During my time on work experience, I carried out several tasks which all required drastically different skills to solve them as quickly and as well as possible. While I did have Charlie by my side most of the time, overseeing the tasks I was carrying out, I did get left to try and do some of my own work throughout the 40 hours I was given.

Down below I will go into detail about some of the tasks that were handed to Charlie and I:

On the first day, I got to aid with the final setup for the Dolby Atmos studio. While most of it was already complete by the time I began my work experience, I still got to help out with some basic tasks such as passing cables through the ceiling and doing some other cable management related tasks, to ensure that it looked more organised, and it would be easier to alter in future. Later, I was tasked with tidying up the loft of the Goodlyburn Theatre, which was mostly moving pieces of equipment which were no longer in use, or simply moving some cables out of the walkways as there were many shows lined up for that week and it would assist in people moving around in the upper floor and reducing the risk of trip hazards for students and staff alike.

The second day was a lot more hands on work as Charlie and I had been far better acquainted with each other. We were handed a large bundle of cables which were faulty (mostly XLR cables but there were some other cables such as 1/4" leads as well. I was quickly taught how to easily fault find cables with a cable tester to discover where each fault was in the respective cables. After this, I was taught how to solder efficiently. I have already had some previous experience with soldering in my life as I have done a few repairs on guitars for myself and some friends, so learning how to adapt that knowledge to fixing broken cables came very quickly and naturally to me. after showing me one or two cables, I was then watched closely as I tried it for myself. After a few mistakes here and there, I was very quick to learn how some faults can be created really easily by soldering from just the smallest oversight. After I completed a few on my own, I very quickly got the hang of things, and I was able to efficiently fix any cables that were handed to me. On top of this we also had some headphones we were given from Eastlake Studio 1 which were also faulty. We spent some time fault finding inside of them and repaired them with ease as the faults were relatively simple and were down to a small error in the connections of the male end of the cable.

Day three was focused more on instrument repair over everything else. I was given access to a cupboard with a bunch of old instruments and other musical gear which were needing repairs. The first was an old fender guitar amplifier which had some faults which were quickly amended. Then we had a selection of bass guitars which had various issues such as broken jacks, faulty wiring of pickups, or generally needed some other forms of setup with the physical body of the guitar. Due to my previous experience with fixing instruments, I was already very well versed with the techniques required to fix many aspects of the bass guitars. I did however learn a few tricks for fixing other aspects such as adjusting the height of bridges and the neck's truss rod.

The fourth day was a mix of multiple tasks. we began the day with some work in the theatre, taking some unused equipment (particularly bulbs for lights) down from the loft and then moving them to the maintenance cupboard of the room I had done aforementioned soldering of cables. After this we spent some time cleaning up the room and the cupboard as it needed a little organising. I had brought in my own guitar from home as it required some looking at and Charlie offered to help me fix it up to a far better standard. So we got to work adjusting many parts of the guitar - from adjusting the truss rod to fixing a minor fault on the bridge. After getting the guitar up to a far more playable standard, we were called down to the Eastlake Studio at the end of the day to complete some tasks to get the studio up and running as it had recently gone through significant renovations. The first thing we did was sort out some of the cables behind the studio desk to organise it better, and then we started setting up some of the new equipment for the studio desks, which were some fancy new SSL studio apparatus. After completing the initial setup for the actual hardware we had to call it for the day as we were stuck on how to set up the plugins which came with the hardware.

On the final day of my placement, the vast majority was spent inside of Eastlake Studio 2, continuing work on the tasks from the previous day of work experience. We began the day with some more organisation of the cables behind the desk, as well as sorting out the cables connecting the Mac in the machine room of the studio to the studio desk, which required us to lift up some of the floorboards. When that was all sorted we decided to put a piece of fabric under the desk to hide some of the cables behind to make it look more professional. This required a lot of trial and error with testing different sizes and applications of the large piece of fabric we were given.