Gear Fanatix is online! Angie and I are so excited to bring this project to you all!
With the audio industry being overwhelmingly white and male, I know I can speak for myself that it’s hard not to feel like an outsider in audio communities, always having to prove yourself, always having to dodge the casual sexism that permeates online spaces. We created Gear Fanatix to be a place for online discussion and community in the vast field of audio. We seek to elevate the voices womxn, people of color, LGBTQ+, the neurodiverse, and other underrepresented voices in audio.
The audio industry is filled with so many vibrant, intelligent, compassionate and diverse people, and our hope is to provide you with a platform to share your opinions and knowledge with the world, and join a community that is supportive, inclusive, and loving of each other!
We’re hard at work getting the community side of the site up and running, but right now you can see the basic site with some content (mostly copied over from the Womxn & Audio Facebook group run by Angie) and hopefully see the potential of this little baby website.
We don’t want to have staff writers, we want to elevate everyone’s voice and hopefully professional profile with the site. In order to do that, we’re gonna need you! Do you have a piece of gear you simply love? Or truly hate? Got a cool technique you’re just dying to share? We’d love to hear from you!
You can contribute either video or text. It can be as short or as long as you want, though we recommend between 5-10 minutes for video, and 1000-2000 words for text. Please provide a photo we can use as a featured image (of the gear, of the technique, of yourself?) and a headshot with brief bio (Your name, where you’re from, what you do, cool fact about your work, and your webpage. No name dropping, please! Your work and knowledge is what matters here, not who you did it for.). Got something you’ve put on youtube or your own site or someone else’s site? Send it to us! We’d love to signal boost your work! Got an idea for something that’s already been covered on the site? Send it our way too! Look at all the youtube videos of dudes super excited to show you this amazing new technique called “Parallel Compression.” Everyone’s opinion, is valid and deserves to be represented. Plus, having multiple discussions on the same topic will give readers a fuller picture of the gear they’re thinking of purchasing, or the intricacies of a particular technique. There is no official Gear Fanatix opinion on whether or not a piece of gear is good or bad or ugly (except for the new Orbit summing box, that thing is ugly). Your opinions, your knowledge, your experiences are all worthy of being shared with the world, and we hope that we can help you do so!
So, how do you submit?
You can send your submissions to gearfanatix [at] gmail.com (if we used the @ then robot spammers would spam the email, go internet). Please open your subject with the category enclosed in brackets (ie. [Reviews]) followed by your article title. We’ll put it through our editorial process and schedule its release!
If you have an questions, you can send them to that email too! We’ll get article comments and our discussion forum up and running soon.
In the meantime, welcome to Gear Fanatix!
Lilian Blair is a producer, engineer, and audio educator in the Seattle area. She specializes in studio recording, mixing, and helping artist achieve their musical dreams.
Dr. Angela Dane owns and operates the only female and black-owned drum studio in Seattle. She is the drummer for rock band Atrocity Girl, whose members are recording and engineering their own debut album through a self-built home studio.
