Leading audio school integrates software and hardware
Florida-based Full Sail Real World
Education, which offers an Associate of Science degree as well as
exposure to all of the technologies an audio engineer is likely to see
out in the field, has installed Steinberg's Cubase and Nuendo digital
audio software in key technology labs to aid in teching audio and
multimedia production.
Bill Smith, Full Sail's Recording Arts Program Director, has been with
the Florida based educational instition for 16 years. "We offer our
students an immersive program that includes 1,578 hours of training,
given over a one year period. We have 50 labs and studios that mirror
just about any situation our students are likely to find themselves in
after they graduate, from typical project studios all the way up to
world class tracking facilities."
After auditioning all of the available software packages on the
market, the school found Steinberg software best suited to their
academic requirements. The labs are set up with individual work
stations for each student, all running either Steinberg's Cubase SX3
or Nuendo 2. Each workstation is networked into a main server which
houses all of the audio clips that the students work on.
"We knew that whatever digital audio sequencer we chose would be the
first software that many of our students saw. Cubase SX 3 is
straightforward and easy to get comfortable with on a basic level.
Once you get comfortable with Cubase, and Nuendo for that matter, it's
easy to keep going and dig into the deeper features, which are as
complex and detailed as any software on the market."
A school the size of Full Sail would also need software that
integrates well with other applications and hardware. "Cubase and
Nuendo have performed flawlessly for us in this area," says Smith.
"Our MIDI lab, for example, has hardware and software from just about
every manufactuer in the marketplace, and we never have any problems
getting Steinberg software to work with anything."
While software has become integral to the teaching methods at Full
Sail, Smith points out that integration is key. "I wouldn't want to
give the impression that we're totally a soft installation, though.
We've got equipment from major manufacturers like Yamaha all over our
facility, including Motif keyboards, a number of Yamaha drum kits, and
several SPX 2000 reverb units."
