On a job right now, so I don't have time to keep tabs on the minutia of the GOP primary cam-pain, only what I can get on the morning ride to base from The USAToday, the choice of hotel rats and airport prisoners everywhere.
Thankfully, The USAToday has a pretty deep bench of political writers, so they catch some odd details others may miss. Case in point, this morning's offering Donors to Romney super PAC have ties to for-profit colleges, which details some large donations to Whatever His Pac's Catch Phrase About "Our Future" from such educational pioneers as the Apollo Group, owners of online powerhouse Phoenix University and Todd Nelson of Education Management Corp., currently under investigation by the DOJ for illegal recruitment bounty kickbacks.
(I don't know if Education Management Corp. actually has a campus, but I doubt they can boast a mascot and fight song).
Another name on the list was James "Bill" Heavener, CEO of Full Sail "University," a prime Florida fundraiser for Whatever Our Future, a name which mashed my pissoff button right down into the console.
Full Sail, for those who do not know, is an established tech college which extracts money from individuals who hope to become professionals in the field of audio and video recording and editing (No link provided. Fuck Full Sail.). For many, many thousands of your dollars, they will teach you the basics of ProTools and Cubase, AVID and the like, proper distances from various sound sources to place microphones and fill you with the vision of walking into Skywalker Ranch or the Record Plant and being hailed as Da Man, the new cowboy with the mad skills, off on a wild career ride mixing Springsteen tracks for Spielberg movies.
Today, for free, I'm going to tell you the exact skills you'll need to make it in the digital production biz: one scoop per cup and one for the pot, aim the broom toward the dustpan and note the player and take number for every track.
That's it. Oh, sure, knowing ProTools helps, and for the money you'd spend at Full Sail, you can buy a Mac and load it up and learn the program the way you've learned every program since your first word processor: beat on buttons until something happens, ask people who are better at it than you are (and now, thank the gods, check YouTube). Congratulations, you're now a ProTools cowboy. You and a hundred thousand other people looking for work.
"Schools" like Full Sail don't get you jobs. They get you some basic skills needed for your trade. What gets you jobs is accepting that you're the FNG and you're going to be making the coffee, typing up invoices and answering the phone while people who've been at the game a lot longer are chatting up Robert Plant or, much more likely, feigning interest while another Flavor of the Month wannabe spends his or her dad's money on demos which will be heard by no one.
The key to getting work in the production biz is work. If you have to sweep, sweep. If you have to coil the mic cable behind the boom operator, coil it neatly. If you have to ask all the musicians' names to keep the track sheets, write 'em down. Work.
Soon, if you're lucky, the real engineer will have a session he or she doesn't want and you'll get to cut the worst death metal crap you've ever heard and nobody else will. And then, the next day, you will make more coffee. And supplement your income doing live sound for bands you would cut your throat to keep from hearing twice.
In a few years, you might be the chief chair warmer, pushing the buttons and feeling fine, but you'll still be wrapping cables and writing invoices. If you're lucky and the studio you work for actually stays in business. Most don't, you know.
But please, for god's sake, don't waste your money on places like Full Sail. Or, if you feel you have to, waste your money on other places like Full Sail. Hell, your local college probably has a decent production studio and classes to teach you how to use it.
Just don't give dough to Mr. Heavener and his "university." Not only will he not get you a job, he's using that money to put President Obama out of his.
And that, my friends, is a damned sour note.
Update: Zwoof points out in the comments that Full Sail co-chairman Ed Haddock is a heavy donor and fundraiser for President Obama and Democrats.
So fuck Heavener, not Full Sail.