Music and Sound Highlights

We are currently in the midst of our exciting end of year ‘project block’ module. Our students have been attending a carefully crafted series of specialist workshops and guest lectures across Sound Design and Music Production.
Topics covered include… songwriting, beat production, musicianship, recording, advanced hardware mixing techniques, mastering secrets, freelancing best practices, electronic music production, creating visuals for live performances, synth jams, creature sound design, video game character sonic prototyping, audio integration with video game engines, Foley workshops, horror sound design workshops and many, many more!
All these sessions are designed to arm our students with the skills and help them build their portfolios to launch their creative careers upon graduation.

Highlights from this year include Dave Walker (Universal Music, EMI, Warner Chappell Music) coming onto campus to share his Hip Hop and Big Beat production tips and tricks from his own professional back catalogue of releases. Students then were invited to create their own short pieces of music using a selection of samples and techniques covered in Dave’s masterclass.
Student from the session from Ben Harrison, Milky T, Geo Bode, & Kirsten Vaughan:
Listen on Soundcloud
Listen on YouTube

Kate Hibbs talked to the students about professionalism and her work as a freelancer within the wider creative industries. She inspired students with tales of how she grafted to create professional networks from seemingly small opportunities. These opportunities turned into long standing collaborations with paying clients that took her all around the world. She also ran a headshot photography session where students could get professional photos of themselves for their own online portfolios, social media brands and digital CV’s.       

There have been several sound design specific workshops and field trips recently as part of our project block. These included students learning how to create ‘gore’ and ‘horror’ sound effects by recording, editing and mixing together the sounds of smashing of watermelons with hammers, crushing tomatoes by hand, squishing wet dish rags, snapping celery, and recording many other everyday items in order to create the sonic illusion of the macabre!

There was a video game character prototyping workshop where the students had to design the sounds of sci-fi alien creatures (both friend and foe alike!) from the basic concept art alone.  Students created signature sounds for characters ranging from giant mechanical flying elephants, to cute fluffy monsters.  They tackled how to create the sonic fingerprint for robotic spider insects, who communicated through telepathy alone.  They were also tasked with coming up with a highly rhythmical sinister alien language for the slithering snake crocodile ‘baddie’ characters.

A field trip to nearby Manchester took place, where students were tasked with capturing the unique sonic landscape of the city.  We also visited the university's woodwork and metalwork facilities to sample the sounds of the industrial machinery. These sounds were then used as part of a creative workshop for professional sound effects library creation.
Student recordings from our workshops and their sonic transformations:
Metal Saw to Alien Transmission
Saw to Monster SFX
Listen and watch on YouTube
Listen on Soundcloud

Recently, our students were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to record at Monochrome Productions' ‘The Forge’ studios in nearby Warwickshire.  Tom Gittins kindly walked us through the setup of his very impressive studio, and guided us through his unique approach to music production, running a recording studio, and working with artists and bands.

Using an original composition the students recorded instrumental parts and workshopped ideas on how to improve the song, all the while having Tom’s seasoned hand to guide them through every step of the production process.  Later that week Tom kindly visited us on campus to talk through his professional mixing and production tricks using sessions from real clients recorded at his studio.  Later in the day we pivoted to continuing to work on the mix of the recording we started at The Forge, culminating in a very impressive ‘first pass’ completed mix.
Joel & Kirsten - All That I've Got (20.3.25)
Listen on Soundcloud
Listen on YouTube