For 11 years, Ida B. Wells has had an expert in the room. In charge of the sound engineering class and pathway, Bruce McCleave may be the most qualified person for his job.
For 30 years prior to teaching, McCleave toured with artists such as Prince, Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé and Josh Groban. He also spent time as the lead sound engineer for “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “The Arsenio Hall Show.”
With a large background in audio, McCleave has channeled his knowledge into his teaching. Students who have taken his class have come out with a greater understanding of analog and digital sound engineering.
“Seeing how all this [sound engineering] works has fascinated me from day one,” McCleave said. “The kids are so excited and intrigued with it. They’re sponges right now.”
Over his years on the road, he’s developed a deep connection to his work and realized how important it is to keep this art alive through high school students. He’s found many great ways to teach them about his love of audio.
Since the establishment of the class in 2014, McCleave has been a frontrunner in making sure the program has breathing room to thrive, even when he wasn’t teaching at IBW yet.
After his daughter, a freshman at the time, told him about the program, he shared his experience with Nick Caldwell, IBW’s band teacher, and the two grew the class quickly.
Both Caldwell and McCleave visited music stores across the city to gather equipment and help teach students to use GarageBand to mix audio. They built the sound engineering program from the ground up.
McCleave attributes his love for music to his brother, who played upright bass. “I had known he was in the basement playing the bass, but to see his band for the first time when we were in junior high truly opened my eyes and made me realize that this is what I have to do.”
When McCleave was in middle school, he took after his sibling. He began to play bass and was a drummer in his own band.
“When we were playing, I realized the sound was really not great, and so I’d go and tinker with the board, and make my drums sound bigger, the guitar cut through a mix more, and over time, I learned how to use the equipment to benefit our band in a live setting,” he said.
Quickly, other bands around him began to ask for his help in audio engineering, and it soon became a job where he could do what he loved.
McCleave and the students from his class cannot stress enough how important a class and career in sound engineering is today.
“From movies, to live shows, video games, anything at all, music is all around us. It’s who we are, in our humanity,” he said. “Music plays a huge part in everybody’s life, whether they know that or not. Music touches all of us, so why not get involved in understanding how it works, and be a part of that magic that happens when we listen to music.”
Equally important are the connections you can form in the world. From his days with Prince, the level of work he put into making the concerts as amazing as they could be drew attention to even more artists he later worked with. McCleave also credits Prince as the reason he became a guitar player.
With a new building for IBW in the near future, the sound engineering department could be looking at a new space to continue making innovations for music at the high school level.
IBW Principal Ayesha Coning has shown a large interest in the program and shared her plans via Instagram for the new space, including a 300 square feet-live recording room, a booth, another studio and 1,500 square feet of space for computers to mix all the music.
McCleave is excited for the future of the program and sees it growing in leaps and bounds, having multiple classes with increasingly large student counts.
He hopes to expand the four classes in the program today, starting at Intro to Sound Engineering up to Advanced 5-6, to six classes. With this new classroom, the sky is the limit for student creativity and learning.
