We were delighted to be involved with the Learning Revolution in October and were busy bringing carnival arts to people all over London. From knitting at the South Bank to carnival costumes in Brixton, samba reggae in Notting Hill to singing in Old Spitalfields Market we worked with a wide range of artists and arts organisations to bring participative opportunities to hundreds of Londoners. Find out more about by watching the audio slide show……

With just a couple of days to go to the Mayor’s Music Education Summit at City Hall, which we’re producing, we wanted to draw your attention once more to the GLA’s No Strings Attached Musical Instrument Amnesty, delivered in partnership with Time Out. If you’ve got an old, once-loved, instrument which you no longer use, then you can pledge it to the amnesty. To find out more, just go to timeout.com/nostrings.

Here we’re at hub towers we’re excited and delighted to be launching our new training brochure this month. It’s full of training courses based on client feedback about what they – and the people they work with – need, and covers areas such as business planning, fundraising, digital strategy and production, legal and finance essentials, creative production, music industry essentials making the Olympics work for you. Easily navigable, each section outlines example frameworks, content and learning outcomes, and it also talks you through how we work with clients to customize our training sessions to ensure that they provide exactly what’s needed.

As you may already know, the hub has a strong track record as a training organisation; over the years we’ve worked with music industry bodies and development agencies to train hundreds of artists, promoters, producers, label managers and others working in the cultural sector. In response to demand, we’ve done more and more training each year. We really enjoy training; it’s inspiring to spend time with other industry professionals keen to find new answers and try out new ideas – and it keeps us on our toes! As trainers, the hub gives people what they want: industry-specific training, full of relevant, practical advice and information that can be put into practice straight away; trainers who continue to do pay their dues and are generous with their knowledge, and plenty of opportunities for debate, questions and networking. All of our trainers are specialist ‘industry insiders’, who combine significant training expertise with up-to-the-minute practical experience of working as managers, producers, fundraisers, marketers or project managers.

Our Fundraising and Sponsorship courses cover everything from government funds to private investment; as the credit crunch kicks in and industry models shift, injecting cash into small businesses will be harder but all the more important. Our Digital Strategy and Production courses are a 21st Century reality check, explaining how to get digitally savvy on a shoestring, build a business-focused digital ‘toolkit’; check out the hugely popular Penniless Podcaster too! We cover the live stuff too – our Creative Production courses cover everything people need to know to make their events a success – the checklist, health & safety, logistic – the lot. Everyone hates business planning, right? Our Business Planning courses are renowned for cutting through the c*** and getting people inspired and on-track. The same is true of our Music Industry Essentials courses, aimed at artists and entrepreneurs alike, which show you how to make money from your music and grow your music business. Meanwhile our Legal & Financial Essentials sessions tackle contracts, copyright, legal and company structures, boards and governance, demystifying all that legal jargon. And, If you want to build your international know how, check out our International Arts courses, which explain how to work internationally, and – the one we all want to crack – how to make the Olympics work for you.

We hope you enjoy reading our first ever Training Guide; we’re very excited about it, and we’d love to explore with you how we might be able to work together. To find out more, give us a call on 020 7377 1373 or email info@thehubuk.com.

Earlier this year the hub was commissioned by Sound Connections to deliver a podcast training project for young disabled musicians and producers. Over the course of five half day workshops we worked with the participants to develop their recording and production skills and to devise and record content for their own podcast. We also invited in some BBC producers to give them feedback on their work, and some pointers for the future.

As the project was all about podcasting, we decided to produce a podcast as part of our project evaluation. Featuring original sound material produced by the participants, footage from the training sessions, plus interviews with participants and our trainers, you can listen to it by clicking here.

(If you can not access the flash media player above, visit ovi.com to listen to the episode)

Check out our flickr slideshow and a selection of related blog entries. Feel free to contact us for more info.

Our Saturday morning podcast project at Stratford Media Circus finally came to an end this week. We were joined by two BBC radio producers who offered feedback to the participants and talked about how they could develop there skills.With bags of experience and enthusiasm, we all benefited from there received wisdom and we at times wished we were on the shoes of the participants once again!

The young people were each presented with a final mix down of the pieces they have been working on over the past 5 weeks. It included interviews, stories, sound effects, live performances, groups projects, individual projects and of course a range of indents.Overall, the young people enjoyed the project a great deal and got a lot out of it, as did we, and hopefully, there will be plenty more to come.

Big thanks to Lou & Alice for coming in and enlightening us as to the inner workings of BBC radio production, also to Stuart, Sound Connections, Stratford Media Circus and of course, all the young people who took part. Well done everyone!

With one more session to go, we’ve been busy tying up any loose ends and making sure we have recorded all the material we need to assemble all our shorter audio pieces into one big one. One big Podcast that is – made up of interviews, the groups favourite tracks, stories, sound FX, narration and more. We’ve also had a bit of a photo shoot so the participants can walk away with not just an audio record of the work shops, but a visual one too.

Next week, we will be making the final touches and presenting each participant with a finished product. Stuart has even promised to reward them with a bakewell tart each. We look forward vey much to these moments!

This Saturday saw the podcast group get to grips with creating an original story and learning how to jazz it up and flesh it out with sound effects sourced from the collective hard drives of Stuart and Tom. Hosting more participants than ever, we worked in separate groups to create two very different pieces of storytelling, including such edge-of-the-seat antics as police chases, trick or treaters, revenge and celebration parties that even we grown-ups couldn’t rival.


It was great to find focus with the young people and demonstrate to them how they could polish up their work using the editing suite – a kind of aural airbrushing! The addition of our in-house wordsmith Jasmine, meant the participants could really explore the relationship between writing stories and using sound effects. A rather extensive collection made it possble to add depth to their stories that featured Big Ben, horses whinnying, doorbells and more. We are building on the skills of the group and are moving towards a nice body of work.

This week, we have focussed on working as a group. After an initial brainstorming session, we came up with the name Music Mashup Podcasters which we think reflects what we have been up to in our workshops.

The next logical step was to create an indent for the group which was a lot of fun – you can see the photos by clicking here. For this, we decided to employ a good old box of percussion including shakers, triangles, djembes, marracas and more. After a lot of noise, we think we’ve come up with something.

We’ve also built on our interviewing techniques and generated reems of material. All in all, the group have got plenty to say so we’re looking forward to next week when we’ll be assembling it all into the form of a podcast.

The day is Saturday, March 8th and we have just finished our first podcasting workshop at Circus Media, Stratford which is delivered in association with Sound Connections and Youth Music Action Zones. The group of young people seemed to enjoy themselves a great deal and commented on how they were looking forward to attending next weeks session.

This week we have focused on the fundamentals of recording and spent time interviewing and getting to know one another. Each participant has worked hard to create audio content based around there favourite musical styles, bands and interests which we will be looking to edit into the form of a podcast over the coming weeks. Led by Stuart Silver and assisted by hubsters Tom and Andi, the programme has gotten off to a cracking start and everyone involved has greatly enjoyed what looks to be a hugely rewarding project. To see the pics, just click here.

Do you have an interest in music or radio and are looking to develop your digital expertise in this field? If so, you may be interested in what we have on offer…

Funded by Sound Connections and supported by Attitude Is Everything, the hub will be producing and delivering another inspirational training programme centred around podcasting.

The project Podcast Connections is a programme of workshops for disabled young people between the ages of 11–25 and is completely FREE! It is a workshop programme that enables participants to develop all the practical skills and knowledge they need to put together their own podcasts.

Including digital production skills, feedback from industry professionals, help to share and promote your music via a range of multi media channels and a chance to play live, you’d be mad to miss out on this fantastic opportunity!

Beginning on Saturday 8th of March and continuing to Saturday March 29th, the programme will run between the times of 10:00–15:00 at the Stratford Circus in East London.

To reserve your place on the course, you will need to fill out a brief application form which can be obtained by clicking here. This should be returned by 12:00 mid day on Wednesday 5th March so you’ll have to hurry as we only have 10 spaces!
For more information, please contact andi@thehubuk.com