Day 1 of Training

So today begins my four day Easter training for TSC. The hope is that at the end of this I will be able to fill the technical positions at disco events (a disco event is anything without a live element to it i.e. a DJ). The topics for today were health and safety and sound. The first bit was obviously not as interesting but very necessary as we will now be working much more closely with the equipment and can be held responsible if anything should go wrong.

Once the boring lecture was over, we had a mini exam to check we had taken in what was being said and then after lunch we could get on with the more hands on stuff. As the weather has decided to finally agree that spring has arrived, we got to sit out in the Interval garden in the union. On a nice day this is a wonderful space in the union, isolated from the rest of the world by hedges and even better when the rest of the students are still at home enjoying their holidays!

Our first task was to stack the PA system which had been disassembled over the holidays. Normally this is a permanent fixture so it took us somewhat by surprise when we were expected to know what to do. The point of the exercise was to throw us in at the deep end and let us learn by our mistakes. By thinking about it and discussing the options as a team we came very close to getting it right first time round other than we had the two stacks the wrong way around. The other side also got it right but went with a different configuration. Apparently both were right to a degree but our layout was preferred so it was decided that the other side should re-stack their side and we should correct our alignment. Lots of heavy lifting and re-cabling later, we were finally done and it was time to make some noise.

Now came the more difficult part, EQing the PA. We are lucky enough to have a very good PA in the union but with a flat EQ you may as well not bother because it will sound awful. To see if we had any hope of being sound engineers, we were played some music that had had the EQ altered drastically at certain frequencies and we were asked to identify loosely which area we felt had been boosted / cut i.e. bas, mid or treble. We then got a bit more technical when we had to try and put back / take away what had been altered although we failed fairly spectacularly at this point. It takes a long time to adjust your ears to know what the different frequencies sound like and it is all very subjective which makes everything twice as hard. Things that can only be learned from experience rather than textbooks always annoy me and I can get very impatient.

The evenings social was supposed to be a cinema trip to see Kick Ass but a disappointing turn out and fully booked showing meant that we ended up in a very expensive pub so not a great start to the social events but I remain optimistic for the rest of the week.

After finally returning home, I decided to make some Cornish pasties for the rest of the weeks lunch. I now regret this... a lot. Not only do they take a flipping age but I ended up waking the house up by setting off the smoke alarm at 1am. Oops! I just hope they taste good now, only tomorrow will tell.