Radio

How Toronto Spawned the Best Mix DJs in the World

October 30, 2024 by Kevin

I absolutely love a great DJ mix, especially one that seamlessly blends disparate genres into a cohesive mix the creates a vibe. Growing up in Toronto and hearing DJs spin at events and on the radio, it’s my opinion that Toronto DJs are the best in the world when it comes to mixing with diversity and skill—driving a party vibe in the club, at events and on the air.

Toronto’s global status as a DJ powerhouse didn’t happen by chance. The city, a vibrant mix of cultures and histories, mirrors both New York and England in its eclecticism and influence from colonial and cultural tides. Like New York, Toronto has long embraced diversity in music; like England, it has remained a cultural melting pot, with a sound shaped by Caribbean, European, African, and South Asian roots. This mix gave birth to an exceptional set of DJs who could blend genres in a way that transcends typical radio format boundaries and resonates across communities.

Defining the Best: Juggling and Selecting

What sets Toronto’s DJs apart from others is a balanced mastery of both juggling and selecting.

Juggling is the technical prowess—the skill of effortlessly cutting, scratching, beat matching, and transitioning from song to song. Today, this is accomplished with sophisticated DJ software running on a laptop holding thousands of songs. Back in the day however, DJs built their skills with two variable speed record turntables, a DJ mixer and hundreds of records carried around in milk crates..

Selecting is the artistic side of knowing exactly which song to play to get the crowd to feel and respond, whether that’s filling a dance floor or lighting up radio station phone lines. A stellar DJ was skilled at both.

In a city that values a great party vibe over technical wizardry alone, Toronto leans towards DJs who can mix as well as they can cut.

In this context, mixing is when a DJ beat matches two songs and creates a flowing, smooth transition between them. This is often done over 4 or 8 bars where both songs are playing simultaneously until the crossfade is complete. Sometimes, this overlap can create a remix where the vocals of one song are heard over the instrumental of another.

Cutting is when a DJ will sometimes beat match two songs and rapidly transition from one to the other without an overlap.

While global DJ icons like DJ Jazzy Jeff represent the “cut” style of DJing, Toronto’s party DJs have long emphasized a mixing style that flows from song to song, creating a show that’s inventive, cohesive and immersive. Unlike pure scratch DJs, who focus on the intricacies of sound manipulation, Toronto DJs blend various genres and beats to keep crowds moving.

The Spirit of Toronto Radio

Toronto’s radio scene in the 80s and 90s played a pivotal role in creating the fertile ground for its DJ scene to emerge. The city’s AM and FM dials were among the most diverse in North America, offering top 100 hits, jazz, dance, community, rock, country, oldies and easy-listening stations. Community radio stations like CHRY, CKLN and CIUT were essential in amplifying styles like hip-hop, reggae, soca, bhangra, Bollywood, jungle, and other genres not heard on their commercial counterparts. Ethnic stations like CHIN FM and CIAO broadened musical and cultural awareness to the average Torontonian in the home of a friend or getting into a cab. The music from these radio shows became cultural threads that wove through neighbourhoods, parties, and public spaces, connecting the city’s diverse groups and building recognition.

The influence of radio brought Toronto’s culturally diverse neighbourhoods together in a way that was rare in North America. Areas like Jane-Finch, North Scarborough, Flemingdon, Malvern, Brampton, Mississauga and Eglinton West became vibrant communities where cultures and music mixed freely at school dances, house parties, family weddings, and festivals. This is where many DJs began their craft, often using home equipment—sometimes building their own speaker boxes. This gave rise to the first mobile sound systems. Basement and rent parties for extended families in various diasporas also allowed DJs to hone their craft. The children of first generation immigrants would often sleep in the coat room as adults played and mixed music in the basement or backyard late into the night.

These children grew up, learning DJ skills at home. This new generation of young DJs pooled their record collections, often made of rare records bought out of town in US cities like Detroit, NYC and Buffalo. This established the first “sound crews” and cross-cultural playlists that shaped Toronto’s unique DJ sound.

Experimentation and Innovation

Club DJs provided the hits and high-energy rhythms that defined nights out. Radio stations often broadcasted these DJ sets live from the clubs, exposing the listener to these club bangers. During the day however, Toronto radio became a playground for innovation. Daytime radio DJs mixed genres that weren’t heard in clubs or mixed together on radio. A lunch time radio set might include genres as disparate as Motown, disco, funk, yacht rock, AM classics, Bollywood, reggae, hip-hop, and soca. DJs like DJ Starting from Scratch, The Juiceman Jonathan Shaw, Jester and DJ Clymaxxx emerged, spinning genre-crossing sets that defined the unique sound of Toronto mix DJs—placing many of them in high esteem among others in their craft.

New Formats, New Audiences

Toronto’s DJ culture went beyond being heard in clubs and on-air. It evolved into a DJ community marked by innovation, with new outlets for new business models and methods of engagement.

This included Scratch Lab—one of Canada’s first DJ schools, Raina Music—an environmental music service providing mixed music for the hospitality sector and Xtendamix—a video remixing service for DJs.

Toronto DJs developed unique business models, and the profession became a mainstay in Toronto’s entertainment sector, branching out into streaming on platforms like Twitch and performing in new spaces. As Toronto DJ culture continues to evolve, the DJs are connecting audiences in fresh and inventive ways. One example is Grocery Store Hits, a Saturday morning mix show on Twitch featuring DJ Jay Online, who dons a Walmart vest to mix and remix soft rock and pop classics that are the staple in grocery stores. Another is Mista Jiggz who has crafted unique remixes for charity fundraisers and other events in the city.

Toronto remains a DJ powerhouse, giving rise to talent who can both juggle and select with remarkable skill, capturing the city’s unique pulse and channeling it into a blend that’s as rich and diverse as the city itself. With each performance, Toronto DJs continue to set a high standard, representing the unique power of music to bring people together across backgrounds, preferences, and generations.

4 Ways I’d Change the Way Radio is Taught in College

August 8, 2022 by Kevin Leave a Comment

I worked in radio for nearly 8 years at CHRY Radio (now Vibe 105) in Toronto. During that time, I worked with many interns from the local college radio program. Many of them were bright, serious and engaged students who worked hard at mastering the nuances of the medium. Many still work in broadcasting currently and I consider it a privilege to have mentored and worked alongside many of these people.

As I spent more time at CHRY, I noticed that our younger interns enjoyed working at the radio station, but didn’t engage with the medium outside of their job. It wasn’t their fault; by the end of the first decade of this century, podcasting, satellite radio, Internet radio and on-demand music streaming had displaced terrestrial radio. It had become the media your parents consumed in the car. The result of this shift was a group of students that were checked out of what they ere at school to study. Students suffered, the industry suffered and the medium suffered because schools hadn’t caught up to the new reality.

College radio courses need an overhaul. Here are 4 ways I’d change the way radio is taught in schools to yield more engaged college radio grads that are smarter and more competitive.

1. Teach Musicology and Music Appreciation

In preparing this post, I did some research on four large college radio programs around the Greater Toronto Area. Not a single college teaches basic musicology as part of its media programs. I began realizing this was a problem when I was teaching interns how to edit bars and beats to cut music tracks. Many college students couldn’t identify the downbeat, the backbeat or the post in a song to line up a VoiceOver track. I couldn’t really blame the students; this was a generation that grew up with gutted music programs in public schools, the ubiquity of software like Garage Band and no collective experience of having to learn an instrument in junior high whether they had an aptitude for it or not.

Graduate better students by providing one mandatory course in popular musicology where students are trained to recognize and identify basic musical concepts such as tempo, meter, key, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, timbre, texture and form. Students should also know how to recognize and identify the studio techniques that accompany pop music production including: reverb, echo, delay, compression, gating, EQ and so on. Students should be able to apply this musical knowledge to any genre and understand how these elements can be programmed on air to create musical flow.

2. Teach Music History

Out of the four colleges I researched in or near the GTA—Humber College, Seneca College, Durham College and Fanshawe College—only one, Fanshawe, had a music history course for its radio students.

Students today are taught to front sell and back sell their announcing with the ubiquitous music scheduler that serves up a station’s tracks for the day based on rules. Many of the students I worked with were not invested in the music they played out in the commercial world, but came alive when they were the ones responsible for selecting the music for a show at CHRY.

Radio schools can make better graduates by teaching the history of pop music starting with the blues and working their way forward through rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, pop and all of the other genres that exploded onto the airwaves over the past 70 years—including international genres. In addition to the music, students should be exposed to the role of—and advances in—technology, social, commercial and economic factors as well as political factors that affected and changed music history. Radio itself played an important role in shaping the sounds that were the backdrop to generations of people. Students should complete the course and be able to apply this knowledge to music programming and on air delivery.

3. Teach Entrepreneurship

Today’s media landscape is very different from the one I entered after I left high school in the 90s. While terrestrial radio struggles to stay relevant amidst audience segmentation and a variety of offerings, there are unprecedented opportunities for innovation, growth and new ideas for programming both mainstream and alternative content.

Colleges like Fanshawe College teach students how to generate new programming ideas, but I propose going further by developing techniques for pitching sustainable ideas including content for syndication, monetized Internet content, audio architecture and branded content as well as other types of audio programming. Each of these can have a terrestrial broadcast component or blaze new trails. Tied into this, students should be taught how to pitch and the role of sales beyond filling avails with 30s and adjacencies.

4. Graduate Smaller Classes

I was shocked to hear radio colleges graduated classes of around 50 to 60 students, depending on the college. Multiply this by the number of colleges offering radio programs across Canada and the US. Then, look at the current job openings in radio.

Today’s music radio station can run with less than 10 staff, not including salespeople who are usually out hustling up leads. Combine this reality with diminishing revenues, automation and local management arrangements (LMAs) and a lack of opportunity will make perfect sense. Reducing class size is one way to ensure only the best make it out of radio college and that there are opportunities in the industry.

Having said this, there are opportunities as mentioned in the third point. Students who leave college with the ability to do new things with new media are the ones who will be rewarded in the future while legacy media looks on and wonders how they did it.

My Radio Production Philosophy

June 11, 2022 by Kevin Leave a Comment

This is an excerpt from Memoirs of CHRY Production—a collection of my thoughts and learnings after a nearly 8 year-long run as the Technical/Production Coordinator for CHRY Radio in Toronto.

Alternative ≠ Mediocre

I never wanted alternative to be synonymous with mediocre. I managed to shift the sound of CHRY Radio because I brought a major market production aesthetic to my work. This is a brief look into my production philosophy I left with the station upon my departure.

When I started my radio career, campus/community radio was synonymous with mediocrity, poor technical execution, bad sound and unskilled volunteers using amateur equipment to produce programming that was easy to ignore. Ads and promos sounded as if they were recorded on a consumer tape deck in a noisy basement by a college student who wasn’t fully awake.
The falling costs of technology and computer processing power put the tools of the major market movers into the hands of the lowly community radio producer. Now, with a quiet room, an inexpensive condenser microphone and multitrack recording software, producers could make radio that rivalled and even exceeded their commercial counterparts.

Creative Writing Strategies

The foundation of building a solid radio spot is recognizing and respecting the limit of time. A 30 second ad should be 30 seconds long, not 27, 31, 33 or 47 seconds.
Once you have a time limit, write to that limit and write creatively.
Every spot should have a good hook that catches the listener’s attention. Develop this skill by playing word games, Pictionary, brainstorming, building mind maps, doing improv comedy and so on. Create pictures in the mind of the listener and write well.

Edit your script. Can you shorten things? Reword them? Use better words? More descriptive words? No words at all?

Allow room for music, sound effects and the personality of the voice talent.

The Jerk Food Festival

One of the announcers I worked with, Clive, had a great bass-heavy voice and could pull off the smooth, sultry “Barry White” vibe. It was the perfect match for the line, “Do you like it hot?” To advertise a jerk food festival. The rest of the ad came together off of the marriage of Clive’s voice and the opening line.

A fully stocked library of sound effects and production music is a huge help. Certain music or sound effects will trigger ideas for great scripts.
The simpler the idea and the more succinct, the better the execution.
Avoid writing laundry list scripts or scripts with too much detail. Listeners will miss it completely.

Radio is a bad place for phone numbers. Direct the listener to a website if you can.
Boil the spot down to a single idea and create around that idea.
If you have 3 great ideas for a script, write 3 great scripts.

Subodh Sharma Real Estate Campaign

Subodh Sharma was a regular advertiser on CHRY. With a long term advertiser like Subodh, the challenge was how to keep her real estate firm fresh in the listener’s mind. For Subodh, the strategy was to remind the listener that although he or she wasn’t buying a house now, there were benchmarks in life where you would need the services of a real estate broker. When those benchmarks came around, Subodh was the real estate broker to call. I developed concepts around a wedding and having a baby, two concepts that were easy to write to. I included the line, “Subodh Sharma is the real estate broker who’ll be there when you’re ready to take life’s next big step.”
Subodh also brought the problem to us that people didn’t know she was a woman. Again, a simple problem I could solve with one line of script.

Running Recording Sessions

I usually try to keep things moving in the studio by having everything prepped for voice talent when they arrive.
Eliminate as much background sound as possible. Pay attention to jewelry, phones and clothing as possible sources for noise.
Monitor your talent, always. Talent should always wear headphones.
I prefer talent stand while delivering their scripts as they can get more air into their lungs and project their voices.
Coach talent if you require a specific kind of read. Emulate the type of delivery you hear on TV or commercial radio. Microphones tend to flatten vocal energy, which is why voice talent may sound like they’re overdoing it when they read live. The recording should sound confident, heartfelt, honest and real.
Be sure the voice matches the tone of the script.
Always listen back to your recordings with talent in the room!

Fairchild construction

Kathryn was a young voice talent I worked with who could easily take direction and deliver a stellar read in one or two takes.

Your recording session is where proper asset management begins. I record as much as possible by over recording beginnings and ends. You’ll hear a lot of slop if you listen to my raw recording files. You may get magic while someone is warming up, so be sure to capture that.

Session admin

Label your files and tracks correctly. As a rule, I typically organize sessions in industry standard dialogue, music and effects (DME) layout. This makes it easy to group, move, edit and manipulate your regions/clips in an orderly fashion.
Use effect presets and save your own! Presets save time and frustration in sessions as they minimize mouse clicks. I typically use presets as a starting point and will fine tune for each voiceover.
If you’re manipulating many clips in the same session, learn how to use the Batch Converter function in your DAW.

Editing and Mixing

Show off!!!
Make brilliant edits. Splice like a surgeon. Remove noise, breaths and tiny mouth clicks. Compress and gate like a pro. Put Abbey Road and Gateway Mastering to shame with your EQ-ing and compression. Your final voiceover should be ready to air on network TV during the Super Bowl or the Olympics. Compress and EQ the way you’d EQ for a major label album. Mix the same way. Each spot should contain the same sonic signature as a well-recorded pop record.
My voiceovers sound the way they do because I remove room sound, clicks, breath and mouth noises and piece together 3 or 4 takes to get the read. This may involve splicing phrases and even parts of words together, especially if the talent is great and records a safety take or two.
I record at a safe level, adjust volumes by hand, then triple compress. By the time the vocals are finished, they should sound full and be easily heard on a small speaker at low volume. This is my “clock radio” reference and guides me in darkness.
Familiarize yourself with DSP effects as they can save a noisy VoiceOver.

Take your time with the mix and monitor on everything you can. High volumes, low volumes, every kind of speaker.
You cannot mix on headphones! It’s an inaccurate representation of what is happening in the air when you’re listening to studio monitors. Use headphones as a reference when mixing, but don’t rely on them as being accurate, no matter how good they are.
When mixing high energy night life spots, you will be required to shorten music beds, splice music and create montages. In terms of editing music, you should know how to edit beats and bars, create loops, match bpm and perform music crossfading.
If you don’t know how to scrub audio, learn. This is what will make your editing much faster and more precise. I don’t know any full-time commercial engineer who uses waveforms to edit.

Jeffery Osbourne concert

An example of a night life ad for Jeffery Osbourne in concert requiring mixing, crossfading and sound effects. Danae Peart, the voice talent in this spot, has a great TEDx Talk on radio and media.

Mastering

This is what truly set my spots above those of other campus/community stations.
Become familiar with companders, multiband compressors, volume maximizers, mastering plug-ins, mastering EQs, stereo expanders and harmonics generators. This is the big secret I don’t usually give away, but every ad on the air has gone through some type of multiband mastering.
There should be no difference from spot to spot in terms of volumes or EQ signatures. I tend to go for a bright, ear-pleasing sound with articulate bass, a bump between 3 and 5 kHz and added air above 10 kHz with moderate compression. I use long decay times and faster attacks to get the material to sound pretty flat once it goes on air.

Roshé Clear Water

Another highly produced ad that brings together great voice talent, production and scripting. The amazing voice talent enthusiastically repeating, “I’m drinking Roshe!” is a lovely Toronto-based singer/songwriter named Mel Dube.

Effects

If you listen to ad agency radio spots you’re not going to find a lot of reverb and delay, especially for commercials for products and services. I tend to mix fairly dry as I find reverb distracting and it’s very easy to abuse.
There are obvious times where you will use reverb and delay, such as recreating environments like a train station, kitchen or sports stadium.
In high energy and night life ads, effects should be used carefully. It’s easy to fall in love with delays and reverbs. It’s harder to know how much is enough. As a general rule, pick 3 effects for an ad and vary the effects throughout the script.