My Radio Production Philosophy

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.