Meet Alex Stagg, a dBs Manchester MA student who has taken advantage of the opportunities available at our home in New Century.
At the dBs Institute Manchester Campus, we’ve helped build a unique environment for our students to learn their creative craft with the help of our friends upstairs at New Century.
Located in the heart of Manchester, New Century is a state-of-the-art venue, kitchen and creative hub housed in a historic building that, in its heyday, hosted some of the biggest artists on the face of the Earth. Today, as well as setting the stage for established acts in the venue on the top floor, the building also helps to nurture the musicians, game developers and creatives of the future in the basement where dBs and our sister college Access Creative College are based.
For our students, dBs Institute and New Century is a unified creative ecosystem where they can sharpen their skills during lectures, seminars and workshops at dBs in the basement, catch unplugged performances from local artists on the ground floor Kitchen and experience some of the UK’s most exciting artists in an impeccable top-floor Hall in the evening. The proximity to New Century doesn’t just offer opportunities for immersion into the local creative scene, it can also provide opportunities for work and networking - something that dBs MA Music Production & Sound Engineering student Alex Stagg has taken full advantage of.
Alex Stagg joined us for his Master’s last year with a long history of music-making already under his belt. Starting his musical journey as the Head Chorister at Salisbury Cathedral during primary school, he attended the prestigious Sherborne School with a music scholarship where he achieved Grade 8 in multiple instruments, toured the world with the school’s ensemble bands, became the head of a 100-person choir and then attended the University of Manchester where he studied music at degree level.
“After my undergrad, I got a job as a composer's assistant at a film music studio,” says Alex, “I was assisting two film music composers called Peter Bateman and Sunna Wehrmeijer. Through that job, I was assisting with office-based work like cue sheets, and then as time progressed, they allowed me to chip in with some actual composing. I ended up composing a little bit for a few series they were working on and I've now got credits on ‘Spirit Riding Free’, which is through Netflix and I also helped out with ‘Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?’, which is Warner Brothers… It was an amazing, amazing opportunity. I really enjoyed it, but I left that job because I wanted to travel.”
With his travel plans derailed by COVID, Alex formed the band Two’s a Riot with his friend Vincent and found work doing photography, marketing and content creation for CMe Media on the South Coast. But, a long period away from music professionally became overbearing. After moving back to Manchester, he decided to apply to a Master’s with us to, “Scrub up on some production skills and technical skills,” and find his feet in the industry again.
“Yeah, it's been really interesting. I've learned a lot,” says Alex on studying for his MA at dBs, “It's forced me to learn a lot and learn quickly. Mixing and mastering are things that you find yourself doing naturally when sitting down and writing music, but I've never fully investigated it as a whole professional process. So, learning how to do it properly has been really eye-opening. We’ve had to create 30-minute portfolios for mixing and mastering and reach out to artists to see if we could use real-world tracks… The enterprise module we had last semester has been really useful too. In that module, we had to come up with a business plan for when we leave university. That's made me reach out to contacts for interviews and has been super beneficial. I've made some really, really good industry connections and a few of them have led to a couple of gigs here and there already!”
As well as helping to, “Give me focus,” ensuring Alex is, “Being held accountable for projects,” and encouraging him to “Get involved directly with the industry,” studying at our Manchester campus has also led to paid work with our friends upstairs in the New Century Kitchens.
“During my time at dBs, I managed to get the job in the Kitchens through an email sent out to dBs students by Dom [Kane, Head of Centre]. They wanted someone to help them out with a bit of photography and marketing,” says Alex, who has just signed a contract with New Century Kitchens vendor Good Things to run their social media, “So I had a few meetings, showed the marketing manager my portfolio of work from CMe and the restaurant I worked with and he was quite impressed. After that, I started to get involved with the Kitchens. I would go around with an iPhone on a gimbal, take lots of videos and photos of all the food vendors, and the event space and then use that content as collateral for their social media. In the evenings, I’d be doing shifts posting stories, covering events that have happened in that space and filming crowd reactions; I also went up to the hall and did a very similar thing for them to use as collateral for future promotion… They'll drop me a message if they ever need me. It’s dependent on what's going on, but it’s been good fun and having dBs, the Kitchens and the Hall in that one space has been very handy. I feel like I'm building relationships across the whole building, which is really nice. Now I know a lot of the team from the Hall and the Kitchens. It's a nice environment to be in. I feel like I'm contributing a lot on all levels, which is cool.”
Alex’s experience working for New Century is another example of the collaborative, creative community we have nurtured throughout the building. As well as providing employment opportunities, New Century has also reached out to our students to perform ‘unplugged’ shows in their kitchen and, as part of the building’s 60th anniversary, we worked together to offer Owen McGregor a fully-paid scholarship to study our BSc (Hons) Live Sound degree this September.
Our connection extends beyond the cultural, we are also physically connected by optic fibre cables that allow our students to capture multi-channel audio from the high-profile artists who play upstairs for broadcast, live recording and multi-track recording. As we continue to cultivate our cross-building collaboration, both dBs and New Century look forward to exploring the other ways we can become a one-stop-shop for creativity in one of the best cities in the UK.
“It's such a new thing. We were the first year of the Master’s course,” says Alex, “So they are still trying to figure out to what extent they can collaborate between the different floors, but the fact that I'm now working in the Kitchen shows that the collaboration actually is starting to happen. The fact they reached out to students first, rather than trying to outsource the work, is good. You can tell they're trying to integrate the floors more and I know a few people in my year who are working at the bar upstairs.”
For other students who want to take advantage of opportunities like this, Alex says that being visible is imperative. “It's getting yourself out there. Being face to face with people helps a lot,” he says, “It's very tempting to sit at home and wait for things to come to you, but unfortunately, it doesn't ever happen that way. Often, by being in the right space and showing your face, things will pop up. That's what's helped me a lot. Getting my name known at dBs has helped. Dom now knows me very well at quite a personal level, so he knows what I can do, what I'm capable of and that I'm very keen to get involved with things. So, when opportunities do pop up, I'm the name that's first on his mind. Whereas, if you just sit at home, people aren’t going to know who you are as a person. Especially with music and the arts, it's often about the relationships you build with people and being an easy person to get along with and work with. Showing that you're just a nice, easygoing person, that you're decent to work with, hard-working, going put the effort in and you're trustworthy, proving that and showing that is a really important part of the process and that then leads to more opportunities.”
Want to join Alex and immerse yourself in a collaborative community in the heart of Manchester? Learn more about our Manchester Campus and check out our courses today!