Why the rebrand? Glad you asked!

We’ve been Manchester MIDI School since 1996 (21 years!) and feel that now is the right time to re-focus on what we do, in line with some major milestones as the school continues to grow.

In the past few years we have expanded rapidly as a school and a staff team, offering more training, and taking over more and more of the Bexley Chambers building as high end facilities for students to use.

November 2016 was a big milestone for the school, shifting from Logic to Ableton Live as the main DAW on our longer music production courses (starting with Introduction to Music Production). Ableton Live has risen to take centre stage as the industry’s DAW of choice, and has fostered a huge community of users and support worldwide. A nod to its Push hardware too, which is incredibly intuitive for music-making, performance, and teaching music production. One of the big impetuses for us as a school to switch was to promote inclusivity for all students making music at home, regardless of if they have a Mac or not.

November 2016 also came with a shift to more modular training, giving students more options to create bespoke training packages suited to their needs. With this came our new 6-month course specialising in sound design, mix down and mastering and heavy usage of Native Instruments Komplete – our Advanced Music Production Course. The decision to include Electronic Music Composition in training for all students undertaking anything from Introduction to Music Production up to our Master Diploma came along too, in support of up-skilling all music production students with a solid foundation of music theory knowledge.

After a big Christmas graft, January 2017 saw our brand new Midi Lab go in, offering a high-end teaching suite of 20 iMacs kitted out with Ableton Push 2s, NI Jams, Scarlett interfaces and NI Komplete Control 25 keyboards. We also launched a new space on the first floor – a state of the art DJ Lab with 7 different setups, from Pioneer NXS2s, to Traktor Z2s.

May 2017 saw another new shift in software, to Avid’s Pro Tools being primarily used on our Audio Engineering Course. This is the industry-standard software for audio engineers and post-production work, which our Audio Engineering course has been extended to cover. This course now includes new areas such as Audio Dialogue Replacement, foley, and scoring for film and TV, to help students create strong portfolios and have a transferrable skillset when working in the industry. 

June 2017 was a big celebration for us, as one of our major goals as a School was reached. This was our new partnership with the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), and with this a step into running a new academic route for students wishing to train to degree level. Our partnership with UCLan has enabled us to run a foundation year, in preparation for students then progressing onto the 3 years of a full BA (Hons) in Music Production at UCLan’s campus. In line with our ethos, this means that students who may not have had any previous accredited music training can potentially come, and assuming a successful interview, be accepted onto a degree pathway. We launched this course for the first time this September 2017.

All big milestones, and there’s more to come! This is just part-one of our decision to rebrand. We currently have huge renovations going on in the ground floor of Bexley Chambers on Chapel Street; where in early 2018 we will be moving our offices downstairs, and opening a brand new student social and venue space. More on this when we have it!