Light & Sound International magazine correspondent Claire Beeson reports on Orbital Training Course

Orbital's annual sound fundamentals training course aims to provide a grounding in the basics of sound engineering.

Before enlisting on Orbital Sound's week long Sound Fundamentals training course, my knowledge of the practicalities of sound engineering was, shall we say, sketchy. So I was relieved, on the first day of the course at Orbital's Brixton headquarters, to discover I was not the only trainee who was quite new to the concepts of sound engineering.

Along with several groups of students from various establishments including Mountview, Guildford School of Acting and the Bristol Old Vic. I found my course mates to include stage managers, DSMs, budding freelancers and a range of crew members from receiving theatres - all wanting to boost their knowledge of sound engineering in order to enhance their career prospects and make the working lives of the rest of their crew easier. In addition to these, a few experienced freelance sound engineers had signed up to the course, aiming to both confirm what they had picked up on the job, and keep abreast of the latest technical developments.

Now in its eighth year, Sound Fundamentals clearly benefits those who attend it. For proof we need look no further than the man at the helm of the course, Theo Holloway, who took the course as a freelancer in 2002 and is now Orbital's training manager. So why does Orbital place such high importance on training? "We employ a large number of freelancers" says Theo, "and the reputation of the company depends greatly on how good those freelancers are. So it's very much in our interest to make sure they know what they're doing. Also, as a company, Orbital has always been in favour of pushing the technology forward and working our new ways of doing things. With that, and with the need to have good people working for us, it was obvious that we needed to take an active role in developing people."

As well as running Sound Fundamentals, aimed mainly at students and younger technicians, Orbitals also runs a more advanced, two-day course each autumn and encourages its manufacturing partners to attend both events and provide demonstrations and product training.

Mainly tutored by Theo, the course includes specialist sessiond on show control, radio micropohnes, video, comms and networking, as well as dediated application training from Yamaha and d&b audiotechnik, who succeeded in 'demystifying audio' thanks to a number of speaker demonstrations by d&b's Steve Jones.

Combining theatre sound theory with hands-on practical sessions, we were also given the chance to go backstage at London's Savoy theatre, where operator Hannah Reymes-Cole gave us an insight into the sound system set-up of Carousel, followed by a question and answer session that gave students a chance to quiz a successful operator on various aspects of the business. Seeing sound fundamentals in action clearly helped a lot of the students, myself included, to process the theory we'd learnt back at Orbital's base.

Other practical sessions included in-depth training on Yamaha's M7CL console. Yamaha's Karl Christmas, Tree Tordoff, Nick Pemberton and Richard McLean guided us around the feature rich console in an insightly interactive and well paced session. Students were also given the chance to mic each other up after a quick demonstration from Orbital's Nihal Badik and Ellie Scott, both of whom have mixed an impressive array of West End productions. A theoretical session on radio mics and show comms also culmiated in hands on learning, with Bill Addison, Orbital's head of technical support and communications engineer Charlie Garrick aiding Theo in making the sessions accessible and beneficial to all.

To round off the week, students were split into groups and tasked with a number of challenges. These included creating a clean and intelligible vocal reinforcement system capable of creating a vocal 'image' on the stage in order to disguise the presence of loudspeakers; designing and cueing up a system to fit the requirements of a 'new West End play'; and devising a control system for a musical click track utilising the MIDI training provided by self-confessed "coding geek" Richard Carter.

These final practical sessions provided lightbulb-moments for many of the enthusiastic and attentive students. The hands-on challenges required us to work together and pool our combined existing and newly-acquired knowledge in order to produce the desired outcome. The fact that even a complete beginner like me was able to get actively involved and contribute towards the end result of each task seems proof enough of how useful and well pitched the week had been. By the end of the course, designed to fit around drama school Easer holidays, patricipants had nothing but praise for Theo, the course and the Orbital team.

"I had a great time on the course," commented Amanda Kerstein from Coventry's Belgrade Theatre. "I'm a lighting technician so it was good to find out new things about sound that I didn't know before - I have a little bit more respect for the noise boys now than I had before!"

Anthony White, a technical theatre student from Guilford School of Acting, was similarly positive: "I thought it was fantastic. It was a lot more in-depth than the stuff I would have learnt at university and it's been good to be around other people who want to specialise in sound rather than those wanting to do lighting or stage management and stuff. It was good fun."

Adam Norenburg, stage manager at Richmond Theatre, commented: "I really enjoyed the course; the course providers were very helpful. Personally, I found that some bits were very hard and some bits were quite easy and on my level. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to know more about sound, though I would say take a base knowledge in first - that might help you a little bit."

"I had a great time on the course," commented Amanda Kerstein from Coventry's Belgrade Theatre. "I'm a lighting technician so it was good to find out new things about sound that I didn't know before - I have a little bit more respect for the noise boys now than I had before!"