Professional Professor, Doctor in Educational Technology, and Audio Master - David "Dave" Nourse

Thank you for joining me for season two of Talking with the Pros with me, Jess B. Today we are talking to David Nourse. Dave is an assistant professor in the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies. He holds a B.S. in Criminology and an M.Ed. in Counseling from North Carolina State University. He received his doctorate in Educational Technology from UNLV where he focused on how technology can be utilized to help at-risk students graduate from high school. Nourse teaches courses in audio gathering and production, audio storytelling and podcasting, and media innovation. He also serves as an advisor for UNLV's student radio station, KUNV 91.5 The Rebel HD-2, where he works with students keen on developing live sports announcing and broadcast skills. Nourse is a National Board Certified Counselor (NCC) and a State licensed school counselor. His research interests include the impact of community-based and Lower Power FM radio stations on their city of license, visual and data journalism, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In his downtime, Nourse is an avid radio and podcast listener, runner, singer, grill master and lacrosse enthusiast.

Featured Track: I Just Feel So Yes - Pauly 2018

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Cause aint nobody got time for Amateur's

Unknown Speaker 0:00
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Unknown Speaker 0:15
This is talking with the pro professional. This is talking with the pros with me just be I speak to the professionals in the world of audio to gain an insight into what it takes to become a pro talking with the pros. And welcome to another episode of talking with the pros. And I'm here with my co host Polly Hey, how's it going? Today we have a very special guest. I am delighted and honored for our guests today. Dave Nourse. Welcome.

Dave Nourse 0:53
Thank you so much for the invitation jets B, I appreciate it. Of course.

Unknown Speaker 0:57
I mean, I need to pick your brain. I've been wanting you been on my wish list. Let me tell you, we're in season two. Now, let's get into kind of your background for those who don't know, your association with audio.

Dave Nourse 1:11
So my background in audio actually started when I was in college, my college had a radio station, and much like we have the rebel HD two here at UNLV. I went to North Carolina State University home of the wolf pack, not the wolf pack from up north. But the wolf pack of NC State right there college radio station was at 8.1 Wk and see their kind of tagline was the revolution. Right? Very cool. Very much about the indie alternative music scene. My getting involved was kind of like the story that a lot of people who get involved with college radio, have you just kind of fell into it. I was hanging out with a friend of mine that I was doing Naval ROTC with, and we were getting out a lab or something one day, and he was like, yeah, I gotta get out of here. I gotta do my radio show. And I was like, what radio show? He was like, Yeah, I got a radio show. I was like, where he was like at the radio station course. And obviously, I was like, we have a radio station. He was like, Yeah, you should come and hang out. And I did. And you know, you can point to a couple of moments in your life that are you take a fork in the road, right? If you went one direction, your life would be completely different than if you went another direction. And that was one of those moments in my life where I can distinctly say my life was completely different after that, because I just chose to go and hang out with him. And as he did his radio show, and it was cool. Like it was really cool. I was not a broadcast major. NC State didn't even have traditional Broadcast Communications program. But I was one of those people, when they say you got bit by the bug, I was totally bit by the bug. And it was great. You know, I loved getting involved. I'd love to be able to learn and talk to people who'd been doing this for a long time. It was a great experience. I got into radio, because my college had a radio station. And then after that, I just never said no, right opportunities would come up. And I would you know, want to get involved. I always loved even before I got involved with radio, I loved kind of those liners that would play in between songs, right? So I didn't know it was called imaging at the time. You know, that was something I learned afterwards. But I love that. And I was like that would be something that I wanted to learn how to do. And so my college radio station had a imaging director, a creative services director, right, a production director, and one of the things that they did in addition to like hoarding, underwriting spots, and PSAs, and things like that was to do the imaging and I was like this would be really cool now would get us off of something that I learned to do, right. For

Unknown Speaker 3:27
those who don't know what imaging is on the radio, it's kind of like the in betweens of songs to just refresh. This is what station you're listening to.

Dave Nourse 3:36
It's the brand, right? It's the underscore of the brand. So anytime that you hear the station voice, right, so it's not the DJ, but it's the voice of the radio station, that is imaging. That's what we in the industry call anything that kind of brands, the radio station, generally outside of the individual personalities. 91.5 Jazz and more has a voice. His name's John Carter. He's based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and he does radio stations all across the country. He's got a great voice for radio, Jeff, Jen's a graduate of our program is the voice of the rebel HD to in between songs when you hear rebel or whatever it might be. Right. That's Jeff, you know, we have operations manager, Jason, who will then take his voice and modulate it and manipulate it and run it through filters and add cool special effects to and I was always, like, that's really cool. I would love to learn how to do something like that. And that gave me you know, this college radio station gave me the opportunity to start learning and it was I was terrible, right? I mean, it was just like, I go back and I would be like, super proud of something and I listened to it now be like, that's awful. But that's how you learn. I learned a lot doing that. It was a lot of fun. And that kind of like led into another opportunity which led to another opportunity. I can point all the way back to that one moment. Yeah, I got a radio show. You should come and hang out and everything after that is part of my journey.

Unknown Speaker 4:51
You were doing all these things. I mean, you were plugging in. You're getting involved. What was the moment when you were like I really love this I I

Dave Nourse 5:00
don't know if I can say that there was a specific moment. I think instead, it was a feeling that I just got right. And I got it quickly when people are bit by the bug, as they say, it's just like, you know, maybe there's a moment like I was sitting in front of the microphone, and I was like, This is what I want to do. Right? First time I sat at a microphone, I was terrified. I don't know if that was what I wanted to do. But I remember started theater when I was in high school. Right. And I remember get kind of the reshow jitters before your opening night or whatever it was, and I kind of remember having that sort of same feeling. And although you don't have an audience in front of you, right, there is an audience that's out there. And and I kind of didn't necessarily, it's not a one to one comparison, but it was close enough that I feel like that analogy works here, you know, in a way you're performing. You're not necessarily like acting, but you know, you're putting on a show, ideally, an entertaining show for an audience, right. That's why a lot of people I think, really enjoy being on my complaining host right, you are entertaining your audience kind of in a in a similar way. I think probably because I enjoyed that in high school. That was one of the things that I enjoyed about radio. But interestingly enough, the more I got involved, the less important that was for me, I liked the feeling. But what I liked even more than that, and I think this will answer your question, just I liked learning about the industry, I liked learning how the station worked, right? The most famous part, or the most important part, a lot of people think it's like whoever is talking on the air at any one point. And that is a super important part. But it's only a part and the more that I learned about kind of the various parts and how they all work together, the more I was like, wow, this is really cool. I would love to be able to learn more about it. And that's why like, I just kept saying, Yes, I would do production, I would do engineering stuff, I would go and do promotions, right, anything that folks needed all the various elements that go into running a station I wanted to learn about and it was through that it was through the production elements that I learned a lot about different types of mics and mic technique, and how do you manipulate a soundboard and kind of all the professional audio things that you would need to know that if I had just stayed involved kind of being a, quote unquote, personality or a host on the air, I might never have, you know, needed to know, right? So it was just kind of one thing led to another and that love as opposed to being a moment that initial interest turned into a love and that love really kind of expanded the more I got to know about things doctrine

Unknown Speaker 7:18
and engineering. I want to get more into the engineering part if we can your board operating as an engineer for the radio station, is that correct?

Dave Nourse 7:26
I think that's where it starts, right. A lot of folks will start out as a board operator, because it gives you an opportunity as opposed to just learning the automation system and clicking two or three buttons, right, you start to learn a little bit more about the functionality that the radio station has. Typically when you need a board operator, it's if you're doing a remote, the radio station is broadcasting live on location somewhere other than the radio station, the host or the personality will be on location, they'll need somebody back studio running things. So you have to learn how to connect remotely, you need to be able to a lot of things that we take for granted. Now there's like a mix minus, right. So the idea of a mix minus is you have all these sources coming in minus you know, that are all mixed together minus you, right. So it prevents feedback and like setting all that up, you know, takes a lot. I mean, it's not rocket science, but it takes a little bit of technical know how and so you start learning by board operating, and then assuming you don't crash the radio station into the mountain, right? They may at that point, say, wow, you know, you were really helpful here, we want to ask you to do some other thing. You know, my journey was I went from board up to like master control operator where it's like, okay, so you're managing kind of all the inputs to the entire facility, and then all the outputs, right? And then you learn equipment, you learn a little bit more that way. And then they're like, Hey, can you work nights? Or can you work weekends? And because you love it? You're like, yes, absolutely. And they'd be like, we're not gonna pay you any more money. And you're like, that's okay. I still love it. And for me, that was kind of I learned, I started as board up and then I became an NCO. And then you know, we had an opening for me, I know, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but ventually became an operations manager and I learned a lot during that way or doing in that particular role about how all the elements come together. And yeah, and that just kind of like I said, one thing led to another so the

Unknown Speaker 9:04
MC Oh, is that kind of similar to that room here at the bottom of the basement here green swan? Yeah. Well, you'd be

Dave Nourse 9:12
so we so we have we have here in Greenspun Hall, master control or a technical operations Senator right now, as a master control operator, you're not necessarily responsible for knowing how all of the pieces of equipment in their work, but if you have audio coming in from a variety of sources, so let's say you've got four sources, one is your studio, right, all the audio from your automation system and all your microphones in the studio that's coming together that's typically mixed in the studio, and then it's sent to your master control, which might go out into your transmitter site or to your satellite, wherever it might be. Another one might be like, if you have any satellite programming, if you syndicate some shows, for example, you know, if it were an NPR radio station, or you know, top 40 radio station where you're bringing in kind of piped in programming from Los Angeles or New York City, something like that, that's coming in on a satellite most likely that'd be a second source. Your third source might be like the remote example that I gave, you've got your personality on location, broadcasting live wherever they are, car dealership or stadium or, you know, wherever, right and so that's coming into the master control through another piece of equipment right now we use a piece of equipment called a Comrex. But you know, back in the day, you might use that called things like a Marty for example, you actually literally take a kind of like an antenna, you put it up on this boom, and you'd like point it back towards your building, and you hope you've got it aim just right. And it will literally like beam the signal back, right?

Unknown Speaker 10:32
Is that like with those vans? Yeah, exactly.

Dave Nourse 10:34
Why didn't see those vans back

Unknown Speaker 10:36
and really, ham radio,

Dave Nourse 10:37
right like radio, kind of like I mean, in the same principle where you would have a transmitter, right, except you're only transmitting it back to your home base back to the mothership, so to speak, right. And so you've got these various sources that are all coming together. And the idea is your master control operator as opposed to working in the studio, they're the ones working in master control, making sure that point a makes it to point D, right, and then point B makes it to point E. And then when the broadcast is over point B needs to make it back to point A, for example. So they're the ones who's technically you're like taking all the routing, and you're making sure it's getting where it needs to go. And it takes a while. But you know, you start you don't necessarily start by doing that you start by working in the studio, and you make sure that the feed is coming to the board, and you're playing the commercials on time, right. And then so you kind of you learn step by step by step,

Unknown Speaker 11:22
I did a show, it was just briefly talking about audio, its simplest level inputs and outputs, signal coming in, signal going out. And everything that can go out can come back in, and it's just knowing how to organize these. And it's fascinating to me how broad audio, the audio world really is, when you get into radio, and you get into broadcasts and you get into podcasting, even anything that you're passionate about, as long as you're passionate about it, you're gonna be able to learn all the different skills required to do it, that is just inspiring. That's cool, because you went from knowing all the technical stuff, trying to just be a sponge right to eventually becoming an operations manager. I'm very curious about this audio gathering and production, what is audio gather, let's

Dave Nourse 11:58
say you are a reporter, and you want to go out and tell a story, you're gonna do interviews, right part of being an audio journalist is you don't have a camera. So you have to use the theater of the mind. So you're gonna go out and you're gonna capture natural sound or active sound, you're gonna bring your microphones with you, and you're going to capture audio and different things. So if I'm doing a story on chess, I will obviously I'll interview Jess over here, we'll have a conversation. But then I might also for my, quote, unquote, be role over here, if we use the video analogy, I'm gonna go I'm going to take my my microphone and my field kit, I'm going to interview her doing her thing in the studio. And then like, if I'm doing a whole documentary on just from interviewing her in the car, kind of get to this place, you know, we got this really cool promotion, whatever it might be. So you're going out and you're gathering audio, you're a field producers, so to speak, and you need to know, as a field producer, well, what's the best microphone to use? So I'm not going to use an SM 58 that you would find a rock star screaming into on the stage to capture just if I'm like standing 10 feet away. Now I need to use a shotgun mic, right? And how do I hold that shotgun mic? And what if it's outside, and it's super windy out? So you need to be able to think Alright, how am I going to capture the best quality audio and then once I do that, right, then the production starts, you bring that audio pack in, you know, you can put it into your Adobe Audition or you can GarageBand right? I mean, we're at the point now where there's a lot of software that's available to us, but I bring it back in. And now what do I do with that? So the audio gathering is kind of getting the raw audio and then the production is what do I do with that to make it sound however I want it to be whatever the end product is

Unknown Speaker 13:24
going to be? What are some of the revolutionary things happening in radio, because I understand podcasting right now is super big. I'm curious to know about what's happening in radio and what's happening also in broadcasts with news television, because that's an interesting field. For anyone who's interested in that audio side of things. I find it fascinating. I'm coming from the mixing world, just mixing bands and doing stuff like that. But I love hearing this because this is exciting. It broke

Dave Nourse 13:45
I mean, broadcasts isn't I mean, especially radio broadcast, right. So we're in an interesting place right now simply because we have more options than ever before. You can listen to podcasts, you can listen to Spotify, or Apple Music, or name your streaming service, the broadcast it's never gonna go away. And simply because first of all, it's free, right? People love free. But second of all, it will always be there in the sense where if it's an emergency, we may lose cell phone towers, and we may lose power to our phones, right? You can still get their hand crank radios out there. You can get in your car and turn your car on. You can get information if there's an emergency broadcasting will be there. People are like, yeah, broadcasted radios dead people in saying that I think since the TV was invented, it's still around, and it's not necessarily going to go anywhere. What the interesting thing about broadcasting right now, right, when you have so many options that are available to you, the question really comes down to how do you remain relevant and what's great about radio is you have the ability to connect with your audience because you serve a community, right? You are about the community that you broadcast to, and I love Spotify, and I love Apple Music and they just want to listen to music. It's there and it's uninterrupted, assuming I've got like the ad free plan, right? But I'm not going to connect with my community all that easily through Spotify. They may have great algorithmically generated playlists. that, you know, fit my mood. But and I can't be surprised. Unless I hear a song that I haven't ever heard before, you can be surprised or you can laugh out loud. Or you can you can say I didn't know that, you know, if you tune into a radio station and there's a great personality who's entertaining up or the you know, they've featuring, you know, some guest interview where you're learning something you didn't know before, we're just finding out about something really cool that's happening this weekend, right? That you know, because you weren't paying attention, because you were super busy this past week, you wouldn't have known about otherwise. Now, maybe you would find out scrolling on your phone through your social media feed. But the nice thing about this too, is it's super passive, right. That's why people love podcasts, you just turn it on, and it's there. I think that's what's really cool about

Unknown Speaker 15:37
it. I love the fact that you're just always learning you don't stop learning that gives you a wide gamut of skills to pull from where you become valuable, you become so valuable that that people see that and they say, Hey, this guy promote him, because he's worth it because he has those skills, right. And that's fantastic. What I love is audios not just being behind a console at a show and mixing bands, or there's more to audio than just that. And that is fascinating to me. I'm fascinated by the world of audio professionals, because capturing audio is so important. It's the line of communication. If you lose the video, if you lose lighting, if you lose anything else, audio is still something to fall back on teacher. I'm just curious for anyone who's interested, how can you inspire someone, but they don't want to necessarily pursue the artistic side of it. There's they're curious about the technical side,

Dave Nourse 16:21
right? Well, I think one of the greatest things that are out there, I mean, it's gonna sound so dumb, but right, it's like, where do you start? Well, just about, like where you'd start with anywhere you go to YouTube, right? I mean, you can learn so much, just by going on YouTube, there are folks who are professional mixing engineers, you know, professional recording engineers, that will, you know, you'll take a look at 128 channel mixing console, and they'll break down what every button on that board will do. Now, fortunately, all 128 of those channels essentially have the same button. So you're not spending all day learning it. But like you start there, if you're more interested in the post production, like you can get on and you can say, Alright, I want to learn about logic, or I want to learn about Pro Tools, or I want to learn about Adobe Audition, right? If you've got a PC, you can download audacity for free today, just open up any audio file in there, take a look at a waveform start playing around, right see what you can do with some of the built in tools that are in there curiosity, right, curiosity helps well, and I think the other thing is like anything, it is a skill, right. And with any skill, the more time that you put in, the better you will be. So if you're not awesome, after 30 minutes, don't give up. It just means you've only spent 30 minutes in there, you know, Malcolm Gladwell, you know, has that saying 10,000 hours, right? Right to become exactly become a master, you need to spend 10,000 hours, this may start out just something you're interested in. Or maybe it's something you want to help with, right? Maybe your church has an AV team, right? And you want to get involved because you're like, Hey, this looks cool, right. And it's great way that I can that I can give some service over here. Maybe you're looking for a part time job at UNLV, Student Union and Event Services, and they're looking for an AV tech, and you're like, Okay, I'll be the person that like, make sure the volume doesn't go too low. There's lots of different ways to get involved. And you don't have to be an expert, which is what's really cool. But instead, if you're just interested, and you're like, I want to know something, right? YouTube is always your friend, and you just pick anything. And you start with that. And you don't have to be an expert, you don't have to get into audio processing, or you know, immediately that would be down the line. If somebody's talking to you about dynamics and noise gates and all this and that and you're just like, I don't know what that means. That's okay. Again, you can get to that eventually. But something as simple as like, how do I talk into a microphone, it seems pretty intuitive. But there are different ways to talk into different microphones. By the way, there's different price points on all sorts of different microphones. Depending on what you want to do. You could spend $3,000 on a Neumann ribbon mic, right? Or you could spend $50, on a Blue Yeti, there's a difference. Now, depending on what you're looking to do, like, okay, you don't have to spend $3,000.25 to 50 bucks might be fine. Maybe it's just start by asking, like, why would I bother spending 1000s of dollars on a microphone? What's it gonna do for me, you start by just being a little bit curious. Right? And that Curiosity will then feed it and if you get as far as knowing, okay, well, there's some mics that are better than others. That's okay. Because even at that you're ahead of most of the game that don't have any idea that there are different types of microphones and you'd use them for different reasons, right?

Unknown Speaker 19:16
I really love your journey and how you just don't say no, and you're picking up different skills and getting your hands into different areas just growing from there. What I want to talk about now is what is Dave up to these days.

Dave Nourse 19:30
Okay, so we are we're transitioning from my from my audio journey to where am i right now, I'm still kind of involved in the audio scene, but my job description is a little bit different. If you look at I'm trying to actually remember what my entire job title I am an assistant professor in residence of the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies in the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs here at the University Nevada, Las Vegas. Yes, so that is a long, roundabout way of saying yeah, I teach here in the J school. My my role here is kind of very I like it like that, right? So I teach a few classes every semester, I run our internship program. I'm the coordinator for scholarships here in the school as well. I do a lot of community outreach. What does that ultimately mean? Right? It's like, okay, I help make sure that the courses that we're teaching, ideally, are relevant for the people who are taking who are in our program. So when you graduate, you're ready for the job of 2025 and not the job of 2015. Right, or 1987. You know, that's, that's ideally what we want. We want our graduates to be prepared for the workforce. This is a media industry media, right? It's super dynamic, and especially now it's changing so quickly, and it's super hard for us to stay on top of all the changes, we have to try. Because if we don't try, then we're teaching stuff that's not relevant, and we're not doing the service to our students. So I try to facilitate a lot of conversations with industry professionals to make sure number one, they know what we're doing. And that, you know, we want to be partners with them, that helps our students with internships that helps them you know, when they're thinking, hey, you know, we need employees, right? Who do they want to hire, they want to hire our students, right? Because they know what we're teaching them is stuff that they need today, and not stuff they needed. Five years ago, I spent a lot of my time when I'm not teaching, trying to organize either events or summits, we bring people in, we talk with them, we, you know, we pick their brains a couple of weeks ago, we had all the general managers and news directors from the television stations here in the valley come by, and we're like, here's what we're doing. Here's kind of what we think the future looks like, what do you guys think? And then they tell us, and we're like, oh, great, that's really helpful. We're gonna make some changes to our curriculum, and we're going to bring you guys back. And that ultimately, not only does it help us make sure what we're teaching is relevant, but it helps, hopefully, our students position themselves so that when they graduate, you know, these are the people that the industry wants to hire right away. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 21:44
you're keeping a conversation with the community, the community industry leaders, that

Unknown Speaker 21:49
when I'm on a job board, and I'm searching for a job, there's so many I type in audio engineer, and so many options come up. And one of those options is even Mehta, for example, is hiring audio engineers. And I'm thinking how can I do audio? Well, there's audio with coding, if you're interested, if you're tech savvy, and you understand, you know, Python and all that you could coding language, you could even code you can be an audio engineer in the coding world. It's so diverse, the need for audio professionals in so many different scenarios, I'm fascinated our phones in our pockets, our radio transmitters and receivers. I mean, it's fast, and we haven't tennis we have, we have a radio device on us at all times. That's an audio thing. So that is just so cool. If that interests you that curiosity, like you mentioned, that is so key to not only being valuable at a job just growing in that job. That's

Unknown Speaker 22:39
what I love about the talk show. Here's how we talk to professionals in the world of audio, really getting an insight to what it takes to become a pro and knowing that we have a similar story where we're like putting our hands and everything like as the president here at the rebel I'm learning all of the aspects when it comes to being hosts production, the imaging, getting promotions, doing live events, doing remotes, all of that, that you see and have done as well. And that's inspiring. We're all here on the right track and doing biggest thing

Dave Nourse 23:14
too. I mean, this is an industry which you might think, okay, audio is audio is audio, right. But if you look at this room that we're in right now, and I know if you're listening, you can't do that. But you know, what do we see in here? Well, we've got five microphones, we've got a computer workstation, we've got a small mixing console. So this is professional studio, but what it takes to operate this so we operate here at in the in the media facility, we have an audio over IP network, right? So audio over IP is huge as a new technology right now. So even though audio has been around for 100 plus years, right, so Well, radio has been around for 100 plus years, right? The technology, which underskirts all of it is still developing, right? If you think about what's really big in the world of kind of audio engineering right now is three D audio audio that is kind of fully immersive, right? Even though it's only mixed in stereo, you know, using Doppler effects, it can put it literally surrounds you right, and it surrounds you in a 360 degree way, right? There's a lot of exciting things happening in this field right now. And it's so much more than just talking into a microphone or doing some basic edits in name your audio editor of choice, right. If you're curious, if you're interested. I think the skill set that working in audio provides you is applicable in so many fields, like you were just mentioning Polly, whether it's from, you know, high tech, you know, you're gonna work for a company like Oracle or meta, and they're looking for developers, or you're working kind of in the traditional ones that we think about broadcast conventions, podcasting to basics. Yeah, but also at the end of the day to think about sports right now think about industry, where communication is important, right? Audio Yo plays into all of that if you have a knowledge, you don't even need to have a mastery, right? You build mastery over time. But if you have knowledge right, then you've got a skill set, which is super valuable. So many places outside of kind of just what we think about, oh, you can do podcasts or you can work for a radio station right? Well

Unknown Speaker 25:17
that's how I see you Dave you're definitely the master here at the J school so just thank you so much for just letting us pick your brain and giving us all the ins and what you're all about in the world of audios. Definitely going to take it further from here and we'd love to continue this conversation so thank you again for coming today. You

Dave Nourse 25:36
know what guys Paulie just be thanks so much.

Unknown Speaker 28:22
I want to thank you so much for tuning in. And if you missed any of today's episode, you can find us anywhere podcasts are available like Spotify, Google and Apple podcasts. Thank you for listening to today's episode a talking with the pros with me. Just be I love you and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye

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