I spent a very interesting weekend at York University for the AES ‘Up Your Output’ Event. This event is primarily aimed at the student members of the Audio Engineering Society brought together by some heavyweight sponsors like SSL, PMC Monitors and Calrec, as well as a diverse collection of guest speakers.
I sat in on several of the talks. I loved hearing mastering engineer Mandy Parnell discuss her techniques and approaches. It was interesting to hear her bemoan the lack of quality control in the various media her work finally appears. I didn’t realise there were so many conversions that go un-monitiored to get your track up on sites like Spotify.
I was entertained by Jim Motley from SSL who did a great presentation about newbies entering the industry – from a manufacturers perspective. I was talking on a similar subject the next day so was keen to hear what he had to say. The bottom line seemed to be find out who you are applying to, write something that shows you have shown a genuine interest and send a CV that is more than just a list of your part time jobs since age 14!
I would encourage all students to attend events like this. It was free, it was interesting and you could win stuff. Sponsors kindly stumped up freebies such as software worth several hundred pounds. They do this to encourage the better students. Jim and I both agreed that we were more likely to employ students we had met at extra curricular activities like this as they were obviously more motivated!
So get out there and join organisations like AES, Soulsound and others and get to events such as this! This is where you start networking.
By the way, writing an interesting CV can be difficult, so Darryn de la Soul will be running a CV writing workshop at PLASA Focus Leeds on 10th May 2016. This will help you write the difficult bits!
Register FREE for PLASA using this link.
