Mastering the RF Dark Arts with Shure’s Jason Waufle

Managing RF can feel like a form of mystical art, especially if you don’t have a ton of experience working with it. But then there are people like Jason, who are masters of RF. Jason told us about how answering a Craig’s List ad got him his first job in the industry, where he was able to learn all about RF. Those skills led to a career where he worked for major productions like Showtime Boxing, Super Bowls, Country Music Awards, Grammy’s, Billboard Music Awards, and more!

Now as a member of the Shure Pro Audio team, Jason cultivates industry relations, research, insights, and market development for the pro audio line of Shure products related to broadcast, touring, houses of worship, live events, and everything high tier wireless.

About Jason Waufle

Jason Waufle is a dedicated professional with a passion for events and family. Currently residing in Nashville, TN, Jason is in the process of returning to his hometown of Las Vegas. As a Senior Market Development and Industry Relations Specialist at Shure, Jason plays a crucial role in providing tools for exceptional events worldwide. His expertise and dedication have earned him a recent promotion to Manager of Global Strategic Market Development. Jason's journey in the audio industry has been driven by a deep love for music and technology. His career at Shure has been marked by a commitment to excellence and a passion for innovation. Outside of work, Jason is a devoted family man, finding joy in every moment spent with his wife and two sons. An avid golfer, Jason also enjoys exploring the great outdoors, often embarking on camping adventures with his family and friends. Connect with Jason on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonwaufle/ and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/jwaufle.

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Hi, I'm Clinton Muntean with Mainline and this is an episode of Sound Connections. Today we got Jason Waufle from Shure. How are you doing, Jason?

Jason

Good, Clinton. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. No worries.

Clinton

Thanks for coming.

Jason

Yeah, absolutely.

Clinton

Like, very last minute.

Jason

Yeah, I was down here in Florida doing some rounds, seeing some customers, having some fun and I mean, you got this setup just ready to go in here, right, at the Experience Center.

Clinton

Exactly.

Jason

So, why not? Why not pop in and say hi to some people while I can?

Clinton

I have to say that I was a little bit let down because Craig said after your day of golf today that you look like a lobster, but you don't look that red to me.

Jason

I'm not that lobstered. I was saved by Craig on, I think it was hole four or five. He looked at me and said, “Hey, Irish, have you put any sunscreen on?” And I had not at the time, and so then I did. I recovered nicely, I think. My wife will thank you very much, Craig. The Florida Sun is significantly, we're a lot closer than we are in Nashville, right? And it's out a lot more, so my fair skin doesn't love it.

Clinton

I was born that way too. I suffer. So let's talk about what you're doing for sure. So you've been there, how long now? It's got to be...

Jason

We're like flirting with two years.

Clinton

I was just going to say two years.

Jason

Just about two years, yeah. So started with them two years ago. It's been, as with anything you talk about over the last couple of years, all of our lives, an interesting situation for all. But to start a new job, and we moved across the country to take this job, when I say we, my wife and I grew up in Las Vegas. We lived in Vegas at the time and the job required that I be in the Midwest or Southeast. So we moved to Nashville, which has been fantastic. But yeah, it's been a fun two years to learn a new city and a new job collectively, right, on top of all the other things going on. But very few complaints in regards to the rest of the world, right? So I still have a great job, Shure has been fantastic to me through those two years, great company. We love Nashville. And I get to do things like this and come down to Florida and see you guys for a little while and stuff that I never would have done if I didn't make that plunge and make that change.

Clinton

So where's your wife from?

Jason

My wife is from, well, we're both pretty much from Las Vegas, right? So, I mean, Southern California, she moved from Southern California when she was young, I think seven or eight, and then lived in Vegas.

Clinton

So you move over to Nashville for this great job. And do you have a network there or are you like, don't know anyone, you get a place and you don't know, like, you don't know the restaurants, you don't know the...

Jason

Nothing. Yeah.

Clinton

Nothing?

Jason

No. I mean, like, so a few people from my previous life in broadcast production that I knew in the area. And then the rep firm in that space, I was tied in pretty quickly with up in Nashville. And so, you know, made pretty good work friendships with those guys fairly early on. And they kind of helped show me around. But you know, we moved. I can get into this a little bit, right? We moved in the first week of November. We had gotten married six weeks prior to that. It was a whirlwind of a year. It was. It was great. And it was all self-inflicted.

Clinton

Just do it all in one year.

Jason

Right. Just just knock it all out.

Clinton

Like a band-aid.

Jason

Rip it off. Yeah. And so and then we also own and operate a holiday decor business, my wife and I, in Vegas. So we moved the first week of November after getting married, doing our honeymoon, packing everything, loading the U-Haul, drive across the country. We were only in Nashville for two weeks before we turned back around, flew back to Vegas, did two and a half weeks of the holiday decor business, had Thanksgiving with the family, went back to Nashville for what was like 10 days at the time, early in December, flew back for Christmas, took all of that holiday decor down. So we didn't really settle into being in Nashville until after the new year. And that was pandemic central. Right. That's when I really all kicked off. So right as I was settling down in Nashville in the new space, sinking my teeth into the Shure job, the world shut down.

Clinton

So well, I mean, the inside of your place and Nashville probably didn't look much different inside your place.

Jason

And yeah, exactly. You got a TV on the wall on a couch in the living room. And we took very quickly to the outdoors during some of our free time during the pandemic and coming from the desert in Las Vegas. You know, we didn't really know what fall or trees or streams were. So we did a lot of camping, a little bit of kayaking. We have a German shepherd that we take out all the time with us, and she's very spoiled because of that. So it was good, man. It was nice.

Clinton

Yep. So what took you into our industry? So you're a musician?

Jason

Drummer?

Clinton

Yeah. So no.

Jason

So no, yes. Not a musician. Yeah. Percussionist. What are—what are notes? No, orchestral percussionist. OK, I played the berimbau, which is basically a piano with mallets. I I guess you could say really early on, my parents decided to put me into a magnet program for communication and creative arts in first grade in Las Vegas. So I took a bus to elementary school. That was a 45 minute trip. So…but it was great because that school like in third grade, we were putting on mini-news broadcasts every morning. Right. You see that stuff happening in high schools. But not with not in third grade. Right. So I did the magnet school program thing up until eighth grade, and then I wanted to like to have some friends locally. So I went to the local high school, but did tech theater and musician and band stuff all growing up. Right. And I knew I wanted to do something that was, I guess, music technical related. I actually did a lot of lighting in high school and then played in band quite a bit. I kind of followed the same path. A lot of people do. I moved to L.A. in my younger twenties. I think right at twenty, actually, I moved to Los Angeles and went to recording school out there, thought I was going to be a studio engineer cutting records and quickly learned that that was not only an extremely difficult path to get to get into, but not necessarily even the most rewarding or lucrative one in a lot of ways. So I was like, you know, sweeping floors in this little studio in Hollywood that was pretty horrible actually. And I went home to Vegas one weekend after I had finished audio school, and I got on Craigslist and I found this. At the time, Craigslist was not quite what it was—

Clinton

That’s where you went.

Jason

What it is today, right? And there was this job ad for this RF support tech at a shop called Soundtronics Wireless, which is a boutique RF coordination firm on the West Coast. And I walked in the front door because I had to leave to go back to LA that afternoon. And I walked in the front door and gave them my resume and the owner at the time said, you're the only one out of like 45 applicants that took the time to come down here and drop this off personally. Uh, and that was it. That spoke to him enough and the resume had enough on it to make him think it was worth it. And he hired me on the spot. Nice. And yeah, and that, uh, that turned out to be an insane last decade of my life of broadcasts, broadcast RF engineering on some pretty awesome shows.

Clinton

Yeah. So, what was that like? I mean, so, you know, I've never been on a tour or been on a real show. I mean, I've, I've got to peek my head in here and there during, during my time in the industry here. But, uh, so what kind of things did you do and, and what kind of people did you do it for or venues?

Jason

Yeah, we were so mostly television based, uh, events. So, um, I did a ton of Showtime boxing. I did, I've done a few Super Bowls from the Perspective of, um, like the desk show that's out front, not necessarily the main halftime show. There's some other very respectable guys in our industry that do that. Um, I've done—

Clinton

Oh, we know those guys.

Jason

—you know, country music awards, uh, Grammys, billboard awards, large, large award shows, uh, and then corporate events, right? You get a couple of hundred channels on a big corporate event in Vegas. That's kind of the Mecca for corporate conventions. We did a lot of those. Um, so there was, there was no job that was necessarily too small for us, but we ended up doing some very large, hundreds of channels of coordination, custom antenna designs. Um, and you know, I guess back to your question, what is that like? That I think it varies quite a bit from show to show, at least in my world, right? If you're on a, if you're on a tour and you're on a bus and you're going from stadium to stadium or, or venue to venue. Um, I've never done that, but I assume that while it is a different city and a different venue, so much of what you're doing is the same, uh, week in and week out or night in and night out, I should say. And while, you know, I would do one showtime fight a month or whatever it may be. And that was kind of rinse and repeat. Um, we were always in a, what seemed like a new place with a different set of fighters and a different, you know, walk in whatever tonight we have two rappers or whatever that might be. Right. So it was always new. Um, it's extremely long hours. You know, you, some days you, you've got a fight on Saturday night and you fly in Friday evening and you show up at Saturday morning at four in the morning and you put a whole broadcast suite into an arena. Uh, you shoot a live television show for six hours or whatever it may be. And then you rip it all out and it's been 24 hours that you've been in that venue working constantly nonstop.

Clinton

Right. That's crazy.

Jason

Um, they take really good care of you and broadcast. I think I was fortunate to maybe make the leap directly to the television side of things because there seems to be a little bit more of a budget involved on those shows. So oftentimes you get more set days for a large shoot, whereas you're not coming in with one day to set things up. Right. The award shows, right? We're talking about seven or eight days of, of install and fine tuning a system before, uh, before it actually broadcast, which is luxury, you know, really. So it varies, I guess, is the answer.

Clinton

So, uh, how does a, you know, a musician, uh, communications background and recording arts person end up in RF? Because you know, we all know signal flow and what happens when you talk into this microphone, but you know, RF is like, uh, you know, some people say it's like Voodoo or black magic. So you walk into this place, they give you a job and I can't imagine that you were designing systems right off the bat. No. So how did you, you know, how did you transition into from, you know.

Jason

Audio music based into the RF side of things? Um, there are a lot of fundamentals about RF that are very similar. They don't necessarily crossover as easy as maybe some others, but you talk about signal flow with a microphone. Like it's, there is a direct signal flow correlated to wireless.

Clinton

That's true. It is right.

Jason

And even more so when you get into patching da's or, or a combiners, right? So maybe I see that correlation more than others because I was taught that in a way for a long time and I lived and breathed it. But the reality of that situation is that I got really lucky with a Craigslist ad. I was sick and tired and broke of living in Los Angeles. And I needed this job to, to change some things, right? So I got fortunate enough that I was in a position where I had some really good mentors at Soundtronics that took the time to teach me what I needed to know. While at the same time, I think I spent, I spent the time that was needed if, you know, if there was a slow shop day, which there often was, you know, I'm taking gear off the shelf and I'm plugging it in and I'm asking questions and I'm breaking it to a certain degree, right? Not physically breaking it, but like understanding what makes it function and what makes it not function. Do some of my own research and, you know, was pretty thirsty for reading material, right? I remember asking when I started doing comms, I did a bunch of RFPLs and comms as well on the broadcast side of things. And there's this great, like, God, it's probably got to be, I don't know how old it is, but it's a black and white, like, I think it's called, it's written by RTS and it's like the communication engineer’s handbook and it's old. It's been around a long time. Uh, and it's, but it's brilliant. It's everything you would need to know to run two wire PL in a 40 page pamphlet with photos and graphics. And I remember—I distinctly remember reading that. And then we hired a new person maybe six or nine months later and I was like, “Hey, you should, you should read this book if you want to know how to do comms.”

Clinton

Did they read it?

Jason

They did not, no.

Clinton

See, I think, uh, cause you know, when you were explaining that a minute ago, um, a thought that came to mind was, you know, as the business owner of that, uh, Soundtronics?

Jason

Yep.

Clinton

To stumble upon an employee that has that thirst, as you put it, is a pretty rare thing. You know, that people that really dig in and want to learn and excel. And so, uh, you know, I'd imagine that's why you had a long career there. What about the, uh, the guy who didn't read the pamphlet? Is he still there? We won't name his name.

Jason

He is. He is still there.

Clinton

That's good. Yeah. So he learns just in a different way.

Jason

That's correct. I think he just learned in a different way.

Clinton

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason

He's doing very well. Uh, just a different learning style.

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Jason

If I'm talking to a room of students or like a group of people and they go, “Hey, your career is impressive to me. How did you get to where you are?” And I say, “Look, if you asked me 15 years ago if I wanted to be a broadcast or f tech that did boxing and corporate events, I would tell you, A, I don't even know what that means. And B no, not really. That doesn't that doesn't that's not what my dream was, I guess.” But it was an incredible—I mean, it was a great career. I got to travel on everyone else's dimes. I got to eat incredible meals. I got to see some awesome events. And I was very, very close to the industry that I loved and wanted to be in.

Clinton

Yeah. I mean, you're right there like side by side, really. Right. You're you are. And it is part of our industry. So I guess it's kind of like if you're if you're going to school to become a recording engineer and you end up going on that long, hard path and you finally get to like record…I don't know this—

Jason

Double platinum record.

Clinton

Yeah. Double platinum record with this great artist that you've you've you've, you know, worshiped your, your, you know, during your young years. So but it must be just as exciting to, you know, you got your system up and running. It's ready to rock. The broadcast is live and you're sticking around to watch the boxing match. I would imagine you have to be there.

Jason

Absolutely. I mean, when I did boxing, you know, you put lavaliers on the referee and the two trainers. And there's only one set of those laws the way that the patching works. Right. So after every fight, I'm climbing through the ropes as soon as the bell rings or as soon as somebody is knocked out and going to retrieve those packs so that I can go back to the locker rooms to put them on the next set of guys.

Clinton

Oh, my gosh.

Jason

So like if you watch a Showtime fight from the last decade outside the last two years, if you look closely, you'll see me in the ring right after the fight. Right. And so that's not I mean, that's not to brag or say anything, but—

Clinton

That's pretty cool.

Jason

It was very cool and I was not a massive boxing fan prior to getting that gig. But that Showtime family was amazing and they run a great ship over there. And that the crew that's on that show has been a lot of those guys have been doing it for 30 years. That's kind of their bread and butter and they treat them right. And they do that. But, you know, I'm standing on the sidelines at the Super Bowl, getting paid an incredibly great wage right to to do something that is very audio related, and is melding the two things that I really love, which is sports and technology and audio. And it's not at all what if you asked me 15 years ago what I wanted to do. So, you know, there are people that have the just exceptional determination and drive to follow their very specific pigeonhole dream. And I'm not here to tell you not to do that. But I am here to tell you that if you're not that person and you want to just be successful in your industry, there are so many avenues to do that specifically in this one.

Clinton

Well, cool. So what about—so now fast forward you've been in Nashville. Well, I guess it hasn't really been that long, but….

Jason

It hasn't.

Clinton

No, but but now you're you're so now you're doing something similar for sure. So you have all this experience working for Soundtronics, working on so many different types of projects, whether it's a sports thing or a corporate thing, little RF system, big RF system. So how did the Shorgate come about? It wasn't on Craigslist.

Jason

It was not on Craigslist. No, sure. Sure. Did not post its job on Craigslist. That's good. No, I was tired of being gone 200 plus days a year. My wife at the time was a teacher, and I traveled pretty consistently like Thursday through Monday if I would go do a weekend sporting event or something. And so, you know, she should be at work Monday through Friday and she’d get off and I'd be on a plane somewhere and be gone all weekend. Yeah, I'd come home late Monday night and I'd see her for dinner on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and be gone.

Clinton

And you're out again. Yeah.

Jason

And, you know, I loved what I did. I absolutely loved what I did, and I love Centronics, and I felt like I had gotten to a place where I was almost kind of in a plateau like growth, personal growth and professional growth wise. And so I just kind of started putting some feelers out with the idea that I could find either A) the next level in live production job for myself or B) a job that was still in the industry, but gave me more time at home and some more flexibility. And sure was the first application. I like as I had this internal discussion, I think maybe a week or so later, I started job hunting and I hopped on LinkedIn and there was this job there, there was professional pro audio market development position. And I had a great relationship with Jen, who is my version of Shure market development, but on the West Coast. And she was my point person when I was at Soundtracks, who I called and leaned on from a Shure perspective. And if I had so much respect for her and she had nothing but praises about working for Shure, and she was just the most exceptional person from a service and relationship really set the bar. And I found that job listing and said, that seems like fun. I could do that, right? I can still be very related to the industry that I know and love over the last 10 years. I have relationships that make sense in that industry and it worked out, I guess. Yeah, well,

Clinton

Jen's phenomenal.

Jason

Jen's fantastic.

Clinton

We don't get to work with her often because we're East Coast, but she's been down here a couple of times. I've seen her up there and in Chicago once or twice. But yeah, that's great. So is there something—I know the pandemic and your travel at Shure has probably been, you know, somewhat lessened. Is there an example of something that some experience you had in the past that has helped you or helped a customer? So you're often out there meeting with people or sort of helped you solve a problem for a customer or just...

Jason

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, like all of it, I think, right? First of all, I don't get this job if I don't have 10 plus years. I mean, that's just not going to happen. And specifically, yeah, the one instance of something that…I tell this story a lot and it seems to help quite a bit of people understand outer band RF interference. I was doing a Kelly Clarkson Christmas special in Vegas at the Venetian. I actually wasn't even doing it. I got called at like 2 p.m. on a Friday by the A1 engineer at the time who was mixing the broadcast side of this Kelly Clarkson special. And he said, “Hey, man, we are having some serious RF problems. We are shooting this thing tonight in like six hours.” And whoever it was that was supposed to be handling the RF at the time was just in the weeds. Right. And I'm at the soundtrack shop down the street. I said, “All right, I'll be down there in a little while. I'll come help you guys out.” So I go down there, and bring the analyzer and some of my tools, and I get everything kind of squared away and I tune everything back up, do a quick coordination, move some antennas, you know, some of the stuff to help things go. And it's all fine and dandy. We're like an hour and a half now from downbeat. Right. And out of nowhere, the rack, the entire RF rack, all the RF meters, just full pegged, light up like a Christmas.

Clinton

That's not good.

Jason

And I asked the guy who was there before, I said, “Is this what your problem was?” Because I honestly didn't feel like I did that much when I came in prior to that. Like, I moved a couple of things around, but it wasn't that bad. He said, “Yeah, this is the problem I've been having. The rack just lights up like crazy and I can't find out what it is.” So I had an analyzer at the time with a directional sniffer antenna on it. And I'm trying to find where this what appears to be wide band interference lighting up the RF rack is. And I'm looking around, looking around, looking around, and I turned the whole RF rack off, except for one of the receivers, and it went away. And I said, “Well, that's odd.” So I start turning things on one by one. And what it turned out to be was a piece of rope light that was inside the back of the RF rack to give you light to work on the system in the back. Something in that rope light has shorted and was causing an arc. And really, you had to be within like six inches of it to see what was just massive full wide band RF interference. Like if you would have taken the receiver out of that rack and moved it two feet away, it wouldn't have seen it. But because it was in this metal box and there was a rope light inside of it, that arcing piece of rope light was causing so much close interference. The whole RF rack was decent.

Clinton

Oh my gosh.

Jason

So you unplugged the rope light and we went off to the races. It was great.

Clinton

That's crazy.

Jason

You know, if somebody talks to me about outer band interference or an arcing light bulb or what can cause interference to my RF rack. Anything that's got power on it can generate.

Clinton

Yeah, that's crazy. So even though that little rope light probably had like a little FCC or CE stamp on it, it was probably not up to par.

Jason

Well, it had been in there for, I assume, multiple years. It was a road-used rack.

Clinton

Yeah.

Jason

Right? So, and you'll see that all the time. We see rope light or LED strips put in the back of racks all the time.

Clinton

That cause problems, yeah.

Jason

Just be aware that occasionally if they have an electrical issue, you might be hurting yourself.

Clinton

Yeah, that's nuts. That's nuts. Yeah, so.

Jason

Hopefully that answered the question.

Clinton

Well, yeah, I mean, I could see where you, you know, now you go on site and sniffing out a problem and that experience from, and all the other experiences you had, you know, help you, you know where to look, you know where to look.

Jason

Yeah, and that's part, that's, that's definitely part of the RF. I mean, with anything, right? You sit on a desk long enough, you know how to get through the menus to find something that's wrong. It just becomes second nature, right? It's what you did. I think the reality of RF is that there's just not enough people that do just RF. Or if you have multiple hats you wear, RF seems to be one thing that people either are afraid of or just don't spend the time to fully understand what is going on, whether because they can't or they have too much going on. But like, if you, if I sit down with somebody that's a great audio engineer and talk to them about the signal flow of RF, the light bulbs start to go off and like, once you understand that some of the basic principles of RF, it doesn't change, right? We're not changing the physics of RF, right? So if I had one piece of advice, if RF is in your in your workflow, like spend a solid, spend like three months of hardcore RF deep diving, if you can. There are, Shure Audio Institute on our website has hours, hours of wireless master class and you know, webinars and videos, and there's so much resource out there to watch and understand some of the RF principles that, you know, you don't have to be, you don't have to be top of the game RF engineer to be a very efficient RF technician for your small corporate gig or for your tour or for your venue. At least I don't think so.

Clinton

Yeah, we've and in the past, you know, pre-pandemic, we've done some of those classes in person. So, you know, I know they're all online and actually pre-pandemic, many of them weren't.

Jason

Yeah.

Clinton

Of course, Shure worked very quickly to get those things online. And but, you know, once things get a little more comfortable here,

Jason

I can't wait.

Clinton

Yeah, we're gonna, we'll do them here at the Experience Center. We got, you know, we can get 30 people in here and then, you know, then we can take it on the road again like we used to.

Jason

So, yeah, that was right at the beginning of obviously we talked about this when I got hired. But yeah, you know, I'm as sick as anybody of the webinars and the zoom calls and the remote meetings and all those things. So it doesn't mean that that information isn't there, right? So but yeah—

Clinton

It is.

Jason

As soon as we can get 30 people in a room or more and do some RF classes.

Clinton

Yeah, like and I think there's something to you know, when you have an when you have a system in the room and you do things on purpose, versus seeing it online versus, you know, bringing in that interference into the room and experiencing it and, you know,

Jason

So much of that, like in all aspects of the virtual learning, right? Like the tangible reactions of reading the room and hands-on and feel-on all those things as much as we're trying to recreate things virtually. Yeah, I just don't know.

Clinton

And of course, you know, usually when we do an event, if it's in the afternoon, there's like beer afterwards. There's that far.

Jason

There's the perks.

Clinton

You know, are you a country music fan?

Jason

I am.

Clinton

Ah, okay. So I was going to make the assumption you weren't being, you know, your time and, you know, you saw your Vegas and Southern California.

Jason

Yep.

Clinton

So, that kind of worked out.

Jason

Absolutely. I remember, I remember like looking at my wife and saying, “Hey, I think, I think we could do Nashville,” and she lit up like a Christmas tree cause she's a pretty big, we were talking to Nashville's or Shure's headquarters are in Chicago. Yeah. And initially there was some talk about maybe we would relocate to Chicago and being from the desert, the winters there just seemed pretty daunting. Yeah. And I, and we had some internal conversations about where else would make sense. And obviously Nashville being the, just the music capital of the world. Yeah. And so, yeah, a little known fact about Jason Waufle. I, uh, I frequent the country line dance bar or used to. I’m quite the line dancer.

Clinton

Well, you will again.

Jason

And the two stepper.

Clinton

Oh really? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Your wife too.

Jason

Yes. Yeah. That's that's, I feel like that's how I swept her off her feet. Partially, to be honest. There's a great country bar in Vegas called Stonies. We used to go all the time with a fairly large group of people. That's kind of where my love, love for country comes from. But, yeah, um, so that worked out great. It's obviously the country Mecca. The locals in Nashville will tell you that they're, they're sick of country music, but, um, it's still got the pulse in that town. That's for sure.

Clinton

And I would argue that country music isn't really country music.

Jason

It's pop music.

Clinton

Exactly. Exactly. So, uh, so what's next? Like, you know, I mean, you're, you're still new at Shure really because you, you, you know, the pandemic is sort of, uh.

Jason

Delayed

Clinton

Delayed, you know, or at least, um, hindered some of the stuff you're supposed to be getting out there and doing.

Jason

Correct. So, I mean, so let's say pandemic—

Jason

Disappears tomorrow.

Clinton

Disappears tomorrow. What are you doing next?

Jason

Um, meeting and, and getting to know all of the people in this part of the country that I should know already, right. From being here for two years, um, get back on the road a little bit. Um, getting tapped into, you know, like we, we have relationships with, with all of these touring engineers or monitoring engineers that are on these tours that are, that are going out now and going to do these shows. But you know, you, you call these camps up and say, Hey, can we come by and say hello and swing by? And they're like, no.

Clinton

No.

Jason

They're in a bubble, right? They have a lot.

Clinton

You can't stay healthy on the tour.

Jason

Can't get a pass. I can't get any, you know, there's very little access. So, um, you know, to go provide the support and show the, you know, some of the stuff that Shure is always working on new and exciting things and get some feedback and build those relationships. So yeah, just getting out to meet the people in this part of the country that maybe I know of and maybe they know of me, but we've never had the chance to get the same room.

Clinton

Yep.

Jason

That, um, getting back to what we talked about before, right? Some in-person classes, get to people in a room, have an RF seminar, see some light bulbs go off. Right. I love that. I really do.

Clinton

I got to be on the back of the rack.

Jason

Yeah. Hey, yeah, no, no rope light in the back of your racks, everybody. Um, but I, I do, I enjoy it. Like I'll go, I'll go speak at some educational institutions, and I've done one or two like recorded videos, and it's so just not the same because I love being in front of a room full of students and you can see some faces or you can see somebody question something you just said. And immediately I'll say to that person, “What's, you know, what's up, what's up, what's on your mind?” You know, I despise having a conversation in front of 40 people that is one way. Um, maybe that's just my style. I like to feed off reactions—

Clinton

That's great. I think the audience appreciates it too. Yeah. Keep them engaged. Good. So we look forward to having you here. So, uh,

Jason

Thank you.

Clinton

Yeah. And then, you know, I think the timing might be just right. Cause you know, you're a new dad.

Jason

I am.

Clinton

And, um, I think about a year in, you're going to be like, “I gotta get the heck out of here.”

Jason

I gotta go. I hope my wife doesn't listen to this. Love you. Yeah, I am.

Clinton

No, she's going to feel the same way. Right. Please go. And you're going to be. Please.

Jason

I do. I mean, that did happen early on, right? Like the pandemic happened and I remember one of my first work trips and she was like, “Oh, I'm going to have the house to myself for three days.”

Clinton

So she's, you're going to go away for a few days and then she's going to be like, “Uh, yeah, I need to go to like the local JW or whatever. Uh, to get a night's worth of sleep without getting up in the middle of the night.” So, um,

Jason

Yeah, our anniversary was not that long ago. And the gift I gave her was a, I gave her a certificate to go get a massage whenever she would like to do that. A handful of basically full night tokens. Like you, you pick the night, and you can go sleep in the guestroom or like we'll figure it out, but like, I, I'll take the bed.

Clinton

Get a full night of sleep.

Jason

You go get a full night's sleep because I do. I get that. I got that last night for the first time in a while. Right. When I'm on the road, I stay in a hotel.

Clinton

We didn't put you the one with the train next to it.

Jason

No, I'm not going to play this for my wife.

Clinton

You're going to be in trouble.

Jason

I'm so dead.

Clinton

We might actually send it to her.

Jason

The podcast.

Clinton

Yeah.

Jason

But just send it.

Clinton

No, we'll just send her this clip.

Jason

Yeah. Just edit it.

Clinton

Not the whole podcast. She’ll be bored.

Jason

That's true. Right. She wouldn't make it all the way through to this point. Yeah. So that's been fun. That's been interesting. Seven week old baby.

Clinton

And well, I mean, it's a good time to do it.

Jason

Yep.

Clinton

You know, you've got more flexibility now. And then, you know, like I said, when, you know, when we're all able to travel more freely and get together in large groups, you know, I think the timing will probably work out.

Jason

Agreed, looking forward to it. I'm sure everybody that's listening will be as well. Yeah. Hopefully I'll see everyone that is hearing my voice in person.

Clinton

Yeah, And you can all look him up on the LinkedIn or something. If you want—

Jason

Jason Waufle, like the breakfast food.

Clinton

Yeah. But spelled differently, though.

Jason

It's spelled differently.

Clinton

So just pay attention. W A U F L one F. Yeah. Correct. Well, thanks for coming in last minute. You know, like, oh, by the way, literally walk out and have a day out on the road with customers and walk in here and do a podcast.

Jason

By the way, you want to do a podcast?

Clinton

Yeah. I appreciate your willingness to do that.

Jason

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Clinton

At least we didn't bring out any of the embarrassing stuff that we know, but we just kept it, you know, that's what—

Jason

That's for the after hours.

Clinton

We kept it professional. Yeah. That's what we should do. We should have an after hours version. Yeah. So, well, thanks everybody for listening. And this is another episode of Sound Connections and hope you tune in next time.