I have reached an interesting point in my career; the point where I am transitioning from one of the attendees of a conference to participating as a panelist or speaker at the conference. Recently I was asked to participate in an audio engineering panel at the 5th Annual Bay Area Producers Conference where each panelist was there to offer relevant information to young producers looking to gain more knowledge, tips, tricks, or any other advice we could sling their way. It’s always an honor to be asked to join industry professionals whose opinions and work I respect in a situation where we are trying to impart advice.
It was after my panel this year that I ended up getting into a very interesting conversation with someone who is just about to finish their formal education and fully immerse themselves the world of professional audio. For two hours we sat and talked about all the things that she was currently doing, excited to learn more about, and curious as to how to handle. The part that really stuck with me in the conversation was her excitement to learn about anything and everything. As a student at Ex’pression, a school that focuses on exposing students to lots of different parts of the technical arts, she’s been able to see a lot of opportunity out there and she wants to be part of it all.
I asked her what she thought she might want to do with all those options available to her and she was essentially at a loss for any concrete decision. She wanted to be a sponge and absorb it all and experience everything. It reminded me a lot of my own career. When I started I wanted to be a musician, then I moved into pro audio and I wanted to work in studios, then live sound, then venues, then system design. Even now I still ask myself where I want to go next in my career without a clear answer. A big part of the fun working with sound and video is that it is so closely related with so many other industries: high tech, internet, music, film, television to name a few, but that list keeps growing each day. The big movement that I see these days isn’t so much in the content itself but in how people are interacting with that content, transporting that content, and storing that content.
What I’ve found throughout my career is that having that initial curiosity when I started has led me to do things that I never thought I would. That act of being a sponge and going anywhere I could to learn more about sound, how it works, how it’s transported, and how it’s viewed by other people has been one of my greatest advantages. While I was traveling the country assisting in system design and teaching people about audio practices, principles, and products, I was able to draw upon my variety of experiences to communicate more clearly and make any story relatable to the issues and concerns of whomever I was talking to, no matter how much experience they had, and no matter where in the world I was. The problems we face as an industry are nuanced but generally similar.
A while back I sat on another panel in front of a classroom filled with people who wanted to have careers in the music industry. Each panelist was asked “if you could go back and talk to yourself at the start of your career, what is the one thing you wish you could say?” Even now, I still believe that the key to my success has been that I kept my curiosity, kept an open mind, and listened to the stories of those that came before me. I still don’t know where I’d like to ultimately end up in my career, but I do know that there will be new amazing information around each corner and that will keep me moving forward.
So if you’re just starting out or even if you’re an industry veteran and you’re uncertain of where you want to go next, my greatest advice is to keep your curiosity because there are always exciting new things on the horizon.
