Sweetwater Internship Post 3 - 3/15/2021

I was told today that Sweetwater is sort-of in a dry season for studio work right now. There's not a lot going on, and in turn, there is not much for an intern to observe or help out with in the audio realm. For that reason, today was a little bit of a wakeup call.

As most Mondays normally start off, this morning was notably rough. Especially considering last night was daylight savings, so we lost an hour last night, making me much more tired than I had anticipated. Nevertheless, I came into work this morning ready to do some cool stuff and learn a thing or two. Sadly, the day didn't go as I expected, and I ended up doing a lot of simple, seemingly unrelated tasks.

In the morning, I got to help out a bit with some setup that was happening on the stage for a rehearsal that was about to occur. I helped some of the artists find some power sources for their amps and pedals, and I set up a talkback footswitch for the lead artist, so he could push it down only when he wanted signal to go through. After everything on the stage was squared away, I re-wrapped and organized every cable wall in the studio and by the stage. Now it looks absolutely pristine, but the entire time I felt like I could have been doing something more helpful (I'll elaborate on that in a bit).

For the rest of the day, I had two very time-consuming jobs. First of all, I was given the task of organizing every single drum head in the studio and the marketing department by brand and size. This task took most of the day, and it was certainly difficult. Part of that job was determining which heads we should throw out because they are too worn or have dents in them. That was the toughest part for me. After several hours of that, I moved on to help one of the theater department employees by grabbing a big bag of these Quik-Release microphone stand adapters, and putting them on every single microphone and stand that the theatre department owned. That took the remaining chunk of the day.

All this being said, I'm not posting this to whine or say that my job is hard or lame, but rather to express that not every task you are given is going to be one that you find particularly interesting, but they still need to be done. Having put all those Quik-Releases on all those mics and stands for the theatre department was payed off by how ecstatic they were that I could help out their department and that I was quick and efficient as I did it. Also, after I got all of those drum heads sorted out, people from every department would come by and say something along the lines of "Wow, you did all this today? You guys are awesome! It looks great!" This task is something that needed to be done for a long time, but nobody had taken the time to do it. It's little things like this that really show your employer that you are willing to help in any way you can, and you are willing and capable to put your full effort into even the smallest tasks.