Looking to Make Varsity - Any Good Training Programs?

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Stephen Findlay

Freshman
Aug 17, 2012
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Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario, Canada
Good Morning All

I am probably a novice at best but am looking to get a good grasp on the ins and outs of pro audio to better serve my clients and hopefully score larger jobs! Any suggestions on some good regional workshops, training manuals, online learning, etc. that you guys can provide for me? I want to know how about how everything works in my Mobile DJ PA rig, all the way up to how a concert venue is set up.

Thanks!
 
Re: Looking to Make Varsity - Any Good Training Programs?

A good grounding in the fundamental principles of audio is a great place to start. I attended a SynAudCon course a few years ago and got loads out of it. To be honest, the biggest challenge was taking everything in - it was like drinking from a fire hose. I'm sure I could have gone through it again the following week and got a bunch of different stuff to take away.

They now offer online training, which means you can go through it as many times as you like, but I got a lot of value out of the face-to-face interaction from attending a course in person.


There's no course out there that will teach how to become a varsity-level engineer, but if you understand the basic concepts behind how the signal path works, or the physics that govern how sound propagates through a room, you'll be ahead of many of your peers.
 
Re: Looking to Make Varsity - Any Good Training Programs?

Last I talked to Brenda the live classes will be fewer and further between. It's too expensive and demanding on their time but there will be some. My corporate overlords were involved in the beta testing (of which I did a fair amount) and we have purchased several licenses to use company wide. On our show we require the less experienced techs to take at least the first couple of levels.

It's affordable and good.
 
Re: Looking to Make Varsity - Any Good Training Programs?

Thanks for the tip. It turns out there's a SynAudCon course local to me starting Monday and I'm going.
 
Re: Looking to Make Varsity - Any Good Training Programs?

Bennett Prescott said:
Excellent, Robert. It will be well worth the money.
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[FONT=&amp]I took the SynAudCon “Sound Reinforcement for Technicians” course last week after finding out about it here on the forum and I thought I’d report back what my experience with it was.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]It is an expense to take a course like this not to mention the lost productivity at work which can be even more expensive. The last thing I want to do is sit in a class and listen to jokes and stories meant to entertain me. I want the class to get to the point and get going and that was definitely the case here. Any stories were purely illustrative of a point that was made in the class. [/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]
I am a hobbyist. I’ve been doing live sound for a few years and I have a nice rig. I’ve enlisted the help of experienced people to help me along, but I want so badly to be competent at it myself. I’ve dabbled in sound all my life, but didn’t have a grasp of the fundamentals. I was concerned that the course would be over my head and I spoke to Brenda and Pat about it in advance. They thought it would probably be okay and even offered to make an accommodation if it wasn’t a good match. It turned out to be a very, very good match.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]
I finally have some understanding of balanced outputs and inputs and common mode rejection. There were fascinating demonstrations of RF interference and the effects of loops, twisted pairs, shields and ground loops. We covered crest factor, rms voltage, impedance sweeps, time alignment, transfer function, fast Fourier transform and time windows. I finally know what comb filtering sounds like! We covered distributed speaker systems. Now I know what that speaker with the 70v on the back is for. I think some of the most important things for me are an understanding of impedance and rms voltage. We covered those subjects in depth. [/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]The truth is that I wish I had been able to take a class like this many years ago. It is the foundation for understanding more. Pat takes subjects that seem to be mired in opinion and lays them out in a way that is simple and repeatable. I've read way too many opinions on way to many forums. This class gets to the meat of the matter. I recommend it without reservation to anyone that wants a solid grounding in these subjects.[/FONT]
 
Re: Looking to Make Varsity - Any Good Training Programs?

I've taken a few advanced classes over the years that were specialized in Sound System Optimization... my area of interest. Meyer Sound will offer seminars from time to time that are free- but you have to get to where the class, often either Nashville or Berkeley. Yamaha holds a similar thing each summer called Audioversity. My favorite class to date was the Smaart Class I took through Rational Acoustic taught by Harry Brill. It opened a few doors for me and I'll probably take the class again.

I hope to take a rigging class in the future.
 
Re: Looking to Make Varsity - Any Good Training Programs?

Kip Conner said:
I've taken a few advanced classes over the years that were specialized in Sound System Optimization... my area of interest. Meyer Sound will offer seminars from time to time that are free- but you have to get to where the class, often either Nashville or Berkeley. Yamaha holds a similar thing each summer called Audioversity. My favorite class to date was the Smaart Class I took through Rational Acoustic taught by Harry Brill. It opened a few doors for me and I'll probably take the class again.

I hope to take a rigging class in the future.
Click to expand...

Meyer's classes are no longer free, but remain a bargain IMHO.
 
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