Though there's now no shortage of recording and music technology courses available, the situation was rather different 20 years ago, when the Gateway School was first established. Paul White talks to pioneering co‑founder Dave Ward about almost a quarter of a century of audio education.
The Gateway School of Recording and Music Technology has come a long way since its small beginnings as a back‑street studio in 1975, but as founder Dave Ward is keen to point out, there's still a lot of work needed before mainstream education gives the subject the support it deserves. I tracked Dave down at the campus of Kingston University, where I began by asking him to recount the school's beginnings, 20 years ago.
"Most of my young life was spent as a singer, mainly on the folk scene, and in 1975 myself and a few friends started the first Gateway studio, above a chiropodist's in the centre of Balham. This was when the first TEAC 4‑track open‑reel machines became available. The idea was to use the studio for songwriting, but it got completely out of hand and became quite a popular little studio. What most people didn't know was that the whole studio was run from a 5p electricity meter because the landlord wouldn't let us have a proper electricity meter. Every morning, before a session, we used to have to run out to the bank and get a bag of five‑pence pieces!"
How did you make the transition from offering recording services to teaching recording as a subject?
"That happened much later. We were in Balham for three and a half years when we had the opportunity to take over a derelict studio in Battersea. We'd grown to 8‑track by the time of the move, and upgraded again to a 16‑track Soundcraft recorder and one of the first Soundcraft Series B consoles. The studio was much bigger and it was a luxury being able to monitor properly."
I imagine that you were learning new things about recording all this time?
"Yes — there was no training in those days, and at that time there wasn't as much good advice coming from magazines as there is now. So we had to formulate our own ways of understanding the technology from a creative perspective. The school idea developed from musicians and producers asking us what we were doing during sessions — it got to the stage where we were spending more time explaining the recording process than recording music.
"We went on to start some evening courses at Battersea Arts Centre, and Dave Dearden, who was then with Soundcraft, lent us a little Soundcraft demo unit comprising half a dozen 2400‑series input modules and a couple of output modules. From there the courses developed, and we opened up a room above the studio in Battersea and turned it into a proper school room. At that time we had a lot of help from the Turnkey organisation, which was then run by Andrew Stirling and Ivor Taylor. When the new Fostex 8‑tracks first came out we used these, along with a little Fostex mixer, to run the first courses."
University Challenge
Probably the biggest step for you was moving to Kingston University, which gave you a chance to put your teaching methods into practice on a much larger scale.
"Eight years ago we were closing down the main studio in Battersea because the lease had run out and it wasn't practical to renew it. We were talking to several people, including various manufacturers, about the possibility of building a bigger school somewhere, and it turned out that Kingston University had a studio built, but because of funding problems, they couldn't afford to equip it. Andy Smith, who was the Faculty Technical Officer, came on a Gateway course, saw what was happening, and suggested to the authorities that we work in partnership with them.
"We got together with Professor Edward Ho, Head of the School of Music, and within four months had moved the entire operation onto their campus. We helped the School of Music put together a new stream of their already very popular music degree, which would incorporate music technology. Gateway staff teach the music technology components of the degree and the teacher training courses. The Gateway‑accredited qualifications came a little time after that, when we put all the courses through the University's validation system, and successful students on our one‑year course now receive a Kingston University diploma."
How much help did you get from the industry at that time?
"We got huge amounts of help from the manufacturers, and none of the work that we are doing would be possible without the help of such people as Harman, Soundcraft, Soundtracs, Ampex, Shuttlesound... the list seems endless."
But your one‑year course is not just to do with recording skills?
"No — the course has four main areas: the recording technology; music technology (which includes all the sequencing, sampling and hard disk recording technologies); music and business studies (which encompasses copyright, contracts, and basic business skills); and the fourth part, which we call complementary studies, which looks at the communication skills needed for working in the music industry, and also areas like studio management and studio etiquette."
One of the advantages of working at Kingston is that your studio includes a very nice performance hall, which gives you the opportunity to record full orchestras in addition to pop groups...
"Because the University orchestras and choirs are rehearsing there all the time, everyone has the opportunity to multi‑mic an orchestra, choir, string quartet, big jazz band and many other combos. We're setting up a system now where Gateway students and School of Music students are working together recording the orchestra onto DAT, adding discrete reverb, but also logging the bar positions so that the conductor can ask for a replay. That means that the students have to learn something about the score‑reading process and the communication skills necessary for working in recording."
In recent years you've started to diversify, so that instead of just looking at studio recording, you're getting into all the mainstream areas of audio.
"When we first started the school, the manufacturers were the first people to take advantage of our training — we still train the staff of many of the main manufacturers and distributors in Europe. We've always done quite a lot of work relating to sound for film, and all our teaching rooms are synchronised, for working to picture. The new multimedia areas require a lot of study and we'll be working in those areas later on. There seems to be this myth that there will be some kind of multimedia person in the future who will have all the skills to be able to do the graphic design, the layout, the animation, the programming and so on — but it's just a myth. What we're looking at is bringing teams of people together with all the different skills, so that the learning process will be more about teamwork and about having an overview of each other's processes.
"We're also going to be running courses for company managers who need to know something about multimedia before they invest in expensive development programs."
How do your teaching methods and ideas sit alongside those of the traditional teaching establishment? I understand that you played a part in getting music technology recognised as a part of the National Curriculum.
"That was some of the work that we did within the MIA as the National Curriculum was being developed, and it was nice to be part of the advisory process. Also, as a director of the Association of Professional Recording Services, I was involved in the setting up of National Vocational Qualifications — there's now quite a good set of NVQs, which were written mainly for the Broadcast Organisations through an organisation know as Skillset. There'll be quite a bit more publicity about those in the coming months."
The Future For Training
Which way do you think music technology education ought to go in schools, given the limited resources and lack of training time?
"The creative possibilities of music technology in schools has all kinds of benefits for the pupil, but the main things that are going to hold it back are the physical resources (money), and the fact that teachers don't have the time or energy to spend on the training they need. Music is a core subject up to the age of 14 at the moment, and composing and performing are such big parts of the curriculum that technology has an enormous part to play. But this potential won't be realised until it's resourced properly. There are also huge cross‑curricular benefits from music technology, because students don't just learn about music — they gain familiarity with computers, they learn to organise data and to develop mathematical reasoning. Just within a simple explanation of how a microphone works, a teacher can cover subjects such as electromagnetic induction, dynamos, power stations, the effect on the environment, and all kinds of things. It all seems so obvious that I can't understand why the educational decision makers haven't seen it.
"It's interesting that, already, a lot of employers in industry now seek to employ people who have musical training, because musicians are likely to have developed their communication skills as well as their logical skills. The value of music in schools is, on the whole, vastly underrated."
When you started out, you were teaching people who wanted to know about the recording process, but now you find yourself in the position of teaching and advising other teachers.
"One part of the work that I'm doing is developing in‑service training for teachers and encouraging the industry to take part in that. Unfortunately, it's difficult when the government doesn't provide the funding or allow the teachers the time for adequate training. In other parts of the world, we're working with organisations, helping them set up their training procedures in recording techniques. We were recently in Singapore talking to the distributors and manufacturers about the need for training. I've just returned from Finland where we've been working with the Sibelius Academy, setting up their courses for recording engineers and producers. A lot of the training we do is not for people who want to find a job in the recording industry — there are musicians who now need to know much more about the whole recording process so that they can develop their creativity, and increasingly record company staff are needing to keep up with the technology. Gateway has always developed in line with evolving needs, which is why we are now setting up courses in broadcast and live sound."
Is it true that your emphasis has now shifted from straightforward teaching of the subject, to teaching people how best to learn in a rapidly changing technical environment?
"Yes, we tend to put emphasis on the learning process rather than on the teaching process. One of the lectures I gave at the Sibelius Academy was entitled 'Too Much Teaching and Not Enough Learning'. The one constant that we know in the Universe at the moment is change. We need to teach people how to cope with change for the rest of their lives. Often it's the perceived rate of change that sets up the fear and stress patterns that cause people to resist change and be frightened of the learning process. For example, a school music teacher might suddenly be given a 4‑track recorder on a Friday night and be told to use it in a lesson on Monday morning."
Where do you plan to take Gateway next?
"At the moment, because of all the new courses that we want to bring in, we're modularising our course material, which will make it easier for us to construct new courses very quickly. Within Gateway, I'm also developing stress management courses for the Arts Industry and other courses that help people express their creative potential. This is part of my work which is not so well known, and it goes hand in hand with helping people deal with new technology in industries other than the music industry. I'm currently developing a training course for trainers in music technology. This course will be available internationally for those people and organisations who have the expertise but not the training skills."
It seems as though there's a lot of very serious educational theory put into practice at Gateway, but I assume that you still run courses for those who just want to spend a few days learning how to record better music in their home studios, as well as for those looking for full‑time musical careers?
"Absolutely. We have one‑week courses, weekend courses and one‑month courses running all through the summer. Although I talk a lot about the theory of education, it all comes back to our original concept, which is that learning has to be fun, and unless you can actually enjoy learning, you're not going to learn efficiently."
The Philosophy Of Teaching
Where does your teaching theory come from? It doesn't appear that teaching is a direction you originally intended to go in.
"Not long after we started teaching, a lot of our students asked us why it was that they had learnt more from us in 10 minutes than they had from their physics teachers in two years. I was trying to figure out what it was we were actually doing, so I went off and studied humanistic psychology for five years, training with the Psychosynthesis and Education trust. This work became the basis for many of our teaching techniques. What it comes down to is giving people the big picture of what's going on before you give them the detail. On a lot of courses, teachers start filling a board full of mathematics and equations before the students have a sense of where the mathematics might fit into the picture. Another important aspect is that we have a policy of making the learning process comfortable and fun. I don't know who wrote the rule that says learning should be frightening and a drudgery.
"Over the years we've taken on board the work of a lot of other pioneering people in the education and training field, such as Colin Rose from Accelerated Learning Systems."
You've mentioned Accelerated Learning in the past; what is the theory behind it?
"It's a very eclectic system that brings in lots of theories — one of the interesting angles is based on the work of Howard Gardener, who is Professor of Education at Harvard. He says that we don't have just one intelligence but several. We're familiar with the verbal/linguistic intelligence and a mathematical, logical intelligence, but there's also a spatial intelligence which allows you to learn by pictures and by interconnections. Then there's musical intelligence, which includes making up rhymes — it's well known that if you have a big list of things that you need to remember, it's easier if you can turn them into a rhyme or song. On top of that, there's interpersonal intelligence, where you have people discuss things between themselves; as we discovered, if we want to understand something better for ourselves, the best way is to try to explain it in very simple terms, to someone who has no knowledge at all of the subject. Then there's kinesthetic intelligence, which all Gateway teaching pays a lot of attention to — learning by doing. Our courses tend to be 50% experiential and 50% theory. Finally there's intrapersonal intelligence, which is inner reflection — taking the time to review for ourselves exactly what it is that we've been trying to learn. We also learn not just with our minds but also through our feelings, and this is very important in the learning process."