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Cause aint nobody got time for Amateur's
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on Public Radio. KUNV 91.5.
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The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz & More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.
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This is Talking with the pros. Like professionals. This is talking with the pros with me, Jess B. 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. All right, we have Wes Knight here, an audio production professional. So Wes, how are you doing?
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Doing okay. I'm a little tired, but I'm okay.
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Yeah, we are tired. Heat's beating me up, man. Oh my gosh, the heat is so, it's just too much right now. It's way too much. It's so much. So you are doing a lot here for KUNV and we appreciate you, but let's take it back. Tell me about you. Give me a little background about you and your schooling and your major.
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All right. And it all started when I was born. No.
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Out the womb.
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Yeah, for real. From the womb to the tomb. No, I'm originally from Washington State. I'm like a transplant local now. I've been in Nevada in the Southern area for about 20 years now. I grew up in Washington as a young kid. So shout out Pacific Northwest homies, what's up? I moved here in 2002. I was seven years old. Lived in Boulder City the whole time. I still live there. Shout out people in BC. For everyone who's like, that's so far. It's not far. It's really not far. You leave town, you're already on the freeway. It's a straight shot to get off on Trop and then all you've got to deal with is the street traffic so as long as you don't get screwed by the lights, you're fine. It's not that far.
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We all will take the journey then.
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No, it's really not that bad. If you're not used to it, sure, but like I enjoy car rides anyway because like I'll just be blasting my music the whole time so I forget about it. So I went to school out in Boulder City, graduated from Boulder City High School in 2012. What up everybody out there? Came to UNLV, it was the only school that I, it was the only school that I applied to. It was the only one I wanted to go to because I wanted to, at the time, Nevada State was not nearly what it's growing to be now. CSN I had had first-hand really rough experience with their, what do you call it, their office, their enrollment process, their staffing. UNLV, however, there's so many different colleges, there's so many different possibilities and opportunities and there's a lot you can find and discover if you go and look for it. So when I came here fall 2012 to start out I Started as an education major. I just came out of high school. I'm very much like school was my life because How else am I going to get into college if I can't get that Millennium? Scholarship and get the FAFSA and get that get that Pell Grant. So like grades and GPAs and all that kind of stuff was on my mind so heavy that I was like, I think part of me didn't want to leave that old school setting at first. So I was like, I can be a teacher, like why not? Especially like I went into intro of secondary education, had a really great professor though, shout out Professor Haddad. I don't know where he is. I don't know if he's still, he's like an alma mater here but I don't know where he is anymore. But he was a great dude. You know, I learned a lot in that class just from the critical educational pedagogy that he taught. So shout out to him, did that first semester. That was what it was, but I realized it wasn't for me because, you know, teaching is one thing, having to navigate a bunch of red tape and deal with, uh, like the politics behind the scene and like not getting paid well enough. And you gotta be dedicated to take that pay and make it work for you. Start of my second year I was like journalism, media studies, and for no other reason than I had an incredible teacher in high school, Miss Ringen, RIP, loved you to death man. She was like you can write, you can be a writer, you can do all this stuff, because she was real, I took her for a composition honors class and we had to write different papers of different styles all the time and she was always telling me like man You're really good. And I was like, well, you just give me a good prompt and like let me go off That's why you give me a good structure and I can do anything and that's what that's kind of what my impetus was for that So I had very simple aspirations. I said I want to been five years. I want to be done with school I want to have my degree I want to be working doing something that I love and I was You know saying I wanted to have my own place in the whole thing and that the other and some of that happened, some of that didn't. Five years later I did have my degree in hand and that was great. Starting out in journalism, I just kind of was taking mostly print classes because I just went all in on that writing thing. But radio as I was taking the introductories for all the different like paths you can take, all the different tracks within the college I mean radio is a perfect fit for me because I already love music. I'm a huge music fan I mean everyone says that but like I really was like I was that kid that back in the days iPods and mp3 players I had a insane iTunes library I filled up like the highest capacity iPod classic that you could get it was like 300 and something gigs. I practically filled that thing up. I was always finding new music. I would get into all these bands and I wouldn't just stop at like, oh, I know one song or one album. I would want to listen to the whole discography. I would want to learn all about the members of the band and I would want to learn what makes the genres what they are and how they all intermingle. I was all into that. I can't play music at all. I don't know anything about theory. You could be like, oh, what key is that in? What notes are those? I'm like, I don't know. But I just love music from that, I guess that consumer standpoint, that listener standpoint.
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So.
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Appreciation. The appreciation, like I find it funny that, you know, you go through school and you can get appreciation courses for like music, for art and these things. And they're seen as like fluff classes, but that's really where you learn. That's where you learn like history. That's where you learn what makes stuff what it is or at least the sandboxes Everything plays in so you can like Oh creativity with that or you know, because every inspiration inspiration because everything It's not to say everything is a copy of everything But everything is something old with something new and that's something new with not necessarily new from the ground up But it's new from a different. It's a new from a different Avenue. It's new from a different school of thought, it's new from a different approach. There's so many...
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And contextual.
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Yeah, exactly. There's so many ways you can make things out of what already exists. I find that much more interesting and gripping than having to come up with the next great idea. Nobody's going to reinvent the wheel. It's not possible. So that was kind of my journey, was once I got into radio, I knew that that's what I wanted to do, or at least I had a better idea, I felt more comfortable. So my very last semester of school as a student, you know, I think it's still this way, you know, you're a student, you have to get your experience hours for your capstone. You know, the big paper, no, just get experience, tell people what it's been like, get some hands-on stuff going on. So I, at first, was a little worried, because I was like, I'm mostly in print, but I don't want to do print for experience because I don't, I don't want to do that. That workplace environment's not for me. But thankfully, my coordinator was like, you don't have to do that. It just has to be within the college. I was like, oh, bet. Cool. So I ran downstairs that I was, I knew the, the, the old GM from the time, Frank Moeller. What's up, Frank? Miss you, buddy. And I told him, Hey, you want interns for the radio station right for the student station And he just like yeah all the time, and I was like I got you Can I can I like put music on the radio? And he's like you want to do indie alternative or hip-hop or EDM, and I was like yeah Just give me the EDM not no sorry give me the top 40 alternative indie. You know and um He was like I got you and so for the whole semester. I was the assistant music director with the student station and every week I would be listening to what gets sent to us and Going through and all we're gonna play this we're gonna play this. This is cool. This is cool And I was like man, this is awesome. Like there's a job out here where you get to put the music on the radio I love that and that's the kind of thing that I found I asked him later I was like like Frank what if I want to be music director, what does that like? What does that mean cuz like? Hierarchical thinking about this I guess like what does that mean? He goes well, that's like one of the top jobs, and I was like I guess I'm accidentally asking for a top job Let's go because mine look is like my big Yeah, like I didn't mean to but that's what that job amounts to and I'm like that's cool I just want to do something that makes me happy right if I can if I can live comfortably and I'm contributing to something that I genuinely care about for like real reasons, like community radio is fantastic. So it's like I'm about that. That's what I care about. So that's my journey. After I graduated in spring of 2017, there was a few years where I was not doing anything but just working. I had moved out of my house and moved in with friends and just trying to make ends meet working and that was going well, but I was kind of spinning my wheels when it comes to I'm not worth use my degree I kind of want to but like how to even start to do that and I was getting all kinds of flustered and worried and everything And I just said, you know what? I know people I should just reach out So I reached out to Dave Norse here at the station at the time. I believe you shout out Dave man I love Dr. Dave man honestly one of my favorite people here at the station I love you Dave man he I had touch base with him this was to give you some context this was February of 2020 oh okay great timing fantastic timing literally had like the one of the greatest months of my life in January of 2020 and I was like man I'm gonna be a great year. I'm like, you know, we carry this because I came out of a pull back the curtain a little bit too much. Maybe end of 2019 I had an extremely bad, a few months of a depressive episode. It was extremely bad. Like I won't even get into it, but it was extremely bad. January flipped around and things changed. And I was like, oh man, I have a new lease on life. Like things are possible. I can like have better control over my immediate life, like let's go, reached out to him, he's like, yeah man, well hit me back in like, hit me back in like later this month, we'll see what's going on. Because he was very interested in like, hey, I just want a foot in the door, I just want to like learn what there is to do, I want to help out any way I can, I just was interested. I kept touch with him and he said, hey, everything's on pause, I'll keep you updated for when it's possible for you to come in. And then summer, I think it was summer 2020 was when it was like, hey man, come on campus. Came in, I started doing a lot of little editing jobs. I started doing voiceovers, doing, putting music beds on underwriting. Just like little stuff. Like I guess you'd call it grunt work. I was just doing that kind of stuff. And I was helping out Kevin Kroll when he was the production manager. So he kind of taught me those ropes, and I did that, I came down once a week from summer of 2020 until fall of last year when Kevin moved on to a different place. A shout out, Kev, I think he's at Lotus right now. What up, Kev? Thank you for everything, buddy. And I got the opportunity to kind of fill that role. And so this was a surprising example of getting your foot in the door, getting base experience, and then if a spot opens up, like maybe you can take it. And thankfully, I was able to and that's what leads me to right now because I've been doing this job as production manager from October of 2022 to now and so that's the journey. It was just a lot of just show up, just show up even despite my reservations of like I can't guarantee the future. I can't control much more than these range of things, you know, I'm very realist in terms of like, there's people who can like, oh, you can do anything. You can go anywhere and do whatever. It's like, yeah, you can, but you have to have mobility. You have to have like the, you have to have the room to be able to do that. You have to have the room to fail, because some people don't have the luxury of failure. So thankfully, I was able to just show up and things were stable enough in my life that I was able to keep showing up and even do it once a week and it's still amount to something and take that time to go from an unpaid volunteer to now being on staff and getting to truly learn my field and learn my trade and Just go on from there. So end goal, I suppose is still I want to be a music director Like Kim here at the station shout out Kim. Love you so much man Do what she does like whoever that is. That's what I want to do right now being in production manager recording our shows and doing the FM shows, doing the student shows, all that stuff. That is, you know, that's what I'm doing now, but I'm hoping I can put that all in my toolbox and then add more to it so I can be in a different position down the road, so.
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Just the love of music. Yeah. That really brought you into the field of radio. And just your vast knowledge and your your wide like eclectic you know your music love and just also just sharing that with me yeah and I know we also share the love of City Pop yeah yeah so just knowing that you're like the man to
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go to all those like those goodies I wanted to let you know it was I was honestly a lot of fun When you told me that you wanted to get your your show off the ground and and start building that music library I was pumped because I was like man, I like I I'm the kind of person like it's like reverse gatekeeping I'm like, no, no, no, no, come enjoy what I like like what I like, you know I so when you were telling me when you brought up City Pop and I was like, that's kind of a niche genre. I think it's getting popular, but it's still pretty online. I'm like, man, that's awesome. I knew because I had records in my collection and I was like, oh man, if I can help you in any way. So when you told me, hey, what did you put on? I was like, here's this list and everything. It really meant, it really creatively, it was so much fun to be able to sit there. This is me like off hours at home pulling records off my shelf, writing everything down, sending you links to find the audio and all that stuff. Just being like, oh, this is so cool because people are going to hear this. And that's really what that's that's what gets me to do it. You know, people get motivated by like, I'm making all this money. So now I'm getting people to listen to these funky bass lines,
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man. They're there. They go hard!
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Who would think that a fusion of the not cringy parts of disco mixed with boogie and funk and AOR mixed with like Japanese pop sensibilities and jazz fusion all together, it would make this insanely awesome mixture that just, I once heard it described as like you're listening to it and it's a it's a nostalgia for a time that you may not have Directly experienced but you can place yourself in that and it kind of feels like warm and cozy and like fun Yes, it really does. It's the perfect summer and spring music. It really is But yeah, it's stuff like that man. Like I just I love I just love music and I get to be adjacent to it with these talk shows. It's just, it's so much fun. I really, I really enjoy being able to contribute to the soundtrack of other people's lives. Because that's what I've been doing my whole life and why not spread that?
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Right, and I love how you say reverse gatekeeping. Yeah. Just sharing, like that's what radio is about. It's like getting to hear those songs that you didn't know and then like diving into those artists and you take that to a personal level Yeah, that that's where your love and your passion is yeah, so I can definitely see you just deep within the the archives of Records and CDs and now that we have like everything digital digital access
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so just like the possibility the possibilities are endless, man. If I didn't have to worry about anything in terms of like earning a living and I could just do the free time and use my free time outside of the station to do whatever, my free time would be filled up with nothing but like reading books, a lot of them about music, and then diving into my, I use my Spotify library, like, you know how you can save a whole album? I use that to be like, I'm gonna come back to that, I'm gonna come back to that, I'm gonna check all this stuff out, and it's like thousands of records now. It's, I can't, I'm giving myself a laundry list I can never possibly complete but I genuinely would do that if I had that time. Yeah. Because that's how much I care and how much I'm like, you know, everything is everything when it comes to music. Like, we can bring in all this stuff and broadcast it to all these people, especially in college radio. Especially when the name of the game is, you know, we have to report to the charts and so on so forth, but there is so much room for that eclectic mix and listen a little bit of this a little bit of that like why not I love that
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Yeah, and you're just really good to act like the labeling like the details and the organization And yeah, just go ahead and tell us about how you not only did you fill up that? mp3 player back in the day, but you had all those details with the album.
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Oh, okay, okay, okay. So I was I was I was a fiend on that metadata. I really was and it's like the dumbest thing. It's so goofy. But like, I, it was, I like it tailored my iTunes library to be a certain way. So this is this is like the 2000s and the early 2010s. This is this is like it's not old, but technology ages so quickly that it's technologically old now This was you know if you have the CD and you have the internet access you could just rip the Info straight from the discs, but a lot of stuff was online only so you're dealing with mp3 files And so I was going through and making sure like I at least wanted the specific stuff I was like I need the artist to be a certain way. I need the genres to be laid out a certain way. Everything has to have the album artwork. I mean, this is before you could just be like automatically generate the album artwork from a database or something. This was, I pulled the JPEG off of Google Images and dragged it into the files, just so when I have it in my pocket and I pull up the tracks and it loads up the info of the song, oh man, there's the album artwork. And I cared about that, no one else did. Honestly, it doesn't matter. It really is to your preference. But I was just always about, I don't know, I've always had a librarian's or an archivist's mind when it comes to the things I care about and I love. If you were to see my room at home, it's my shelves of my DVDs and my Blu-rays, they're alphabetized. My collection of like retro game consoles and all that stuff, everything has its place. The systems are organized and then everything is alphabetized that way. Like I'm just a fiend for that kind of stuff. It's not a mess if it's organized.
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And that whole mindset though, just will carry over to, again, like your love and your passion and then your ultimate goals here.
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Oh yeah, oh yeah.
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For music director. I didn't realize now, building up that show, how much, even though, like, okay, you just think about the song being played on the air, but no, you still need that metadata.
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You need those cut IDs, you need the file name to be a certain way, you need to have it in the correct, like, we label by library, whereas that kind of translates into layman's terms as like the genre, basically, or the category. But yeah, you need to have all that stuff. So I remember being when I was first starting to help out here and I was kind of helping out with going through our library and making sure like links weren't dead. The artifacts were where they're supposed to be, those kinds of things. And people were like, man, this is like grunt work, grunt work. This is data entry. This is like real, real, like people found it boring, you know, and I'm just here like,
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let me get this done.
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Keep typing, keep typing.
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Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Like it wasn't glamorous work and yeah, it burns me out too after a time, but it was, it was, it was, I knew, I knew I was looking at the big picture of when this is done, this is going to be like the most well-organized music library in the entire state, you know what I mean? If I take it upon myself to know that someone else doesn't care, but I can. I can care. So I brought that into this position actually when I first was like, hey, and you're going to be taking that production manager spot. Hey, let's clean up this student drive that we keep all our shows on. Let's clean up this back end in our filing system." And so Jason put me on that and just said, Hey man, clean things up. And I was like, okay, can do. And then, you know, a week later he was like, he was like, Whoa. I'm like, yeah. And he goes, he's like, I'm glad you care. And I'm like, I'm glad that you care that I can. You've given me the space to actually be able to do that. Whereas a lot of people would try to clean up those details and they would be like, that's not worth the time. That's a waste of, I'm like, how is it a waste to know where things are? How is it a waste to be able to say like, okay, what do we have on tap? Cause you know, it, it takes, it takes due diligence every single day to, as you're constantly moving things, making new stuff, moving things out, moving things around. You got to know what you're doing. You got to be up on where things are and where they're going and making sure that you know where something lives so it can be, it doesn't get lost to time. It doesn't get lost in the ether because we are kind of piggybacking off of what you were saying about everything going offline or online where when we lose, when things go online, it's easy for those original sources to get lost in the shuffle as technology advances and, for lack of a better term, cloud services are not 1000% reliable the same way that the Library of Congress works where there's physical media, there's physical books, there's physical CDs, there's physical anything. You keep that and then suddenly someone has it somewhere. So a bunch of stuff gets taken off of streaming services because people want tax write-offs. Well, people have DVDs at home. That still lives on somewhere. But if you don't have that, if that gets phased out, if that goes away, then nobody gets it. It doesn't matter if people want to be selfish and greedy and care about the money, the fact is that piece of creation is gone. That piece of art is gone and that can't be recovered. People can be inspired to make new stuff, but that original thing that was its own specific intermingling of influences and creative ideas, that's gone. That's horrible. So I mean I guess that's how my kind of creativity goes into the, what you can see is all the back end of messing with metadata and all the grunt work and the ones and zeros as it were.
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Well, the file organization really just keeps everything moving and going along.
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Like if we're spending time busy looking for things and then you maintain it, once you fix it, then you can maintain it. And maintaining stuff is a lot easier than having to like – than having to like pick up the pieces and clean up the mess in the first place. Once once you've like once you've like put in I don't know how better to phrase it But you do the difficult work to start out and then you make you set yourself up for ease Down the line and you just keep that going. I think that's a much better way to go about workflows and quote-unquote productivity Then constantly feeling like you're behind the eight ball and you're racing just to juggle a million things and then barely sleep. Right. It's just I can't function like that, so I'm trying to make any aspects of my life
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Streamlined.
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Streamlined. Like, streamlined without losing the fat. I don't want to get, I don't want to make, just because something is streamlined doesn't mean it has to be shallow and surface level. So I kind of try to keep that mentality.
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Right. And as a professional audio production, you're really just maintaining the ship here. Yeah. You're really on the control board, driving the ship. And so we appreciate you. And I just thank you so much, Wes, for coming. Is there anything, any parting words of advice that you would like to tell us about in terms
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of the world that we live in, where it seems like why even bother trying? It seems hopeless to take one step because, you know, the future is unwritten and unguaranteed. And if you're paralyzed by that fear of instability, like I often am, the very best you can do is just show up. Just try. Don't think about whether or not it's going to work. Don't think about whether or not it's going to go well. Don't think that if something doesn't go exactly the way you feel it should or the way that provides you the most immediate sense of safety and security, it's okay because what's important is that you tried. It's not a waste of time. If you learn something outside of music, my other favorite thing in life is pro wrestling Absolutely, if I wasn't in music I would find a way to be involved in that business. I love it I'm gonna shout out to wrestlers for giving sage advice that I feel they truly believe in so they bring it to TV One is well the nightingale. She always says life sucks smile anyways. Like being rebelliously optimistic, be like the chaotic good, that kind of thing, I'm all about that. Other part is Eddie Kingston, the realist in wrestling, has always said that wrestling saved his life, in a lot of ways it saved mine in personal ways, and he always says either win or lose thing, because a lot of times, I don't know about you, but failure was not well tolerated in my life, and it's been unfortunately drilled into me that like you get one shot and if you met and if it gets messed up then like oh well or personal failing or you should have this you should have that and that's not the way it's supposed to go like supposed to learn from failure you're not supposed to have it lorded over your head like there's something inherently wrong with you as a person. You gotta give yourself the grace and the space to make mistakes so you can learn better and because you have more knowledge you can do better. Not because you're performing, but because you actually can pull from experience. I think that is the way to do something akin to Forget learn better do better it should have been learn more grow wiser I feel like we should be education and empathy and not fear and judgment That's what I'm about. So I think I can do that through music and sharing it with others
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Everyone needs a soundtrack for their lives and that's what I'm here for. Yes. All right, Wes. Thank you so much. That's awesome. I really appreciate you. Thank you again for coming out today. And let's take that advice and, you know, let's learn. I love learning. I'm glad. All right. All right. Bye bye. Bye bye. 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 of Talking with the Pros with me, Jess B. I love you and I'll catch you in the next one. I love you and I'll catch you in the next one.
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Bye!
Transcribed with Cockatoo