Student bands don’t appear at Georgetown like they do in the movies; there’s no lawn concerts or fraternity parties with crazy rockers and enthusiastic fans, jumping around to the sound of rebellion, angst or just plain fun. There is a bevy of small venues in the District, and with talented, motivated musicians enrolled at Georgetown University, the Hilltop may seem like an ideal place for student bands.

Looking at the experience of two current undergraduate bands, however, it is evident that although vast improvements have been made in the accessibility of the music scene in recent years, Georgetown still has a long way to go. Luckily, those involved in the music community — from professors to the students themselves — are highly motivated to make their musical dreams a reality, and indeed have already taken steps to put our campus on the rock ’n’ roll map.

The logical first step for a student band is to join the Guild of Bands, a program unique to Georgetown and a must for anyone looking to jam or play gigs on a regular basis. The program brings together performed bands in weekly rehearsals and master classes with experts in bass, guitar, piano and electronics; at the end of the semester, the Guild hosts a concert featuring all participating bands.

“The original concept behind this whole thing was that a lot of students were trying to find an outlet to play at school, although it seems a little strange to do this in an organized setting,” said Joe McCarthy, who became director of the Guild of Bands this year.

City Folk came about from jam sessions between Dan Cook (COL ’10), who plays the guitar, and Matt Strom (COL ’10), a cellist and bassist. When Jeff Reger (SFS ’10), another guitar player, was introduced to the others through mutual friends at Georgetown Radio, the three decided to form a band and audition for the Guild. At the Guild’s first jam session, they saw Kiran Gandhi (COL ’11) on drums, and asked her to join.

“We just kind of hit it off musically,” Reger said. “The whole forming-a-band thing is weird. It’s like a relationship, and jamming is like going on a date. So we started playing together and we started writing songs and it just worked.”

The band has self-released and self-recorded two EPs, Other People’s Parties in 2008 and Pushing/Pulling in 2009. The first was recorded in Studio D in New North, and the second in a friend’s house on Reservoir Road. As for getting recording equipment in for a house, “we just kind of invested in that,” said Reger. The band has also recorded in McNeir Hall, known for its high-quality acoustics.

City Folk is an example of just how much bands can take from being a part of the Guild. “The cool thing about those guys is they’ve been playing together for a while and they’ve got a nice concept going and it’s been fun working with them,” McCarthy said.

In addition, the Guild aims to make connections between musicians. “We try to accommodate everybody. If we have a guitar player who wants to be in the Guild but they’re not in a band, and if there is a need for a guitar player in another band then we try to get these other people in there. I think a lot of musicians have become friends just in that little network.”

This network connected City Folk with the Stoop Kids, a sophomore band that recently opened for City Folk at a show. “It let them know we were competent,” Stoop Kids bassist Joe Romano (COL ’12) said.

The Stoop Kids said they thought of the Guild as a necessary step for Georgetown students who are interested in playing music to take. “The most frustrating thing is that we can’t access any rehearsal space without being in the Guild of Bands,” drummer Patrick Sweeney (COL ’12) said. “There’s no drum set on campus for students to use, and to my knowledge there’s no rehearsal space where you can make all that much noise. We get complaints for playing in the apartment, and last year also in our New South dorm.”

Even with a unique institution like the Guild of Bands hosting rehearsals, however, student musicians still struggle to find time to play. “It’s the nature of being a Georgetown student. I feel like we have a lot less downtime,” Romano said.

For student bands, motivation comes directly from having gigs to work toward. Major bands have come out of prominent universities — Vampire Weekend is composed of Columbia graduates and MGMT of Wesleyan alums — so the workload at Georgetown may not be an insurmountable obstacle.

“The difference is that there really isn’t a scene set up here,” Stoop Kids singer Max Odenheimer (SFS ’12) said. “There’s no outlet for it, so there’s no incentive to practice. There’s no incentive to sweep aside your schoolwork for a couple days and just record.”

Romano agreed. “It would be totally different if we could go out and play, like every Friday night, at a bar that has live acts. That would be the motivation we need. It would be more conducive to just getting out there too.”

When the Stoop Kids opened for City Folk, they pulled together a seven-track setlist in a short time. “Now that there’s nothing on the horizon,” Odenheimer said, “there’s nothing to push us to prepare.”

City Folk has now played at numerous D.C. venues, including Adams Morgans’ Chief Ike’s Mambo Room and The Red & The Black, on H and 12th Streets, but Reger admitted, “The hardest part about being a band in Georgetown is finding places to play, so we’ve had to get creative at times.”

The band started out playing free shows in Red Square. “We looked into it, [but] you can’t have more than 65 decibels, so we just try to play at times when people aren’t in class or at work,” Reger said. “It was fun because when you play [at a] place like that, people will just come and watch.”

Now, they try to send out demos and contact booking agents for different venues in order to get a gig. “It helps that we know the band who just graduated the year before us, A Born Idler, who have played at [the nightclub] DC9 a few times,” he said.

For City Folk, Bulldog Alley in the Leavey Center would be a logical place to play, but only student organizations can book the space and the Guild hasn’t been able to break through the red tape to allow bands to perform there yet.

“Bulldog Alley is a decent space,” Romano said. “If someone hosted a once-a-month thing there … it would really foster a lot more things musical at Georgetown.”

Although the rehearsal space question is yet to be answered, future Hilltop bands will have access to pending university recording space. Georgetown is finishing construction on a state-of-the-art studio in the basement of New North, which will be available to Guild members upon completion.

Options are currently limited to the production studio in Gelardin, setting up in McNeir Hall with permission and assistance from faculty or finding elsewhere to record. “We basically do our recording in our bedroom,” Odenheimer said.

“There’s really no reason to [use Gelardin] because the equipment in the library is so limited; it wouldn’t be any benefit for us to use it,” Sweeney said.

Other resources for student bands to tap into exist within the music department, with classes ranging from Seminar in Songwriting with professor Bill Danoff (writer of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and “Afternoon Delight”) to the Recording Arts course with professor Flawn Williams. In addition, student musicians can join performance groups, such as Jazz Band, Pep Band, Wind Ensemble, World Percussion Ensemble, Orchestra and chamber groups, among others.

“We use all sorts of on-campus resources,” said Sweeney, who took Williams’ Recording Arts class. “In fact, we’ve used just about all of them, as far as I can tell.”

Odenheimer and Sweeney credited classes like Writing About the Performing Arts in helping them with their songwriting and producing. “They’ve all kind of helped us,” Odenheimer said, “[to] make songs instead of just sitting around.”

Beyond course offerings and Guild membership there are musical outlets on campus where student musicians can find a home, including Georgetown Radio, campus newspapers and the World Percussion Ensemble. But the Stoop Kids are most frustrated by the small role these groups play in shaping the music scene.

“Georgetown Radio doesn’t have the widest scope,” Odenheimer said. “We have a good setup for the radio, decent visibility [in the Bulldog Alley studio], but even then, I consider myself reasonably involved in the music scene and I don’t listen to it unless I’m listening to my friends’ shows.” Odenheimer suggested that radio shows host campus bands to play live on their show, adding a unique reason for other students to tune in.

“With our vast iTunes libraries, no one really listens to Internet radio. Maybe Georgetown Radio’s new role could be to promote on-campus music,” Sweeney said.

As general manager of Georgetown Radio, Cook has been hesitant to book his own band for WGTB gigs, though he notes that participating in radio has helped him learn how to set up and use audio equipment.

Gandhi also is very involved in other campus outlets for music, most notably the World Percussion Ensemble, which McCarthy also directs. Her connection there helped City Folk score a gig at an African music showcase, despite the lack of African influences in their rock music.

It seems that while students can participate in multiple music groups, the music community as a whole still lacks cohesion. Cook phrases it this way: “There’s overlap, but it’s more like City Folk has no connection to [Georgetown] Cabaret, the radio has no connection to Cabaret, it’s a lot of separate entities where people sort of move from one camp to another. … There are overlaps, but there’s not one centralized force. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that per se, it just allows a lot of different agendas to be pushed forward.”

Cook noted that the opportunities extend beyond graduation for students interested in the music industry, and that faculty members in the music department can connect students with alumni at Rolling Stone, Sirius Radio and the Georgetown Entertainment and Media Alliance, among others.

“It’s just this total package. You can engage in it in academics, you can engage in it in extracurriculars, you can engage in it just in practice, in being able to be in a band. … It’s idiosyncratic,” Cook said.

But there’s no doubt that it takes impetus and motivation beyond merely wanting to play music in order to take full advantage of the resources available to student bands. Without a pre-formed scene, replete with small clubs and eager booking agents, landing gigs and recording albums can seem to be daunting tasks.

Romano summed up the difficulty: “I just wish there was that already in place, because I feel like we’re establishing a music scene at the same time we’re trying to get our own [stuff] in order.”

At the same time, the scene continues to grow and expand, and this becomes clear in comparing the experiences of two student bands — City Folk and the Stoop Kids — two years apart in their Georgetown careers. But one thing remains the same: The drive to create music drives the search for bandmates, gigs and recording equipment.

“Just get out there and get to know people,” Reger advised. “If you stay in your dorm room playing guitar by yourself, you’re not really going to go anywhere.”

This year’s Gelardin show will be held Saturday Dec. 5 in Walsh Black Box Theatre at 8 p.m. Caroline Klibanoff is a student musician and Music Director of WGTB Georgetown Radio.