January 08, 2004
It's a shame about Ray

And I don't mean the "chivalry's not dead" Ray Davies, either....

As has been previously noted, AZ and I are regular listeners to WLUW. We listen to it in the mornings, we listen to it some evenings, we listen to it when Dick Buckley's coughing is too distracting. We defend it to our friends who work for other community stations in Chicago.

WLUW is a campus/community oriented station, my favorite kind. AZ and I both worked at these stations (with the same (though smaller scale) funding struggles...) over the years - for years (between us, over two decades). So there's a certain avuncular condition that sets in when I hear something that could be improved in the medium I love.

At WQAX, the older announcers had a systematic mechanism to satisfy this avuncular urge and help the younger crew improve - after the first couple shows, you submitted an air-check tape for review by your peers, and in a week or so comments would come back to you for improvement. Then you were encouraged to resubmit periodically, and to provide feedback to your fellow station members.

On WLUW, the morning shows are, as a rule, great. Lots of good music, a mix of familiar and strange. But when I listen to one of the announcers, Ray, I confess I find myself wondering about changing stations. Ray knows a lot about music. He knows what the band released in the last few years, how the tracks he just played compare to the other tracks on the album. He was probably at their last gig at the subterranean or hideout or bottle. He knows they used to record with a different lineup, and that one wasn't as good as the new one. He also thinks you should know that this album has some other tracks on it that are also very good, and you should probably go pick it up at your local independent record store.

This is great information, background that helps Ray pick the music that makes a good show. But it also makes for announce breaks of 5 to 7 minutes as he tries to share all of it with us explicitly. Yesterday morning, rather than ranting at the radio through my shaving cream, I thought I'd pass along a tip I'd received in the past. During a review of one of my own airchecks, someone said I should really consider timing my announce breaks, to raise my consciousness of their duration and focus the content more sharply.

Thankfully, WLUW has a handy AIM access - or perhaps, unthankfully.

I passed this idea along to Ray. Maybe it's because IM can create distance as much as reduce it, but Ray's response was "With all due respect to your sage advice, when you get a radio show, buy yourself a stopwatch and have at it".

Which, clearly, wasn't my point.

So Ray, in the unlikely event you egosurf yourself and come across this, here's an offer for constructive criticism. When you next do an aircheck and you're happy with it, I'd still like to kibbitz. It's in my nature. Give it to me (cassette,cdr, minidisk, whatever digital audio format you prefer) and I'll give you a few (because I think there are only tweaks needed) notes.

And if you aren't doing airchecks and listening to yourself speak.... Give it a try.

Posted by esinclai at January 08, 2004 06:48 AM |