{"id":41399,"date":"2025-04-04T18:02:29","date_gmt":"2025-04-04T22:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/?p=41399"},"modified":"2025-04-04T18:02:30","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T22:02:30","slug":"from-fluke-to-feature-how-the-sinclair-guitar-lab-landed-a-pbs-special","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/tartan-news\/2025\/04\/04\/from-fluke-to-feature-how-the-sinclair-guitar-lab-landed-a-pbs-special\/","title":{"rendered":"From Fluke to Feature: How the Sinclair Guitar Lab Landed a PBS Special"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This past January, PBS aired an episode of \u201cThe Art Show<\/a>\u201d featuring Sinclair Community College\u2019s very own Guitar Lab in its first segment. Over the course of about 10 minutes, the episode briefly covered the process of building a guitar in the lab and the importance of applying STEM outside of the classroom.
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The members of the Guitar Lab took great pride in the episode and were happy to be given the opportunity. They also admit that the entire thing was a fluke.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Guitar Lab in Building 8 on Feb. 11, 2025: While the workshop is usually filled with students on Saturdays, it’s often only filled with a handful of students throughout the week. The members of the Guitar Lab team work in a connecting room, assembling and shipping kits around the world. Photo Credit: Dion Johnson<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Andrew Shaffer, the Guitar Lab\u2019s operations manager and senior lab tech, recounts the story of how the PBS special came to be. \u201cThere was an individual who was taking one of the Physical Education classes and she told her friend that worked for PBS that she ought to go down to Sinclair,\u201d he said. \u201cI guess she was walking by and was like \u2018What is that?\u2019 She stopped in and she asked \u2018What do you do here?\u2019 I told her and she was like \u2018Do you think it would be alright if we did a story on you?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Josh Kemper, a Guitar Lab team member, sorting packages onto a cart to ship to Pago Pago in the Guitar Lab on Feb. 11. Much of the team’s day-to-day consists of packing guitar kits to ship both nationwide and overseas. Photo Credit: Dion Johnson<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After sending the request up the chain of command and getting approval, filming was allowed to begin. There was just one problem. For the episode, PBS wanted footage of a guitar being made from start to finish. The regular course that Sinclair offers does so over four months. Luckily, there was a training event last summer where members would build the guitar over the course of a week instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was almost like it was meant to be,\u201d Shaffer adds. \u201cThe universe said, \u2018Yes, this will happen.\u2019 If it was another time, it would have been very difficult for them to film the entire process, but it was perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two months after capturing footage of the training event, PBS returned to film the team producing the kits that they ship out across the world. This is a day-to-day task of the Guitar Lab team. From Alaska to Germany to Columbia, the Guitar Lab sells and ships kits to STEM programs not just across the country but internationally as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<More Knowledge is More Savings: Taking Charge of One\u2019s Benefits<\/a>><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe were known more nationwide and outside the country than we were in Sinclair,\u201d said Josh Kemper, a member who has been with the Guitar Lab for five years. Kemper has a love for STEM and seeing its applications in the real world through actual crafting. By working with the Guitar Lab, he hopes to share this love with students getting into STEM programs via building guitars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat formulas you\u2019re using and what problems you\u2019re doing, you can see the results in front of you. It makes it easier to understand and this is a lot more fun than a bird house,\u201d Kemper said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dion Johnson, Multimedia Specialist<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past January, PBS aired an episode of \u201cThe Art Show\u201d featuring Sinclair Community College\u2019s very own Guitar Lab in its first segment. Over the course of about 10 minutes, the episode briefly covered the process of building a guitar in the lab and the importance of applying STEM outside of the classroom. The members […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10416,"featured_media":41406,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2102,3522,2104,5528,5962,2110,5354,2121,2144,2122,5390,2111,3,3525],"tags":[1418,6258,6254,2141,6256,276],"class_list":["post-41399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-life","category-dayton-news","category-entertainment","category-events","category-interview","category-local","category-magazine-articles","category-music","category-music-entertainment","category-performing-arts","category-photos","category-shows","category-tartan-news","category-tartan-spotlight","tag-campus-life","tag-for-the-love-of-guitars","tag-from-fluke-to-feature-how-the-sinclair-guitar-lab-landed-a-pbs-special","tag-online-exclusive","tag-pbs-news","tag-sinclair-community-college"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":"","source_text":"","source_url":""},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Untitled-design-2.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-aLJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10416"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41399"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41405,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41399\/revisions\/41405"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}