The Course
This is your chance to be who you want to be musically, learn about the business, match your music with an audience and plan a working life playing music.
We will also develop your musical literacy and technical skills.
There are four main themes:
- Music performance
- Creation
- Production
- The music business and the context in which music happens.
Average places available: Up to 55 each year
Career prospects
We have strong links with the music industry and hold frequent in-house auditions and showcases for record and publishing companies. Our students have won many songwriting competitions. Our graduates have achieved chart success across the world, as writers, producers and performers.
Many have signed recording and publishing contracts. Career outcomes include working as session musicians, as music producers and as music writers for computer games and advert campaigns. In addition, you are eminently qualified to pursue careers within music education or within the wider world of business.
Each year we conduct a survey of our alumni who graduated almost four years earlier to find out what they did after leaving us. You can see the results of the latest survey by clicking on the factsheet image:
The Graduates
Many of our Music graduates have been instrumental in top ten hits across the world not just as performers but as writers and producers.
Indie-pop trio The Wombats met and formed here. Their second album This Modern Glitch reached number 3 in the UK charts in April 2011.
2003 Music graduate Sandi Thom’s debut album Smile, It Confuses People... sold over a million copies and reached number 1 in 7 countries. Norwegian graduate Mads Hauge co-wrote and produced Pixie Lott's number 1 singles Mama Do and Boys and Girls.
Stateside, Liam Lynch directed and co-wrote the music for Tenacious D movie The Pick Of Destiny.
Many Music and Sound Technology graduates are signed with leading labels including Nude Records, Ninja Tune, Invicta, Hi-fi, Counter Records and top jazz label Candid Records.
The Staves, whose lead singer studied here and graduated in 2010, have been attracting a lot of attention, having already backed Tom Jones and the Keane alt-country project Mt Desolation.
Others are composing and arranging for film, TV and video games. One of our graduates has worked for a number of years for George Lucas at Lucas Arts in San Francisco as a Staff Composer for Star Wars video games.
Our graduates have also gone on to work alongside many world famous musicians: this may be as backing singers, instrumentalists (eg drums, keys, guitarists), songwriters, support groups or as their sound engineers (working on their albums in studios or on their live sound on tour).
The list of artists that Music or Sound Technology graduates they have worked with covers just about every style of music and includes Britney Spears, Madonna, KT Tunstall, Beyoncé, Simon Webbe, Guns N’ Roses, Daniel Beddingfield, Eliza Doolittle, Atomic Kitten, Stephen Fretwell, Sheryl Crow, KD Lang, Death Cab for Cutie, Take That, John Martyn, Paul McCartney and Jools Holland, to name but a few.