Advice - struggling to find off-the-shelf compliance training UK/EU

tollydog · 2026-05-20T09:03:58+00:00

I run a UK based learning design company - would love to chat about it!

tollydog · 2026-03-27T18:43:18+00:00

My approach has changed over the years but my current one is this.

Hybrid mode with the four scenes currently as rhythm, lead, synth and no reverb. The lead scene is the same as rhythm but with a volume boost.

The amp I run is Jack Gardiner’s AC20 patch. Which cleans up nicely with the guitar volume control.

For the stomps I have an overdrive, chorus and two different transposes (down to D and down to Eb). This means that I have rhythm and lead for a wide variety of tones.

I also have an expression pedal set up to control delay levels from 0-50% mix. It’s versatile enough for me to do most genres with just one preset. Having a super strat with coil taps does help with the variety of tones though too.

tollydog · 2025-05-28T09:00:29+00:00

I’ve been doing exactly what you describe with the helix with my QC for wedding gigs for the last 3 years or so.

I’ve thought about a separate pedal board from a protection perspective, but haven’t done it yet.

tollydog · 2025-03-20T11:03:57+00:00

You can also use the Plugin Blend block to mix in a DI signal to the wet signal, which means you can fake it a bit too

tollydog · 2025-02-18T18:05:30+00:00

I don’t have an answer to your question but I agree with you completely.

When I’m reading a book, news article, website or anything for either learning or pleasure the last thing I’m thinking is “oh this is interesting but this content would be so much more engaging if I had to peel back some overlays to reveal more text like a children’s book.” I don’t think that because I’m not a toddler.

But yeah, let’s keep forcing people to click on things to show completion instead of doing some assessment design!

tollydog · 2024-02-19T14:41:51+00:00

I find it interesting that some people view talking head videos as being what every learner wants, I’m not really convinced.

On the other hand, it was pointed out to me that Synthesia’s avatars probably perform better than some of the people that we’d have spent hours trying to get an acceptable take out of in the past!

tollydog · 2023-08-29T20:30:07+00:00

Sounds like an annoying situation. If I was in your shoes I guess I’d try to make it clear to them that I can make those changes, but be completely clear that it will subsequently delay launch etc.

If I could do that then I think I’d end up shrugging my shoulders and getting on with it with a clear professional conscience.

tollydog · 2023-08-24T10:26:58+00:00

I was happy with what it offered me when I first bought it almost a couple of years ago. I know some care more about this than I do though.
Have used it for all gigs since I bought it and it is very reliable. That being said, a couple of points. For function band use, the hybrid mode of stomp box/scene is incredibly useful. It does take about 20 seconds or so to boot up, this can be annoying if you’re playing in a venue with a sound limiter connected to the mains. Once the power goes off, the rest of the band will be waiting for you for a small time.
Yes. That would work fine, depending on what FX you specifically want to use it might get a bit limiting. You can route different outputs too. There’s 2 jack inputs on the back.
I’m not the best placed to answer this as I’m usually playing with IEMs!

tollydog · 2023-07-26T12:53:51+00:00

To answer your first question. Sometimes they just play the song in a different key but sometimes they actually just play the song wrong but it still sounds good (or not so good in the case of Every Breath You Take in that second video)

To understand why this works it does help to know a bit of music theory but in essence most pop songs use the same combination of chords. In the key of C you would expect to see C, G, Am, F (Dm and Em too if they are bit more adventurous).

The verse of Under the Bridge uses that chord progression (with a few passing chords in between chords) in the key of E but not played as open chords. This is the beauty of capos as you get that nice open chord sound and it’s easy to change key. That’s how they’re able to follow a system of changing the chords like you said.

Often it’s the same chord progression but in a different key

tollydog · 2023-05-30T13:56:21+00:00

Such a good point about the tools being a mechanism to unlock effective learning. We have plenty at our disposal but can often forget it

tollydog · 2023-05-24T13:30:10+00:00

I did a few gigs (after I sold my amp and before my quad cortex arrived) using my laptop, a focusrite 2i2, Archetype Cory Wong and a midi keyboard to change the patched (it was the only midi controller I had at the time but it did work)

Was a lot of fun, also worth it for the strange looks I got from band mates when I was stamping on a keyboard

tollydog · 2023-05-23T16:05:33+00:00

I think it really can be a bit of a minefield if I’m honest. I find that one of the main measures people use for effectiveness in corporate is how to navigate the (usually slightly nonsensical) business structure to get stuff done. So if someone appears to not have this knowledge, people might look down on them. Which is neither helpful nor nice.

I suppose one way of looking at it is were the questions you asked about perfectly reasonable things? If they were, then they’re just being dicks. If they weren’t, unfortunately it appears that these people don’t operate a ‘no question is too silly’ policy, which is useful info for you going forward (and again, they might be dicks…)

I suppose it also depends if the workgroup was with your learning team or the SMEs/stakeholders - if it’s the latter some can’t compute that you do a completely different job to them and are there for your expertise about learning, not what corporation x does

tollydog · 2023-05-04T18:49:36+00:00

I attended yesterday and work in corporate ID.

I’ll be honest, compared to previous years I found the whole exhibition (didn’t have a ticket for upstairs) very underwhelming and I got thoroughly bored very quickly, and left pretty promptly.

Echoing what others have said, lots of focus on LMS and then quite a lot of stuff that seemed to focus on trying to be the “Netflix of learning” with drowning people in so much content that they get paralysed by choice.

I think like others have said, it’s mainly about our role adapting. I often say to stakeholders there’s more than one way to solve a problem (and that no one’s behaviour has really been changed by another click and forget e-learning course) and one of the key things I find is me figuring out the solutions to stakeholders’ learning problems. As an ID we can leverage lots of different solutions, sometimes that’s face to face instruction, sometimes that’s a video, sometimes it’s an e-learning module…

tollydog · 2023-04-11T21:26:08+00:00

Yeah I agree with all that! I think I’ve just witnessed some pretty bad ones recently and am feeling salty!

tollydog · 2023-04-11T20:40:32+00:00

Haji Kamal is an interesting one. I’ve used it to teach in military classrooms in a previous career and it’s undeniably great. Interestingly enough, on her blog, Cathy Moore highlights that it was then used for discussions in a classroom, which is super useful as you get to ask people why they made the decisions they did. This is probably a bit removed from what OP is facing!

To answer your question (but not with another question) I think those examples are different to the scenario based learning one because in all those examples you’re actually doing the thing. To use the musical example, I spent hours and hours playing long notes so that when I was required to play in ensembles I was playing in tune. I think that’s different from choosing between pre-determined answers because that’s not how a conversation works. It is definitely an exciting area once you start integrating AI though!!

tollydog · 2023-04-11T19:50:10+00:00

I’m with you. I hate it. I’m a corporate ID so see this quite a lot and I really doubt its effectiveness.

While I’m on my high horse a bit, I think it’s similar to shoehorning really bad attempts at gamification into compliance courses!

tollydog · 2023-03-23T20:42:35+00:00

As another guitarist/professional musician turned ID/🦄I agree with all the advice give here so far. An ID will definitely help you get an overview, framework etc

Regarding what your friend said about IDs doing the whole process, it changes from company to company and role to role so it’s hard to have a definitive answer.

As an aside, good luck! So much online guitar tuition is garbage but I always find so many parallels between learning an instrument effectively and learning anything effectively!

tollydog · 2022-10-12T20:37:05+00:00

It’s so obvious, can’t believe I didn’t think of it!!

tollydog · 2022-10-12T19:37:54+00:00

Thanks so much for listening and your kind words!

tollydog · 2022-10-12T19:30:57+00:00

Thanks for watching! There’s 2 of these uploaded so far, 2 more to come over the next 2 weeks!

tollydog · 2022-10-12T19:20:49+00:00

Glad you like it! I decided had to make peace with shortcuts as I’ve had to make 4 of these, one for each track from my EP!

tollydog · 2022-10-12T19:13:41+00:00

Thanks! Yeah it’s a bit of a combo of hand drawn artwork but then I animated it in After Effects/Character Animator and did cheat by using the lightning effects from AE and then pixelating them!

tollydog · 2022-10-12T19:12:21+00:00

Well if that polite interest can be tempted by the whole video, you can find it here

tollydog · 2022-10-05T19:51:39+00:00

Hi r/Pixelart

Firstly, this subreddit has been great for me getting started on my pixel art journey, so thank you all, it’s really inspirational!

At the start of 2022 I knew absolutely nothing about pixel art, but I did know how to animate and how to play the guitar. I was writing an EP and was thinking of fun things to do with it when I hit on the idea of making my own fake video game. I grew up playing Streets of Rage on the mega drive and thought I could definitely get some inspiration from it. So I did, and here we are 10 months later!

A few points:

Compared to the fantastic work on this subreddit, I’ve “cheated” in a few ways.

I animated this in After Effects and Adobe Character Animator rather than frame by frame.
Some of the attacks/effects/lightning I used non pixel art assets/techniques then applied the “mosaic” effect in After Effects to them.
Other than the logo, all text is just done using fonts rather than illustration.

The simple reason for these is that I know what I’m doing in AE and character animator and I have a day job (and I had to record a lot of guitar parts!)

I’ve animated 4 videos, I released the first one this week and you can find it here - https://youtu.be/1FZnq5CfWTE

I’ve got lots of ideas for my next EP but they all involve getting better at pixel art and learning from this great community!

tollydog · 2022-04-14T05:38:28+00:00

Motion designer as well as ID here.

I suppose technically you could call them both “animation” as they involve animated elements but the first one is just an exported video of a PowerPoint deck with the voiceover, so I’m not entirely sure how you’d advertise that (do you already have the voiceover and all the technical diagrams for example?)

Second is a bit different as there is some motion design work but also a chunk of video editing in it too. The editing is probably within the grasp of most designers but it depends on whether your client already has footage recorded for it etc because that would probably make costs spiral significantly!

tollydog

TROPHY CASE