Well, the HNC DJing and Electronic Music Production is a brand new course and we're sort of guinea pigs to the whole thing. It's really good, but you can sort of tell they're still working things out a bit... So far we've covered Structure and Composition, Recording and Mixing down live bands in a studio, Mastering, Event Management, The Science of Sound and Analysis of a Genre. There are a few things that seem irrelevant to electronic music production and there is a lot of essay writing, but I think they have certain criteria to cover as a higher education course, and I suppose some of it allows us to keep our options open for other directions we could take in the music industry. They've put a lot of money into getting some really good hi-end equipment and acoustic treatment, and the tutors are really good - most of them are involved within the music industry (My tutor last year was this guy -
https://soundcloud.com/defazed)
Before this, I was doing the same course, but at a BTEC level, it was the opening year for Cornwall dBs, so once again we were kind of guinea pigs... It's a 2 year course, but me and a few others had already had a fair bit of experience with music production before doing the course, so we got moved up to the higher degree instead of going onto the 2nd year. The BTEC's obviously not as intense as the HNC and it literally starts off you off from the basics of EDM production, but I definitely learnt a lot from it. Another thing with the BTEC is that there are actual modules on DJing and developing your performance skills, whereas the HNC doesn't actually cover DJing, it's all based around production.
But yeah, it's a really good music college, the atmosphere's wicked and I've met a lot of sound people there. You get the odd person who doesn't take it seriously, but most of the people on our course are really dedicated to it! Wish I could do it in Berlin to be honest, the music scene's a lot better over there than it is in Cornwall!