At age 14, I wandered into my school’s auditorium, walked up to the gentleman who was in the process of hanging lighting fixtures for an upcoming performance, and started asking him technical questions. He could have responded with “Hey, get lost, kid! I’m working here,” and who’s to say what effect that might have had on my newly kindled passion for technical production?

But no – he answered my questions. And I learned things. And then I came back the next day and learned more things. (Before long I had learned enough about lighting to realize I wanted to do audio instead, which is at once both a tired joke and the honest truth.)

Twenty years later, a major part of my professional bandwidth is spent helping others learn, answering their questions, teaching, and training. Part of that is my job – for example, I’m an instructor for Rational Acoustics, which means I get paid to help people understand measurement principles and the operation of Smaart software. I also spent most of 2022 writing a book about my approach to sound system design and alignment. That’s a lot of hours spent spreading information and knowledge.

But even when I’m off the metaphorical clock – I spend a lot of my “leisure” time talking about the same principles with friends, colleagues, and early-career people. Not only because it’s a topic I’m interested in, passionate about, and love to discuss – but also because I love seeing my passion mirrored in others, and I’ve come to find it particularly meaningful and rewarding to help foster these skillsets in the next generation of audio humans.

Something Bigger

You can consider this “paying it forward” or “passing the torch” if you will, but I think it’s part of something bigger. I’ve been humbled and inspired by the community of giving and teaching that has grown up around the ProSoundWeb Signal to Noise podcast, which we founded some 4-plus years and 180-plus episodes ago.

Besides the people listening to and learning from the show’s content directly, we have a tremendous, active Discord server where more than 1,000 folks from all over the world, all corners of the industry, and all levels of experience freely exchange knowledge every day. We’re no longer “blowing into the campfire” to get it to catch – I really enjoy sitting back and watching the community grow and enrich itself.

Something I’m particularly proud of and humbled by is the community’s treatment of newcomers. Everyone is welcomed regardless of skill level or background, even the “dumb” questions are met with patience and sincerity, and we have watched a great many careers blossom and advance, as before long those same people return with “real gigs” and questions and observations. It all goes into the stew, and the vibe is truly inspiring.

It’s also shockingly free of typical “internet behavior” – there are no insults, personal attacks, or people talking down to other people. This is – perhaps, and disappointingly – the most surprising aspect.

There exists an attitude or mindset among certain individuals in the audio industry, particularly some of the more seasoned practitioners, that being abusive, rude, curt or demeaning towards early-career people is somehow a necessary rite. We’ve all seen examples of this: “If you don’t know what these buttons do, you shouldn’t be touching a mixing console.” Or “You won’t understand this.”

It goes without saying that an important part of training and mentoring is teaching our charges to have a thick skin and to handle criticism and build confidence, but it seems that is too often misinterpreted as an excuse to be mean, mocking, or even cruel. There’s a part of the community that seems to have adopted “poor treatment of newcomers” as a particular source of pride. In so many words, the position seems to be that “I suffered mistreatment early in my career, so you should too!”

Or maybe… just be kind? I can’t seem to understand any motivation for intentionally being unhelpful towards younger interested folks other than pure ego – the desire to ensure superiority at all costs. I’m not sure what’s to be gained from a community where seasoned industry veterans are unkind towards high schoolers who have the courage to show vulnerability and ask a question in the first place.

After all, each of us was, at one point or another, that eager young person interested to learn more – if any of us were actually born knowing everything about audio from day one, I must have missed that press release. For the rest of us, someone (or “someones”) taught us things, and we learned from other people. That knowledge is not ours to hoard.

Speaking Volumes

There’s also a factor to this that is an extension of the sage advice “never say anything over the comms that you wouldn’t say through the PA.” You never know who’s listening – does anyone really want their disparaging remarks about an artist or a product or a production company made public on an internet forum where anyone with a few spare minutes can connect the dots?

In some cases, the dots are already connected, as some folks seem to be fond of trash-talking artists and boasting about ignoring riders on forums and social networks using their real name and the name of their company. This stuff doesn’t disappear into the ether – it’s there forever, and it’s only a matter of time before the statements make their way back to the people they were made about. Yet another argument for being kind, if only for self-preservation.

My wish is to leave the industry better than I found it – more knowledgeable, more researched, more rational, more kind, more welcoming – and to associate with others who wish the same. I unequivocally reject the age-old custom of mistreating others, and I believe that how those interactions are handled speaks volumes about who we are as people – and as professionals.

Those first interactions with an interested youth turn out to be a great indicator of how likely I am to want to befriend the person in question. I find it rather disappointing that the “grumpy old sound guy” persona is real enough and common enough to have become a trope, but it’s time for that trope to disappear. Do we want to pass the Baton of Bad Attitude (“Son, all that the light touches will someday be yours, and then you, too, can treat the next generation with disdain”) or do we want to “break the cycle?”

We all see it, every day, everywhere we look. The experienced stagehand teaching the intern how to properly coil a cable versus the local vendor dismissing the requirements of a client simply because they – personally – haven’t heard of the artist before. The A-level front of house engineer taking some time to answer questions for a high schooler investigating careers as a school assignment versus the touring PA tech belittling a recent hire for being slow instead of offering some guidance to help them speed up.
The world is watching – what kind of legacy do you want to leave? Do you want to pass the torch, or snuff it out?

Editors Note: The author would like to extend an open invitation to like-minded readers to become a member of the Signal to Noise Discord community at https://discord.com/invite/4CrrwQECCT.