a taste of radio makes you hungry for it again
In the past when I traveled, I used to bring my portable rig, build a pillow fort, hook everything up and try and make a good recording in a crap environment. For the most part, it worked out OK.
The best result was that it would sound OK. That’s pretty much it.
Folks who don’t travel alot, like I do, think it’s kinda fun to put all that stuff together. After years of doing all that, you find out it’s monotonous. From the actual fort building and jerry-rigging to getting a shot-gun microphone through airport security without TSA pooping their collective pants (reasonably so as a Sennheiser 416 mic looks very suspicious under the x-ray machine) it gets to be a pain.
Bottom line, if I don’t HAVE to bring a travel rig, I won’t.
Instead, I use recording studios in the cities I visit. You meet new people, make new contacts and generally enjoy much better recording conditions. Except for that recording session outside of Dayton, OH that got postponed because there was a drug-related murder that took place across the street just before I was set to arrive.
And by postponed I mean I cancelled it. Just to avoid the possibility of me getting eternally cancelled.
So recent on one of my trips, I was in need of a studio for a rush audition. It was inside a large radio station and being in the station’s production room was like a joyful time warp for me.
From the board to the desk to the Electro-voice RE-20 microphone (the same type I used in the 80’s when I worked in radio) it was a wonderful place to be.
People who used to work in radio (and there are tens of thousands of us) will rightly complain that we were poorly paid, over worked and undervalued. People of work in radio now may say the same thing.
But pay and some lousy bosses (and/or owners) aside, it brings most of us real broadcasters to our happy place. Playing the music, mixing the stop sets, the radio station jingles, banter, callers, on-location events – it was all so fun and yet professional. There were and are many very good people in radio. We were serious about doing a good job, being creative, working to make sponsors happy….it could be a good business to be in.
This isn’t a gauzy, romanticized remembrance for me…radio had many good parts to it.
But by the time I finished with it, the bad parts outweighed the good parts. That’s just how life goes.
I completely understand why people stay in the radio business (even for less than stellar wages) and why even a few of my VO friends have gone back into it.
Being in that radio studio for my recent recording, it was my brief happy place. And all we all want is to be happy.
