3. – The ‘radio’ read - One of the big stumbling blocks, in my experience of working with VO talent, is that annoying/bigger than life/I’m too cool for the room-voice that VO talent bring with them.

The 80s were the 80s, the 90s were the 90s… today is a completely different ball game.  Most of the people who get into radio want to mimic the style of programming that they listened to when they were young.  In my case (I am 38) the 80s were a major influence.  But the people who listen to radio today are nothing like me (the way I was in the 80s).  Young people have been bombarded with SOOOO many commercial messages that, by the time they get to their twenties, they are cynical of the overt commercial messages.  They need radio, the commercials and the promos to ‘talk to them’.  A more natural and personal VO sound is key.

Which brings us a dillemma…

Most of the VO talent we hear on the radio in Europe tend to be a bit older than the average listener of a station.  Which kind-of makes sense… you want your station’s VO to exude confidence, to have on-air presence and to be experienced (to ease your work flow). These attributes are usually associated with more ‘mature’ VOs and they might be the same ones that have the more traditional radio voice you’d want to get away from.

So… tips and tricks:

- Headphone use – As mentioned in the last article… you can make a lot of difference if you have a VO who uses headphones.  If you take the headphones away somebody will feel strange to make their voice bigger.  You can use this to great affect if you want to get a natural read.  Some of the biggest names in de VO business use this trick.  Even the ‘one shell on, one shell off’ trick works wonders.

- Mix it up – People are creatures of habit.  And a certain amount of ‘habit’ is good but you need to break through it every now and again to make things lively.  Mix things up by having your VO read the copy over a pre-produced promo shell every once in a while.  If your VO is used to reading dry text he/she will suddenly gain inspiration from feeling the music underneath.  Is the VO used to reading everything in bite-size chunks… have him/her read full sentences.

- Voice settings – Keep voice settings (plug-ins) for a couple of months but don’t hesitate to change the chain every now and again.  It will keep your VO talent involved in the process as well if you try to tweak and change.  It gives a sense of the ongoing process to perfect the sound.  Don’t go over board though because you don’t want to give the suggestion that the station changes its sound all the time.  But even the process of switching between EQs with virtually the same settings will keep the process lively.  This way you can gradually get your VO used to the fact that the voice is a versatile instrument.

- Compression – I have walked into stations where the talent reads copy into a clean mic chain.  Other station’s set-ups make it virtually impossible for the VO to NOT get into the boomy announcer read.  How does your mic chain influence the way your VO reads the copy?  It makes sense for VO people who work from home to use a neutral setting because they have to deliver material to different stations.  That’s a one size fits all approach.  But using more or less compression can also open up new possibilities since your VO can shout into the mic and go into whisper-mode from one second to the next.  As producers we have wonderful tools at our disposal and it’s good to push yourself to test the limits every now and again.

The next time we’ll dive into ‘directing your VO’.  What are the do’s and don’ts?

2 – Control how your VO hears him/herself – The last time I wanted to stress the importance of psychology in the quality of a VO artist.  We are in the people business and we should understand that the way we deal with our VO talent directly influences the outcomes and results.  A part of that psychological process is to understand how a VO artist hears him/herself and how to influence that.

I have been at plenty stations where the VO talent comes in a couple of times a week to do a session.  Interestingly enough at most of these stations there are producers and technicians who have their ideas about the way the voice of their talent should sound but never have a discussion with the talent to see whether their ideas match those of the talent.  An example:  A CHR station where the VO talents were recording with all the processing already on their voice.  In this case this meant heavy EQ, short delay effects to make the voice sound a little bit wider and compression up the whazoo.  In the studio it sounded awesome but in the booth there were problems with headphone feedback since the signal was turned up so loud by the brick wall limiters that the VO talent could hardly move without getting weird feedback sounds.  The result… the headphone sound had to be taken down and the VO was always complaining that he couldn’t hear himself very well.

Try to understand that the technical aspects of a recording session might be important to you but are completely un-important when it comes to getting the best out of a VO artist.  A bad recording of an incredible performance always tops the pristine recording of a bad performance.

That said… if you prepare before a session you will probably not need to worry about the performance or the technical aspects.

Technical preparation

Sit down every now and again with your VO and talk about the following points:

- Does the performance become better if the talent has headphones on with both shells, a shell on only 1 ear or with the headphones completely off?  Do you have a high quality headphone that the talent likes?  Is it in a good enough condition that the ear shells don’t leak sound?

- Does your Pro Tools rig cause a delay / latency in the sound to the point where it causes problems for the VO artist?

- How much compression will be useful for your VO.  Play around with the settings.

- How does the VO feel that his/her voice is best represented when using EQ, compression, delay, etc..  Not to say that you should use these presets in your final product but it might help to get them feeling good about their voice and make way for more possibilities to start playing around.

- How does the VO talent use the mic?  Up close? … do you get a proximity effect when the VO comes close to the mic and the low end of the voice gets boosted?  A little bit of a distance?… do you hear the room when you start compressing the sound in your promos?

Having talked about the technical aspects the VO talent should at least feel that he or she is being heard and that all the circumstances have been created to bring out the best in their performance.

And then comes the next stage… the one where YOU as a producer get the VO talent to a point where they deliver the best material… which we’ll talk about next time…

Ever stuck for a great promo text or idea? No matter what you try, you still come up with the same clichés?

Why don’t you try to use the cliché to your advantage.  Try to actually write the copy of the promo in that ‘un-original’ fashion. Then pick one element of the story and put it in front of the text. Exaggerate it, ridicule it and make that over the top element the attention grabber of the promo! An easy and quick way to freshen up the approach of your promo. Works every time…

4. If you’re a music director in the U.K. this site (www.comparemyradio.com) will make it all that easier to find out what songs are played on which stations. The website was originally targeted at listeners who want to find out on which station their favorite song is playing. It allows you to quickly compare stations on their plays of current songs but you can also access information on the most played songs in the U.K., broken down into contributing stations. Another fun tool is the ‘Variety Gauge’ which shows how many different tracks are on the playlist for each station which shows you how varied a stations playlist is.
Compare My Radio does not monitor all stations in the U.K. but the stations monitored are listened to by over 27 million people in the UK. That’s about 53% of the British population according to official audience figures (Rajar Q2 2009). And the best part of it, it’s free!
5. Music directors in the Dutch market might find sites like www.nummergemist.nl, www.nummerweten.nl and www.watiseropderadio.nl helpful in their search to alternative ways of music research and reference.

So get creative yourself in finding creative ways to get your music research and reference.

p.s.: If you are currently in another than the above mentioned markets and you have info on websites like Compare My Radio, please feel free to share this information by placing a comment on this post.

How important is a Power Recurrent for your station? Do you really need such a category in your music scheduler or is it something trendy that you can easily do without? Of course the importance depends on your format but if you’re in AC, HOT AC or CHR you’d better be spinning those Power Recurrents!

A solid Power Recurrent rotation is the easiest way to boost your ratings. Time and time again (in very different markets and with very different stations) history repeats itself. Stations that were omitting resting / not playing songs for a while because they thought that the audience had to be tired of them, sky rocketed with their ratings when they started with their power recurrent rotation.

Fresh

Especially in HOT AC and AC formats a Power Recurrent category can give your station a fresh and ‘today’ sound without the risk of the sound becoming too unfamiliar. For CHR the amount of power recurrent titles  are often less than for the AC formats and played in a higher rotation. Also the titles are often newer than the ones used in HOT AC or AC formats but the principle remains the same.

If you’re targeting 25-34 35-49 years, especially women 25-39 years…Power Recurrents are your most valuable songs.

A Power Recurrent rotation for women 25-39 years has the effect that it gives them a feeling of being up to date with today’s music without risking them to tune out on a song they can’t sing-a-long to (yet). Of course the right balance between current, recurrent and gold songs is important as well. So be sure that besides the Power Recurrent rotation, the balance is adjusted to the needs and habits of your target audience.

Burn

But what about burn you ask? Yes, there are songs you may not want to put in your Power Recurrent rotation. But this has much more to do with loving or hating a song than burn. The songs that get burned are the songs they dislike. You’ll never hear someone say: “I love this song, I wish they’d never play it again”. So if have the means and money to do research on which titles they like, don’t be afraid that those like titles will get burned. 90% of those titles will have less burn than you would expect.

This is because absorbing new music gets more difficult as the targeted listener ages.  It takes more time to get familiar with a new title, so the life cycle of the song becomes longer. Let’s not forget that with all things heard on radio, you need to hear a piece (be it a commercial, promo or a song) at least 3 times before you really start paying attention or remember (as has been described in numerous cognitive studies). Pierre Bouvard, Executive Vice President, Cross-Platform Services for Arbitron Inc. explains in his study on Optimum Effective Scheduling for example how that this principle not only works for advertising but music as well.

Considering average listening times of your targeted listeners and assuming you have a solid vertical rotation on your currents and recurrents, what do you think should be the amount of spins to let a song reach it’s full power?

Mistake

Often currents are moved too fast through different categories. Be sure the speed at which a song travels through new/adds, current and recurrent should be ‘custom designed’ for your targeted listeners and their ability to ‘absorb’. If you are out of tune with your audience in this regard, you’re throwing away easy opportunities to boost your ratings.

Record reps

So what about the record reps that keep trying to persuade you to play the latest of the latest? Let me put it this way… why should you take a song off your playlist when it is still testing well?

I’m all for giving the listener something new to listen to and get acquainted with new songs but do it in a calculated way (well thought through) and in a measure that fits the needs of your audience. But don’t throw out a well testing song just because there’s an even newer one of the same artist.

The smarter record reps luckily already understand that it doesn’t matter if a station is playing the ‘old’ track. It promotes the album and boosts its sales and that’s all they want.

Spins

So how many spins do you give the songs going into the power recurrent category? Of course it depends primarily on the time spent listening of your listeners and the amount of titles in that category. It even depends on what your competition is doing with this strategy. Some stations play their Power Recurrents almost as much as their medium rotation current tracks.  Others give them about 1 to 3 spins a day with a very strict vertical rotation.

It’s up to you to find out what power recurrent rotation fits your station but rest assured… there’s one out there that fits the needs of your listeners.

I sometimes find it a little bit frustrating to keep reading about ProTools users, their Macs and the fact that they ‘supposedly’ had their systems installed and NEVER experienced any crashes.  Sssssyeah…right!!!!

I am trying to kill some time right now since my computer froze while I was apparently editing faster than my own shadow (I disagree with that, actually, but my computer seems to think I am not using it in the correct manner).

But during this downtime it dawned on me that there are probably many producers – especially in the music industry – who never experience any problems with their Macs because

a. they use their rig to record and play back audio – that’s like having no car problems with your Ferrari because you never take it out of the garage, if you ask me

b. don’t experience time pressure the way radio producers do – hell, when I get on my rig in the morning I sometimes imagine I see smoke coming from the mainframe since I am cranking out material in such a tempo

c. They are not being completely truthful because they are afraid to get laughed at by people who bought their PC (which probably works just as well) for only a tenth of the price

Come on… you gotta have a sense of humor about this stuff.  Like I don’t know myself that the only reason I got my Mac was because it looked cool, I had money to spare… plus the fact that Macs are wonderfully easy to restart after they invariably do crash.

I guess that I am lazy in the ‘fixing the computer department’ but I’ll get really active when I see people consequently lie about Macs being a fail safe solution to all of their problems.  Note anybody who is open to hearing this: Mac, PC, Maserati, washing machine, airplane… if you buy a machine it WILL, at some point, break down on you!

When I ask the same question to the talents that still do ‘sell tickets’, they admit they never really put that much thought in it. “My PD says we’re giving away tickets, my tease sheet says we’re giving away tickets so I say “we’re giving away tickets”.” Selling pieces of paper isn’t interesting to your audience. Even when you add the sound of fumbling with some paper as I heard on a station yesterday, it keeps sounding lame and boring. It keeps sounding as paper!

It’s the talent’s job to make the prizes sound interesting and exciting. You’re a sales person on the radio! So start thinking about how you could make two pieces of paper something worthwhile calling for.

Try to sell the experience the listener is going to have when he or she wins the tickets. Make them envision the experience: “imagine yourself standing front row with your best friend eye to eye with Rihanna. Be sure to look good ’cause she might catch your eye…. yeah THAT close!”

You can also make the tickets sound more interesting selling the benefit of having that ticket. Relate to real life: “I know all your friends are going to be unbelievably jealous of you when you are standing eye to eye with Taio Cruz at his completely sold out concert”. Or even relate to real life in a completely other way: “wouldn’t it be awesome to stand front row, experiencing Maroon 5 up close and personal and hey, you can even make some of your friends happy ’cause you get to take 5 of your friends with you! God you’re gonna be so popular!”

Especially if the tickets come with extras (like an exclusive limo ride to the concert, a backstage pass or meet and greet) try to tell your audience how it would be if they really won. Tell them a story, tell them what they’re thinking, help them envision the experience. But please don’t sell them tickets anymore.

A few years ago, I remember my PD coming into my studio asking me to cook up a promo that featured some caller audio. I had the voice tracks from the voice guy, picked out some music and effects for the promo, but I was at a loss for having just the right mix of callers to pull it off. What’s next? The daunting task of blindly listening to old talk shows for the just the right soundbyte from a caller? There has to be a better way, right? Yes, there is and here are two suggestions.

1 – If you’re lucky enough to have a local talk show, ask your engineer if they can set up a “phone only” feed from the talk studio. No annoying talk show host to step over the caller or music to make the call unusable…just the caller. If you’re able to set this up in a logger, aircheck machine, or even a DRR in NexGen to automatically record this audio, you’re golden. At the end of the day, pop open your DAW, look for the pieces in the waveform that are not silence, and go fishing for some callers.

2 – Now let’s say you don’t have a local show at your station or you’re not able to get the “phone only” feed from engineering, there is another option. Listen while you work. No, I’m not talking about some trite positioning statement from the AC station across town. While you’re producing spots, writing copy, or working on the next Mercury Award winner, listen to your station. If you want to be hi-tech, create a task in Outlook with the day’s date and give it a title of something like “Promo Notes”. Yes, you can be old-school and write it down on a piece of paper. But if you’re like me, you can be left with scraps of meaningless notes at the end of the week if left unchecked. When you hear an audio gem, write down the time and a description of what you heard (this works for clips from local and syndicated talk show hosts too). When it’s time to produce your next promo or when you just want to switch things up a little, go fishing for some great caller or talk show clips…and know where the fish are.

1. Be a psychologist – Everybody uses their voice during the day without paying too much attention to it.  If you’re in radio, it becomes a bit different because chances are that you climb behind the mic from time to time and send your voice out to the (hopefully) hundreds of thousands of listeners.  Can be a little nerve wracking at first but since you don’t actually know your listener you just do whatever you think is best and let the chips fall where they may.

But imagine climbing behind a microphone, in a little isolated booth, knowing that on the other end of the glass (or ISDN-line) there are people pouring over every word you say.  “No… don’t say it like that… say it like this…”.  These people are highly critical, they make you repeat words and sentences until you start thinking to yourself “presents… presents… presents… strange word actually…”.  And then they tell you to be more enthousiastic, plaster a big smile onto your face, when you have just eaten a bad sandwich after your boyfriend/girlfriend shouted at you for not being at home enough.

It might sound a little silly but these kinds of things… I think about them when I start directing a VO talent during a session.  I find it quite amazing that these people get themselves into such a state of mind on a day-to-day basis that they want to step into a booth an have me criticize every word and noise that comes out of their mouth.

The best thing I ever did was to try to voice a promo myself and sit during a DJ meet at the station with the 15 jocks tearing the promo to shreds.  I emerged from that meeting with a new found respect for our station voices.

And as a consequence I now really try to understand every person who walks through the door.  Do they seem tired, stressed, happy, sad.  I know that if I want to get the best out of my time with a VO, I have to make sure that I don’t treat them like a one-trick pony and delve into their psyche a little bit to get the results that both the VO telent and I are the happiest with.  And as a result I have found that most VO artists start treating themselves as one-trick ponies as well.

Next time… how to control the way a VO hears him/herself during a session…