Charlie Puth Made a Whole Song Out of a Comb and Masking Tape With NYC Elementary Students

Charlie Puth just proved that a hit doesn’t need a studio, just a classroom and some creativity. On the latest episode of Celebrity Substitute, the singer walked into a New York City public elementary school and challenged the kids to find music in the most ordinary places. A comb scraping across its teeth. Masking tape peeling off the roll. Those became the building blocks of an actual beat.

Once the sounds were recorded, Puth and the students wrote an original song together, alternating between singing and rapping, then performed it as a group. He told the class his goal was to show them that anything can be made with music, and by the end, they’d done exactly that. The moment carried extra weight for Puth, whose mother worked as a music teacher, and who is now a dad himself.

The episode arrives just after the North American leg of his Whatever’s Clever! Tour, which began back in April. His album of the same name debuted at No. 46 on the Billboard 200, and the tour’s New Zealand and Australia dates were recently canceled. If you could build a beat from any sound in your house, what would you use?