Back to the Money Room

“This room pays the bills.” One of my 1980’s radio cohorts used to say. Amen to that; the radio production room is where the local commercials are recorded and prepared for broadcast (except the agency spots produced by outside studios, which are dubbed to another tape for airing).

Spending the majority of my radio experience in the religious format stations shielded me from the dishonest practices of my secular counterparts: payola, shady barters, etc. We had to fight for every dime of revenue and often leaned on the crutch of brokered time preacher show for an overwhelming majority of it. A good 30-40% of our day was preacher shows. That gave me plenty of time to hone my production skillset.

I learned an amazing amount in a short period of time on the analog gear of the era (not state-of-the-art even then.) My limitations were actually better for my development in the long run. 2011 digital whiz-bang gadgetry would have stunted my growth; I’m thankful in retrospect.

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Having said all that, here is a concise look into my typical production method(s).

• Start with the copy (or script of the commercial). It is usually typed, double-spaced and in all CAPS, read through a few times. In 1993, I began practicing reading copy into a small Panasonic tape recorder before the actual production began. Prior to this I would do a cold read or two into the Reel-to-reel in production. If I got it in one take: done. If not: record over and over again until “perfect.” The practice reads were a real time saver. Literally. 30 second spots had to run exactly 29.5 seconds 59.5 for a 60.
• Then, choose a music “bed.” Most of my stations had purchased large libraries of cheesy royalty free background music and sound effects on vinyl albums. Many of the stations I worked for used real music, probably illegally, I plead ignorance.
• Next, I set the levels. The vocal first with the ubiquitous tape delay echo. Then, the music bed (if any) set so it did not drown the messenger.
• Now I would record to the “master” tape. ¼ inch tape running at 7.5 or (later) 15 ips.
• With all of this assembled I would dub the master take to another tape, a broadcast cartridge (or “cart”) for use on the air. Although in later years, for better quality, I skipped the reel-to-reel and went direct to cart.

With all of this rigmarole taken care of, I forgot to make an archive copy for my demo reel. Often I would make cassette copies of the carts for posterity; they are few and far between. The cassette dubs were sometimes muddy third generation copies until I had the foresight of going direct to cassette simultaneously with the open reel or cart direct recordings. In the late 80’s I felt cassette was the best archival medium, due to the impending obsolescence of reel-to-reel. I have only a miniscule fraction of my total production output committed to the archive. With hard disk drives today I suppose all my commercials would be saved. God help us.

Stay tuned