Less than 5% of the people creating the sounds, music and media that form the daily soundtrack of our lives are women. Women’s Audio Mission (WAM), a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of women in music production and the recording arts exists to address this issue. On April 27-28, the group will present their immersive recording arts conference, WAMCon Nashville, for the first time in the country music capital of the world, Nashville, Tennessee.
WAMCon Nashville features interactive workshops covering topics from studio recording and mixing techniques to songwriting, guided by award-winning female producers and engineers like Linda Perry (P!nk, Adele, Alicia Keys), Emily Lazar (David Bowie, Foo Fighters, Beck), Shani Gandhi (Alison Krauss, Old Crow Medicine Show, Jewel), Simone Torres (Cardi B, Sia, Dua Lipa, Usher, Sean Garrett), Gena Johnson (Brandi Carlile, Kacey Musgraves), Jordan Brooke Hamlin (Indigo Girls, Lucy Wainwright Roche), Jennifer Decilveo (Andra Day, Beth Ditto), and Melissa Peirce (Carrie Underwood, Garth Brooks, Reba MacIntire).
“While female artists including Ariana Grande, Halsey and Lady Gaga have dominated the charts in 2019, women throughout the music industry still remain hugely underrepresented,” said WAM Executive Director Terri Winston. “Programs like WAMCon Nashville, featuring some of the country’s most talented audio engineers and music professionals, are designed to inspire and grow the next generation of successful female producers and engineers and address this disparity. Nashville is country music’s creative hub and we look forward to bringing our program to its thriving music community.”
WAM trains over 2,000 women and girls a year in the recording arts to address the critical lack of women in the audio industry. Over the past year, WAM’s transformative programs have been spreading nationally – the organization hosted three successful, sold-out recording arts conferences in Los Angeles at Capitol Studios, New York at Jungle City Studios and YouTube Space NY, and Boston at iZotope/PRX Podcast Garage, which served over 500 women.
WAMCon Nashville takes place at The Tracking Room, Nashville’s largest recording studio, as well as the historic Ocean Way Nashville Recording Studios. The event is sponsored by Spotify, Eventide, Epidemic Sound, Shure, The Walt Disney Studios, iZotope, and Universal Audio, and presented in partnership with Change the Conversation, an organization that fights gender inequality in the music industry by providing support, education, and community for women artists and executives.
Additional details about WAMCon Nashville, including the information about the sessions, panelists and workshop leaders, as well as ticket purchase, is available here: WAMCon Nashville 2019.
