CRAS 2013 Year in Review

2013 just finished, and we are kicking off the new year with a great start! Thinking back over the past year, we did so many things and had so many wonderful students beginning their audio engineering journey.

CRAS is more than just a handful of classes. And as many of our current students and grads will attest, CRAS isn’t just about what you learn in class, it’s about what you do outside of class. There is always something happening down here! With our campuses being open 24 hours a day, you can always expect that something will be going down. From clinics and boot camps, study sessions and tracking sessions, we always have audio pumping through our system.

One of the bootcamps we had this year was the Internship Bootcamp. The internship is an integral part of the Conservatory experience, and is your chance to get hands on experience working at a real world studio. But, having proper studio etiquette is really what is going to get you noticed at any studio, so we go through various exercises to give students an insight on what it takes to be a good intern. You can read more about what went down during the Internship Bootcamp here!

We also have one of the biggest, most active student chapters of AES in the country, which provides us with a lot of opportunities for mic builds, music theory clinics, guest speakers and so much more.

CRAS this year saw more events than we ever have before, including an amazing presentation by the one and only Manny Marroquin. You can find his speech on our YouTube channel, or check it out here!

Speaking of our YouTube channel, we were able to get that kickstarted this year and we’ve been working hard on getting some great videos up – not only CRAS events, but also series of tutorials to keep fellow engineers interested and up to date with the latest tips and techniques. With the help of our great instructors like Phil Nichols and Eli Salazar, we’ve got a great set of videos up and going, and we have more coming down the road.

From time to time we have our own instructors show off the talents that they have that extends beyond the classroom, such as Brian Burrill’s Music Theory clinics, or Scott Murray and Neight Hardman’s Circuit Bending clinics, where they showed how to make their cheap musical instruments sound so much more incredible.

On occasion we’ve even put together field trips. This year we had groups of students go out to see Sound City, go to Tucson for the PotLuckCon 2013 Audio Conference, go to local studios like The Salt Mine Studio oasis and 513 Studios, and we were even a tour stop for the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus.

But we would be nothing, and have none of this, if it wasn’t for our wonderful students! Here is our first start from 2013 during their exit class. I hope they didn’t mind having to share the Live Sound room with the massive 7.1 audio/visual gear that our friends at PRG brought to show off for us!

Every year we put great audio engineering grads out into the industry, and they always rep our name well and make us proud. Whether they go on to follow bands on tour as FOH engineers or crew, or spend hours sitting behind the large format consoles that we train them on and earn Grammy nominations like John Horne, we would be nothing were it not for our students!

We are so proud of our grads that we often bring them back to give their words of wisdom and success stories to our current students. This Thursday we will be having another amazing grad panel, with four of our prominent grads in various industries – from mic manufacturing, live radio broadcasting, studio recording and more – telling their tales for us. You can read up a little bit on one of our previous grad panels here.

So to all of our students, past, present, and future, thank you! You are what makes the Conservatory great and we are looking forward to an exciting 2014! We have so much more in store…new curriculum, new location, all kinds of new gear! Stay tuned.