Two Weeks in Training

This post might end up being quite long as I have two weeks worth of very full days to catch up on. I have been attending the TSC senior training course for the past two weeks and they have been some of the busiest weeks of my life. With socials organised almost every night and a full days training during the day, I have only really been in the house to sleep and very little else. I often found myself coming home, getting changed and shovelling some food down my throat before heading back out again and so haven't had any time to keep up with the blogging.

I would love to say that normal service will now be resumed but with next week being freshers week, the chances of that happening are very small. Now that we have 'graduated' as seniors, we are expected to fill the job sheet for the majority of freshers week events - and there are lots of them!

Days one and two were theory based and we went through health and safety, risk assessments, power theory and sound theory. They were a little bit boring but were interspersed with practical demonstrations which helped cement the theory in place. Wednesday kicked off the practical elements with gig training for the smaller of our venues, the Fusion. This was an introduction to the front of house desk the beast that is the Allen & Heath ML4000.

The first time you set eyes upon this monstrosity, you feel feint inside, daunted by the though that you will have to know what all the buttons do - and worse still, use it to engineer a band! By the end of the day however, I had started to get to grips with it and the theory from the previous couple of days made even more sense.

Thursday was based in the Octagon for working at height training. This involved climbing into the roof of the Octagon (about 23 feet) on a set of what looked like very unstable ladders. As it turns out however, they are very stable (as they would have to be) and the chances of falling off one of these things is very slim unless you are (or someone else) is doing something very stupid. We were also taught about how to fly the main truss in and out and about the switch room which is full of electricity, bus bars, circuit breakers and sockets. As juniors, we were banned from the room on grounds of safety and I can now see why! If you don't know what you are doing in there, you can cause lots of damage to yourself and other people.

Friday was the second round of practicals and the two groups swapped places leaving us with a lighting day. For me, this was far more interesting than the sound side of things but meant that I got a lot less out of the day in terms of learning. Whereas with Wednesday, almost everything I did was for the first time, Friday was recapping things I already knew and was fairly confident with.

Onto week two and for the first four days, the four groups are on rotation through the foundry. Kicking off our week is front of house training. As we had already been introduced to the desk last week in the Fusion, we got more of a chance to experiment with the EQs, gates and compressors as well as having a little play with the effects unit. It was actually a reasonably good day and once again, I learnt a hell of a lot but am getting more and more confident that if push came to shove, I might be able to bluff my way through and should now know enough to help others if they are having problems (which is what the training is all about).

Day two we moved on to lights and my favourite day of the week. We had a whole day for this with a group of three people so the aim was for something a little bit special. We decided to try something new given that we had the time and expertise on hand to offer up any hints that we might need to get everything working. We pulled off the look we were aiming for and had some fun playing with ideas. The difficulty with working democratically within a team is that decisions about the rig that you might normally make on your own have to be discussed with the rest of the group which makes everything take that little bit longer. On the plus side, three people made it much easier when rigging once we had ultimately decided where everything was going to go.

Day three was AV day which we have had very little of thus far. It is something that has been neglected in the past and so this year, it was decided that the new seniors should actually be taught something. There were two computer scientists in our group (myself included) and so this was the natural category for us to fall in to. The other groups had all left early from this session but we somehow ended up dragging it out to finish at normal time. It was another fun day and we were sent out around Sheffield to collect some clips for us to use. We managed to create a mash up of me dancing around the poster pillar outside the union and it looked very clever despite using only an old tape camera and the AV software.

Day four was all about monitors and another big scary desk, the Soundcraft SM12.

It is very similar to the ML4000 with the exception that almost every button has a different name - despite serving the same purpose. We got to grips with it quite easily and even the EQing started to make some sense. I am still totally useless at identifying frequencies and ringing out but if someone tells me to do something, I'm pretty sure I can do it.

Onto the final day... Friday. Today is all about being a stage manager. We started the morning with a brief first aid course and got to try CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver on some manikins which was interesting to say the least. We then moved on to radio training which involved each of us trying to annoy reception taking in in turns to practise radio calls. At the end of the day, we had the dreaded test. We were given this at the beginning of the training and I didn't understand most of it but recognised throughout the week when we were being taught the answers to the exam questions. It was very reassuring to go through the test and understand all of the questions and being able to confidently answer most of them.

So, that it. I am now a senior member of TSC - scary eh? Freshers week starts tomorrow so I'm taking the night off and enjoying the free time before I start at 7pm tomorrow for Pop Tarts.