Four Collarts alumni have traded campus rehearsal rooms for festival stages, triple j premieres and packed-out venues.
Students love Collarts.
Australia’s leading creative industries college, with four campuses spread across Fitzroy and Collingwood, has repeatedly ranked #1 in national student experience surveys for teaching quality and skill development.
It’s also stacking Melbourne’s emerging music scene with talent right now. Indie singer-songwriter Benjamin Trillado dropped his single 16 in November, while pop and R&B artist Hannah Donnelly recently had her track Nostalgia premiere on triple j. Five-piece Erica Avenue are fresh off a Beyond the Valley set and headed to St Kilda Festival, and producer-busker Umbra Moon has become a familiar presence in Bourke St Mall. All four acts came up through Collarts – the Australian College of the Arts – with campuses across Fitzroy and Collingwood.
Indie singer-songwriter Benjamin Trillado, whose new single 16 came out in November, studied Music Performance at Collarts. Collarts had all the facilities that Trillado needed as a young music student.
“I remember being amazed by the multiple rehearsal studios equipped with virtually any instrument you could think of,” he says. “We spent countless hours and days in them, working on our craft, forming friendships, learning songs and trying to be the next Fleetwood Mac.”
Pop and R&B-influenced musician Hannah Donnelly is a Collarts Music Performance student. Donnelly, whose latest single Nostalgia premiered on triple j earlier this month, has developed her stagecraft through the weekly student performances at Collarts’ Wellington St campus auditorium.
“For me, a strong performance happens when I feel at home on the stage, and that only happens through practice of performance,” she says. “I have loved that there is a space at Collarts for me to practice my performance skills. Despite it sometimes feeling strange that it’s the middle of the day and the room is full of your teachers and peers, it is really about practising getting up there and being yourself that helps in the long run.”
Pop and folk five-piece Erica Avenue have also benefited from the weekly performances in the Wellington St campus. Erica Avenue recently performed at Beyond the Valley, and they’re on the lineup for this year’s St Kilda Festival. The band members credit their time at Collarts with giving them the confidence to excel on big festival stages.
“This auditorium is really what prepared us for real-world gigs,” the band says. “Having to perform there every week, we learnt stage craft, stage presence, how to handle technical difficulties, forgetting lyrics or chords. You learn and grow to be so comfortable on a stage, it really became second nature by the time we started gigging in the real world.”
Erica Avenue have also made use of the professional rehearsal facilities at Collarts’ Brunswick St Campus.
“These rooms are decked out in all the equipment you could need for a whole band,” the band says. “Doing ensemble classes in those rooms taught us how to use equipment properly, so we can get the most out of our instruments and improve and experiment with different sounds and techniques.”
Songwriter, producer and busker Umbra Moon began studying Music Production at Collarts just as Covid hit. Social distancing rules significantly impacted their time on campus. “This was unfortunate,” Moon says, “because Collarts has incredible studios, synths, and microphones that I would absolutely love to dive into now.”
However, Collarts allows alumni to book studios and equipment when they are vacant, which Moon sees as “a massive pro of studying there.”
Despite the Covid interruption, Moon – who can regularly be seen performing in Bourke St Mall – was shaped into the musician they are today by a few key experiences from their time at Collarts.
“One [experience] was attending the Australian Women in Music Awards, where Collarts took a select group of students,” Moon says. “It was an amazing opportunity to connect with people who had been in the industry for a long time, and I really thrived in that environment.”
Moon also won a scholarship from Collarts to go to Germany and attend International Songwriting Week at Popakademie. “Being placed in a high-pressure, intensive environment with strangers, writing to briefs, gave me a real glimpse into what working as a songwriter or producer might be like, and I absolutely loved it,” Moon says.
As Moon’s experiences indicate, Collarts offers more than just creative arts education and access to world-class facilities. The college prides itself on connecting students with professionals from all sectors of the music industry.
“The teaching staff at Collarts are the real value of this university,” say the members of Erica Avenue. “Every teacher has had professional experience in the music industry and really knows the scene inside and out.”
Trillado agrees: “We had staff and teachers who were musicians, artists, band members, publicists, managers, sound techs and more, who were so equipped and willing to give us advice and opportunities. To this day, I find that I’m still crossing paths with staff as I continue to navigate through the music industry.”
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Donnelly has learned an enormous amount from her fellow Collarts students. “We are all allocated into random groups that turn into your band for the trimester,” she says. “I was lucky enough to meet five of my closest friends in my very first group I was put into at Collarts. I realised pretty quickly that I would need to pick up my game – be on time, learn how to harmonise, learn how to communicate what I want to a room of people I barely knew. My confidence developed majorly in that first trimester of study.”
Moon had a similar experience. “One of the biggest strengths of Collarts for me was meeting like-minded people, students who were genuinely passionate about music and production,” they say. “Being surrounded by passionate students and teachers inspired me to be the best I could be.”
Something that Trillado, Moon, Donnelly and the members of Erica Avenue all agree on is that Collarts is a welcoming place, where everyone’s creativity is encouraged and nurtured.
“The best part about the teachers at Collarts is the way they respect you as musicians yourselves,” Erica Avenue say. “Even though there is still a student-teacher hierarchy, they seem to acknowledge that art is art, and whilst they teach us technique, they more so teach us the ways of the industry by giving us advice based off their own experiences.”
“Peers, staff and teachers always made me feel welcome and created an environment for me that felt safe to explore my musicality and skills,” Trillado says. On top of all that, I made some life-long friends through Collarts, and that’s something I value more than anything.”
Collarts’ music program includes the two-year Bachelor of Music Performance and the two-year Bachelor of Music Production. Both courses offer a combination of creative and technical skills development, access to professional facilities, and interactions with a wide range of industry professionals.
Collarts’ music program
- Bachelor of Music Performance & Bachelor of Music Production
- Next intake: February 2026
- More details here
This article was made in partnership with Collarts.
