Shure Inc. has announced that the student team from Middle Tennessee State University is the Tenth Annual Fantastic Scholastic Recording Competition grand prize winner. Under the guidance of Assistant Professor Dr. Doug Bielmeier, the four-student winning team consisted of Frank Gerdts, Charlie Garcia, Jimmy Mansfield and Sam Hillman. The team’s winning original composition, titled “In My Head,” was co-written by Angel Snow and Darrell Scott.
“Over the last nine years, our FSRC has pushed students to create exceptional music,” said Stephen Kohler, Senior Director of Marketing, Shure Americas. “This year was no different. The teams showed great diversity and proved to be a promising group of the audio industry’s future. A big shout out and sincere thank you from all of us at Shure to the students, faculty and judges who helped make the tenth year of this competition one of the best yet.”
The final compositions were evaluated based on overall fidelity, clarity, sonic balance and creativity in selection and placement of microphones. Expert judges on this year’s panel included Mike Clink, Johnny K., Jack Douglas, Stephen Hart and David Cole.
“The Shure contest allowed some of our best students to put together all the skills they learned here at MTSU and apply them to a real-world project with strict guidelines and hard deadlines,” said Dr. Bielmeier. “Just participating has made them better engineers, not to mention will help them with their current and future clients. Oh, and we had a lot of fun using the locker full of Shure’s fantastic microphones.”
During the competition, which began last November, 10 student teams from the U.S. and Canada each produced and recorded an original composition using only the contents of a microphone locker provided by Shure. After working through the tracking and mixing phases of the project, each team submitted unmastered mixes of their track to the panel of industry experts for review. The nine other schools that participated in this year’s competition were Berklee College of Music, Daytona State College, Ithaca College, Lamont School of Music at University of Denver, MacEwan University (Canada), The Hartt School at University of Hartford, University of Central Missouri, University of Colorado Denver and University of Lethbridge (Canada).