We Will Never Forget This!
- dendyjarrett
- 7 days ago
- 8 min read
We Will Never Forget This
Twenty-seven students, one of the most respected studios in American music, and a grant that almost expired.
By Give A Note Foundation
On April 29, twenty-seven students from York Community High School in Elmhurst, Illinois spent a full day inside Electrical Audio in Chicago. It was the kind of day Give A Note Foundation exists to make possible, the kind that begins, often, with nothing more than the right people finding each other.
This one traces back to a Give A Note board table. It was there, in June 2025, that Marc Bulandr joined the board and met F. Reid Shippen. Without that introduction, the two would never have crossed paths, and the day at Electrical Audio would never have happened. Give A Note brought them together, and the good multiplied from there.
Electrical Audio is the studio Steve Albini built by hand, with a crew of friends, between 1995 and 1997. Albini ran it until he died of a heart attack at home in Chicago on May 7, 2024, at the age of 61. By then, he had engineered thousands of records across his career, including landmark albums like Nirvana’s In Utero, the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me. Most of his work from 1997 onward was done at Electrical Audio. He charged a flat fee and refused royalties on principle. The block of West Belmont Avenue where the studio sits was renamed Steve Albini Way two months after he died.
The York visit took place almost exactly two years after Albini’s death.
Workshop session in the live room. Students seated along the brick walls. Marshall and Vox amps on the floor. The closing fifteen minutes of the day.
The students were greeted by Jon San Paolo, the staff engineer who has been at Electrical Audio since 2005. He is one of the people who said yes when Steve’s widow Heather Whinna asked the team, in the hours after Steve died, whether they wanted to keep the studio running.
Jon walked them through both studios. He showed them the brick walls, set with mud rather than mortar, so they absorb high frequencies. He showed them the rooms inside the rooms, concrete slabs separated by air gaps so a bass amp in one room transmits almost nothing to the next. He pointed out the Neotek console in Studio B, which is literally the console from the attic of Steve’s Francisco Avenue house. The original console of his recording career, still working.
The hallway between Studio A and Studio B. Persian runner. Mud-mortar brick on the right.
Then Reid Shippen took the floor.
Reid is a Grammy-winning mix engineer from Nashville. He has number-one credits across country, Christian, and pop music. He runs ROBOTLEMON. He is the co-founder of ONCE.app, a tool that returns all music streaming royalties directly to independent artists. He had flown up from Tennessee the day before to spend the day with the students.
He started by reframing what they were there for:
“There is something magical about a bunch of humans looking at each other, making noise.”
— F. Reid Shippen
Then a few minutes later, the line that became a centerpiece for the day:
“What’s the most important thing you look for? Hang, hang, and hang. You have to have the personal vibe, you have to read the room, you have to know how to work with people. We can teach you everything else. But if you don’t have that, don’t even bother.”
— F. Reid Shippen
Reid Shippen with students in the hallway between studios, and a kid in a Nirvana shirt—who wore the right shirt.
The trip almost did not happen.
The students’ teacher, Chris Gemkow, had secured grant funding for the program years ago. The funds existed. The intent existed. But Chris had not been able to find an administrative path to spend the grant on the kind of experiential, out-of-classroom learning the grant was meant to enable. The clock was running on the money. Without a way to activate it, the grant would have expired.
Reid took the project on as the operational mechanism that made the grant work. The grant paid Reid. Reid paid Electrical Audio for the studio time. Reid paid Art of Pizza for the students’ lunch. Reid paid for his own flight from Nashville. Reid took no personal fee for any of it. The remaining balance of the grant is being donated back to the York Music Production program.
Marc Bulandr hosted Reid at his home for the visit and drove him to and from the studio.
What the students experienced as a single day at a famous studio was, underneath, a careful act of generosity that turned a grant about to expire into a saved program asset. It worked because three people did the unglamorous part of the work, in the right order, with the right intent. It worked, too, because the year before, Give A Note had put two of them in the same room.
The drum kit in Studio A. Persian rug, brick wall, mics in position for the afternoon’s session. Joshua at right with his Canon.
Rather than recount the day in order, four moments tell it best.
The first was a conversation on a couch with a senior who had wrestled since he was four years old. He had Division II wrestling offers and turned them down. He is going to DePaul in the fall. He said he had to choose music because he could not do anything half-way, and as long as he was wrestling, music had to come second. The way he said it was the way someone says a thing they have already spent years thinking about. He was not arguing with himself anymore. He had decided.
The second was a senior heading to Bradley University in the fall for animation. While researching the school, they had discovered that Bradley recently launched a music production major. By lunchtime they had decided to do both degrees. The decision happened in real time, in the lounge, in a way they did not seem to have fully announced to themselves before saying it out loud. They also said something worth holding onto:
“Places like these are my happy place. No joke. I love things that… I don’t know where most of the stuff comes from. Feels very mysterious. Home, homey. And I feel like a lot more confident and like more part of like I already am.”
The grammar falls apart at exactly the right place. They are reaching for a feeling they don’t yet have a word for. Belonging here as the version of themselves they already are. In a building Albini designed for the people who don’t quite belong anywhere else.
The Pro Tools session captured by Jon San Paolo. The afternoon’s recording, blue and red regions, ready to be exported and sent home with the students.
The third was a student named Vaughn, who played piano during the recording session. Asked what it felt like to play in there, he said:
“I liked the setting the best. I wasn’t too nervous because it was just kind of me, and I was, I don’t know, it was like a zone kind of.”
That is what the room is for. He got into a zone. A high school kid said, in his own words, that the studio did its job on him.
The fourth was the closing workshop. Fifteen minutes before they had to get back on the bus. Chris asked the kids to put their phones away, and they were asked which of Reid’s lessons had stuck. They named different ones. The writing-a-song-a-day rule. The dropping-your-song-next-to-a-hit technique. The advice to start therapy as soon as possible because the faster you know yourself the more powerful you are. The reminder that being someone other people want to be around is more important than talent or gear.
Then, asked what they would say to the staff for opening the building to them, a student spoke first, “You guys didn’t have to do this, and the fact that you did is super dope.”
Then Jon spoke for the studio, “Steve’s death hit us hard, but also the outpouring of support and people who Steve resonated with really, really spoke to us, and we’re happy to keep doing it. After the first year, we were like, I don’t know if people are gonna book time here or care about this or not, but they do. Especially now that computers are writing music, which is total horseshit. It’s the human experience that makes music and art what it is.” — Jon San Paolo
Then a student paraphrased Albini’s entire ethos back without knowing it was Albini’s ethos:
“It’s supposed to be for everybody. It’s supposed to be a human experience. And like be communal and like lifting each other up.”
And on the way out the door, twenty-seven of them said the same five words:
“We will never forget this.”
A handwritten thank-you note left in the studio. Ronnie Amighetti and Mattia Bertolassi, Brescia, Italy. Dated 6/17/25. The kids on April 29 were not the only ones still leaving notes.
There is a version of every institution where the money exists, the intent exists, the willingness exists, and nothing happens, because no one stepped into the middle and made the pieces move. Grants expire. Studios stay closed to the kids who would most benefit from being inside them. Practitioners at the top of their craft never meet the seventeen-year-old who would have remembered them forever. The default is no.
What changes the default is people choosing, one at a time, to do the unpaid part of the work. Reid choosing to be the mechanism. Chris choosing to hold faith with a stuck grant until the right shape appeared. Jon and Taylor and the Electrical Audio staff choosing, in the hours after Steve died, to keep the building open. Heather Whinna asking them. Steve building it in the first place. The kid who walked into the room and decided he was going to take this seriously.
Every one of those is a small yes in a world that defaults to no. The building itself is the largest visible yes any of them ever made. Steve’s. The kids walked into a physical structure made of stacked human choices, and the day added a few more to the pile.
A Maruhon pachinko machine in front of a glass-block window. The building has had previous lives, including, according to local lore, as a parts factory for Bally pinball. Layers all the way down.
This is the work Give A Note believes in. The work of the connector, the host, the driver, the person who remembers to send the email and pay attention to whether the grant is about to expire. The kind of work that does not show up in headlines. It shows up in twenty-seven kids who said five words on the way out the door.
It is worth remembering exactly what the day felt like. The brick walls with the mud mortar. The Pro Tools screen glowing blue and red in the control room. The kid playing piano in a live room where, somewhere on a shelf nearby, sat reels from sessions he had grown up listening to. Reid telling them what therapy did for him. Jon, telling twenty-seven teenagers that computers writing music is total horseshit, in the building Steve Albini built.
A framed window of vintage microphones inside the studio. Everything in this building has been put there on purpose.
Some days work. Some days you watch the system do what it was supposed to do, and a few seventeen-year-olds carry it forward without knowing they are now part of the chain. That was April 29.
• • •
With deep thanks to F. Reid Shippen, Jon San Paolo, Taylor Hales and the entire Electrical Audio team, Chris Gemkow, and the twenty-seven students of York High School Music Production.
