sure that CDs are at the big events.

Next, you have to create big events that build excitement for the CD release. No matter what the performing ensemble is, at least two big events should be staged: a concert of some or all of the music on the CD, and a record-release broadcast on the P.A. speakers in the quad at lunch or at an end-of-the-year, all-school event. (We had one called “Day on the Green.”) Have your students operate the sales table; that will generate more sales than if you and the other old fogeys do it. And be smart about the sales table: ask your most social and friendly juniors and seniors to run it.

Promote the event to your target market. Send a flyer and an e-mail, if possible, to the parents, publicizing the big events and the upcoming CD release. Promote it to the students with big posters, flyers handed out at break at school, and over the school morning announcements. You and your students should personally invite each teacher to come to the concert.

Most of your CDs will be sold at these big events, but always keep a stock of current and former CDs handy to sell later. Students will come back a year later and want to buy five more. Another great idea is to set up a listening post in the school's front office, with a sign telling people they can buy copies from the school secretary. We bought a $30 portable CD-listening display from Laurel Music called the SumaDek, set it up with a CD player and headphones, and put up a sign about it in the office (see Fig. 1). Total expense: approximately $70.

How long it takes to sell 500 CDs depends on how big your school community is and how good your performances, recordings, and promotion are. No matter how big your school is, however, you will sell 500 CDs — and many more after that — if you follow the general guidelines in this article. My school had a student body of fewer than 300. We succeeded, and our promotion could have been much better. We learned as we went along.

The funds that selling CDs will raise are rewarding enough, but what is most rewarding is seeing the pride in your students' faces when they realize that there truly are people who want to buy the music they've created. Together, you have produced a memento that documents the accomplishments of your music students — something that they will periodically listen to for their whole lives, that will put a smile on their faces when they're 50 years old, and that raised money and pride for the music department along the way. Starting a recording program at your school made it all happen.

Cory Cullinan (cory@pictoriarecords.com) was Pinewood School's music teacher and Arts, Communication, and Technology chairperson. Now he's CEO, composer, teacher, and janitor of Pictoria Records (www.pictoriarecords.com).

On MET's Web site (www.metmagazine.com) are MP3 files of three recordings my students created. “Dance with Me” is a song composed and produced by Polo Black Golde, a sophomore at the time. “Meditation on Classical Guitar” was composed and performed by senior Roger Chang. “Good Times, Bad Times” is a piece composed and performed by a group of students who took a famous Beethoven piece, changed it from major to minor, and made it into a rap/pop song. The final MP3 is a selection from the live performance CD of my choir, the Pinewood Singers. Enjoy, and have fun making your own recordings with your students.

Jerome Headlands Press tel. (928) 634-8894; email info@dianerapaport.com; Web www.dianerapaport.com

Laurel Music Company tel. (310) 450-6311; email info@sumadek.com; Web www.sumadek.com