Media

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.

Career Trek: The Radio years

June 9, 2022 by Kevin Leave a Comment

My Early love Affair with Radio

When I started high school, I thought I wanted to be an accountant. In Grade 10, I joined the A/V Crew and fell in love with the technical arts. In grade 11, I won a local radio contest and got to sit in on the production of a major market morning radio show—limo ride and all.
While the antics of the hosts, Jesse & Gene, had me in stitches, I was paying wrapped attention to Perry, the show’s producer as he flew around the studio, cutting audio tape, jamming commercials into cart decks, running the board, cuing the hosts, playing CDs and being the proverbial glue that held the show together. I was sold; THIS is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Just over a year later, I started a closed-circuit radio station at my high school before leaving to pursue a degree in Radio & Television Arts at Ryerson (now Toronto Metropolitan) University. After graduating and working freelance for several years, I had enough material to assemble a small demo which I sent to a tiny radio station in North York, Ontario in the fall of 2005.
I had applied to be the station’s creative producer, writer, audio engineer and technical coordinator—in other words, the entire production department. The salary was less than a living wage today, but it was a start.

The Demo Spot

I was asked to produce a radio spot for CHRY’s People Powered fundraising campaign. Using my crude set-up at home, this is what I submitted.

After two interviews and my demo, I got the call. I wasn’t selected as the candidate. I was crestfallen and figured I’d remain in the freelance world a bit longer. Two weeks later, the phone rang again. The first candidate didn’t work out and I was offered the job. I took it and started my new full time gig as the Technical/Production Coordinator at what was then called CHRY (now Vibe 105 TO).

Amplifying the Alternative

This is a production demo I submitted for a national award in 2007. It didn’t win.

In 2005, the production facilities at CHRY were barebones to say the least when I walked in on my first day. Besides a slow computer and a Rode Broadcaster microphone, I had nothing—no headphones, no script stand, no licensed production music, no sound effects and no volunteer staff. My manager got the JAWS for Windows screen reader installed on my office and production computers for which I am eternally grateful. This one piece of software allowed me to independently work with advanced audio production software and keep a job for nearly 8 years.

Kevin at CHRY Master Control

At the time, CHRY’S sonic signature ranged from a noisy mix of over-compressed, reverberant and poorly equalized material to a few slickly produced jingle IDs that ran during station breaks. The overall aesthetic definitely sounded gritty, unfocused and very grass roots. I thought we could do better as a station and as a sector.

CANADA HELPS PSA

An example of the pro sound I brought to the station using tight compression, subtle effects and EQ, not to mention Talia, a stellar voice talent from Toronto.

The day-to-day was about managing the chaotic and often hectic worlds of radio spot production. I wrote, recorded, edited and mixed radio ads, promos, public service announcements, station IDs and other on-air material. My production philosophy was to produce high-fidelity material using the tools I had at my disposal—a computer with audio production software and a high-quality condenser microphone. I discuss my production philosophy in this post, but sufficed to say the station’s sonic signature evolved to being indistinguishable from major market stations with bigger budgets and more resources. We became equal players, sonically speaking with no difference in audio aesthetics when sweeping the dial.

Canadian Women’s Health Network PSA

The original version of this national spot was poorly recorded with a terrible VoiceOver and bad levels when it was sent to us from the NCRA. I re-recorded with an amazing voice talent, Jayde, who brought the spot to life.

Over the next eight years, the staff and I built CHRY’s production department to be recognized and envied nationally in the campus/community radio sector. Besides producing award-winning radio creative and refining the station’s sonic signature, I left a legacy of documented best-practices, policies, procedures and sage advice for the person who stepped into my shoes so we would never backslide into producing audio that made the listener cringe.

Award Winning Fundraising Spot

This spot campaign for our 20th anniversary fund drive won the award for creative Production from the National Campus/Community Radio Association in 2008. A fantastic voice talent, Greg, anchored the spot and gave us the “institute” vibe we were looking for.

How I Adapted

Thanks to a supportive staff and volunteers, great assistive technology and the chance to prove myself, I excelled as a radio producer who happened to have sight loss. Among my colleagues, I was known as the sound engineer or the producer and never “the blind engineer” or “the blind producer”. Many of our ad clients never knew their spots were being written, recorded and mixed by someone who couldn’t see.

As mentioned prior, I used JAWS to do everything on the computer. I ran Sony SoundForge with custom JAWS scripts, Adobe Audition and a handful of VST plug-ins. My Audio Arts console was labeled with braille and other tactile marks which help me orient myself to the board. The station itself was small and easy to navigate, however the York University campus where CHRY was located was immense and less accessible than my alma-mater. Having a great crew of staff and volunteers helped in incalculable ways when it came to miking up remotes or getting to station events.

Working as a freelance audio producer had its perks. I got to work on projects that were of interest to me, but my first full-time gig in radio helped me refine and hone my craft. I’m convinced that working at a radio station is the coolest job in the world. For me, every day was different with new challenges, amazing people and something new to learn every time I walked into work. I left the station in 2013 to pursue my first tech startup, TellMe TV, but I was grateful to be a part of something bigger than myself.

Feature on Jazz Singer Emilie-Claire Barlow

This was a full-length radio feature on Emilie-Claire Barlow, a wonderful jazz singer formerly from Toronto. This feature came about early in my tenure and was the first really long format piece I’d edited and mixed.