Front of House
Thirty hours and a six-hour capstone. Learn to run live sound for a band, from the first cable to the last case. It costs nothing and you do not need to own any equipment to start.
The spine
Eight modules, in the order it should be learned.
This is the written-out audio tier of the Foundation’s A/V curriculum. It is not a reading list — every module is built to be done with your hands. If you are reading a module instead of doing it, you are not learning it yet.
The two that matter more than any of the eight
Signal flow and cable discipline. A student who leaves with those and nothing else is employable.
Being able to trace a signal from any source to any destination on any system, regardless of brand — and handling cable like it is expensive. Specific equipment ages out of the trade every few years. Those two never do.
That is why modules one and two come first and are never compressed, no matter how much a student wants to get to the interesting equipment.
The honest part
37 of 51 lessons need no equipment at all.
Equipment is the real constraint on free training, so every lesson in this tier is tagged by what it actually requires. Nothing that needs a room is ever set as homework, because a student has no sound system at home.
After this tier
The rest of the trade.
Tier 1 · 30 hours
Audio foundations
Written in full and running now — the eight modules above.
Tier 2 · 15 hours
Video
In the curriculum and taught in sequence after the audio tier.
Tier 3 · 9 hours
Lighting
In the curriculum and taught in sequence after the audio tier.
Tier 4 · 6 hours
The job around the job
In the curriculum and taught in sequence after the audio tier.
Four tiers, eighteen modules, sixty contact hours including the capstone. Audio comes first because audio is where the work starts and where the jobs are — and because a room will forgive a bad picture long before it forgives bad sound.