Ty Ford, Audio ● Video ● Words, Baltimore, Maryland
By Jerry Vigil
The original “Production Rat.” Depending upon how far back YOU go, you may remember articles in Radio World by Ty Ford, and if you’re a long-time subscriber to RAP, you may recall our first interview with Ty sixteen years ago in 1993. Ty had been out of radio for a few years, enjoying some success in the voice-over business, and had just finished a book on audio production, which was a focus of our interview. Has he managed to remain self-employed all these years? Yes. Has he become another one of those big six-figure voice-over guys? No. What does a Production-Rat-turned-voice-guy do when the voice-over market crashes? How does he survive? Even flourish? We have those answers for you, and answers to questions you haven’t even thought about yet. Radio production people have a special skill set, and as Ty unmistakably demonstrates, it is a sturdy springboard for those looking beyond the hallways of radio stations.
JV: In our last visit 16 years ago we focused on a book you had just written, Advanced Audio Production Techniques. You’ve done a lot since then, so let’s catch up. What was the next phase of your career after that book?
Ty: Well, that was in ’93, so I was out of radio. I was not working for a station. I worked hard from ‘93 up through 2000, and I saw a decline in voice work which was probably about 75 or 80 percent of my work at that point, freelance voice work through AFTRA and SAG. I saw the decline happen pretty sharply after the millennium and marketed very aggressively against it until 2004, and at the end of 2004 I said, “Well, it’s just not here anymore.” And this was not just me. This was true for a bunch of guys and gals who are professional voiceover people in the Baltimore and Washington markets and other friends that I have around the country.
So everybody was kind of looking at each other. We’d gotten past the point where you say, “How are you doing?” “Oh, I’m doing fine.” It had gotten too real and people were actually starting to be honest about it, which was extraordinary in itself, and I think shows the degree of fear that was being felt.
And what happened? Well, corporate industrial video fell out of favor for a number of reasons. Computers were not yet fast enough to handle audio and video but they were fast enough to handle text. So people were using various programs to train their employees, to tell the story here and there without video. So that put the voiceover people and the on-camera people who used to play parts in the vignettes that were part of the sales and training videos and all that stuff -- internal, external communications, you name it -- that just nailed them.
And at the very same time we had the advent of the big box stores, and the small retails that had been the bread and butter of voiceover people for doing commercials locally and regionally just got plundered. We have Lowe’s and Home Depot who came in up here and basically crushed any local regional hardware garden stores. There are a few left that specialize, and they’re okay, but a lot of people went out of business. That meant the advertising agencies that had those accounts lost the accounts. Many of the advertising agencies went out of business and the voice talent that did the work on those spots no longer could do that work.
So it was definitely a downward spiral. After 2004 we then have broadcast companies like Clear Channel and others finding that voice tracking is now possible because finally, the bandwidth on the Internet is wide enough to allow those kinds of transmissions. So they decide to blow off a bunch of announcers in the secondary and tertiary markets. And where did those people go? They’re best trained to put together copy, record it, and be on the air somewhere. Most of them were non-union so they hit the streets as non-union talent looking for work, and in doing so they cut the bottom out of the local and regional union voiceover market. Before this, a radio spot would get us, depending on what year and what the contract was, around $200. These guys were coming in and saying, “We’ll do it for $50 a spot.”
So that led me to go, “Well, what else can I do?” Period.
JV: So there it is, 2004, and the VO market tanks. How would you assess it today? Is it just as bad? Is it worse?
Ty: Well, right now it’s in pretty bad shape because there’s an oversupply still. There are websites out there where you can join as a voice talent, and I won’t mention any names, but I found out about one and I went to it. You can register for free. I registered for free. I did my profile. I uploaded my clips and then I went back to the site and logged in and pretended I was a customer. I found the Ty Ford page and I listened to his clips. I scrolled down a little bit and saw, “Like Ty Ford? Want someone that sounds like him?” And there were 13 clips of other people that were down there. I checked them, and of the 13, 12 were non-union, and I wasn’t sure about the 13th. I said, “This isn’t going to work.” I’ve got to charge scale if I want to do it above board and get the pension and health coverage, at that takes me out of the competition because these folks will do it for 50 bucks a pop, so I’m done. I checked a number of the online services and saw that pretty much that’s the way it was.
I emailed the guys at this one service and I said, “You know, you’re not really doing the talent any service by posting clips from 12 or 13 other people on the very same page, and I’m trying to figure out how that’s good for me.” And whoever answered the email must have had a Masters in PR, as they spun a very pretty story. As a matter of fact, I emailed them back and said, “God, you know, you obviously have a degree in creative writing because you’re wonderful, but the bottom line is, this isn’t good for me.”
JV: It sounds like the bottom line is, you didn’t pay.
Ty: Well, there’s that too. I don’t recall if that one was the site with the offer: “Now if you really want to get some exposure, use our special category where you pay us some money.” I’m very wary of that. I’ve been approached by people and can’t even count the number of entities who’ve approached me on that, and my line to them is, “Show me that you can make me money and I’ll write you a check. Bring me the business, I’ll write you a check.” There are just too many places out there. You can go broke paying money to websites that promise to give you business.
JV: You mentioned health insurance provided by SAG-AFTRA. I’ve often wondered if that’s decent coverage for a fair amount. How does that work?
Ty: Well, I don’t know what year it was but as the economy went south, all the members in AFTRA and SAG got letters basically saying it wasn’t free anymore. Used to be that if you made a minimum amount of money a year in sessions -- and I want to say at least at some point in time it was $12,000 -- your coverage was free. Incrementally the economy has forced them to charge for that service so it’s not free any more. The last letter I received said the premium was $975 for 12 months, and I don’t remember the specifics of whether that was basic or extended or what the actual deal was.
I’ve gone elsewhere for my coverage. I think they’ve upped it and I don’t know the exact dollar figure, but unless you’re making maybe at least $15,000 a year, you don’t get coverage. It could be more than that. I forget. But you do get that money put aside for you in your pension.
JV: So is there really a career, a future for somebody that wants to do VO seriously, outside of getting lucky and being one of the cream of the crop in LA or Chicago or New York?
Ty: I think it’s exponentially more difficult now than it used to be. I do know people who have been lucky before the current economy went into the bottom of the well. They have managers or agents and they do get work frequently. When you start that, you actually have to be in town. One of the guys I know is an old friend of mine. He hasn’t told me how much work he’s doing, but he had some pretty good hits and he says he can now do it from home. He’s got a setup that’s okay to work with, and they don’t drag his butt up from Maryland all the way to New York every time they want to audition him.
And that’s another thing. I’m pretty sure this is the same way now. Even if you got the last voiceover for the whatever-national account, you normally have to audition for the very next spot that comes up, indicating how much talent there is out there.
So, to answer the question specifically, I used to be able to make a good living just doing voice work and the other stuff because I had a passion for it. Now, it’s on the other end. The balance is completely 180, and I’m doing many other things to make my living, which I totally enjoy. But this is maybe a different view of the eggs in one basket thing that voiceover people typically get into where you have one client that starts to take up all your time and you’re like, “Well, I just don’t have time to market,” and then they leave and you’re left with an empty nest.
In my case, it wasn’t the clients because all that just kind of went sideways. I looked for other kinds of things to do to populate my nest.
JV: So what other kinds of things did you get into?
Ty: As the economy splintered the voice work, I went first to location audio recording for film and video shoots. I have wireless gear. I have booms. I have mikes. I have mixers. I have the cables to feed cameras and a solid-state hard drive recorder. I went that way.
I started doing music production for local singer-songwriters and tapped into that market. Then I bought a video camera, a Canon XL2 about five years ago. I started shooting with that and eventually got the tripod, which was pretty damn expensive itself. You think audio toys are expensive; you take a look at the video toys and you’re like, “What? Holy mackerel!” And then there’s lighting because the essence of good video is good lighting, and the editing software, and another computer to handle that kind of stuff.
As I was doing that, I was putting out a pretty healthy presence on some of the forums, and a couple of the forums were basically video forums where people came to ask questions and get solutions. There was always an audio room. So I’d hang out in the audio room and people would ask questions that I knew the answers to quite easily. So I did that, and at some point I thought, “You know, I could probably do a seminar on this, a workshop.”
So I set one up at a video post-production house down in Washington on a Saturday, and we did five hours. I said, I don’t want any more than eight people here, and bring your audio gear because many of the solutions are device specific. I want to solve your problems, so bring your problems. Make a note: I was out, I did this, and I did that. Bring your problems. We’ll solve them and we’ll see what’s going on with your gear.
One of the women that came to that said afterwards, “We took copious notes. Do you have any of that written down somewhere?” I said, “No. It’s just kind of sloshing between my ears.” She said, “You should write it down.” So between February and November of that year I spent time writing a little book that’s only like four by six inches and 78 pages. I put a link to PayPal up on my website with a page describing the book, and I sell about 100 of those a year.
Last year B&H Photo Video, the guys in New York who do the online stuff or the catalog stuff, they reached out and said, “We’d like to carry your book.” So they sell about another 100 a year or so. I just sent a shipment off to them this morning. This afternoon I’ll answer my email and there’ll be a note from PayPal saying Charlie Brown in wherever bought my book.
I thought it was going to be local. I thought I’d use it as a way to brand local videographers who at first could not afford me on my day rate. My day rate for audio for an eight-hour day is 400 bucks. Five hundred for a ten hour day, and above that we really need to seriously talk. So I figured, all right, some of them can’t afford me. They bought these $3,000 to $4,000 cameras as have I, and they’re making personal films, documentaries, their first “movie” and they need help with audio. They can afford a $24.95 book.
And when I sell it to them it’s got all my info in there, so when they finally get around to having a project big enough and can afford a separate sound person, hopefully I will have branded them and they’ll call me. What happened was, I started to get responses from all around the globe. The only continent I have not sold a book on is Antarctica. I’ve learned that the penguins are pretty audio savvy. They don’t need me down there, so I think.
So the point for your readers is: what product can you manufacture easily to put this type of income together? I wrote it originally in PageMaker. I converted it to whatever the Adobe thing is now. I sent the file to the printers as a PDF. In the quantities that I order, it costs a little less than $6.00 a book and I sell it for $24.95. Now that’s not going to buy me that island in the Bahamas, but it’ll buy me a couple of bags of groceries every month.
JV: What else are you doing?
Ty: Well, I’m reviving my singer-songwriter career. Not that it was ever very big, but I had fun with folk music in coffee houses in the late ‘60s, and in July I have two dates. One to play instrumental music during a spiritual retreat day, and later in the month a three-set singer-songwriter solo event up in Pennsylvania in a nice little restaurant Friday night 6:00 to 9:00.
So I had to do the research. To make it quick, a friend plays there. I helped him load in and load out. I saw all the gear in his minivan and thought, “So I gotta load that out of the house into the car, out of the car into the club, out of the club into the car, and then back into the house.” It’s a couple of EONs and a mixer and all kinds of stuff, and I’m like, that’s painful. So I found a Fishman solo amp which is 35 pounds complete with stand with a bag with wheels that you can roll in the door. It has 220 watts of power and two inputs on it with lots of extra ins and outs and it sounds great. So I’ll be using that up there.
And as I kind of covered before, I started to get into shooting and editing. I’ve got lots of singer-songwriters, and they frequently need help. They want to get gigs. So they go to a venue and they say, “Book me.” And the owner goes, “I don’t know. What do you look like on stage? What do you sound like?”
Well, they can now send them to a link on YouTube or on Vimeo.com -- which is a slightly technically higher grade kind of YouTube place. They come into my recording studio, which I now have draped so that I can shoot video in, and I’ve got my lighting up. So it’s a pretty simple setup for a one- or two-person group to come in here and shoot and walk away with stuff that they can upload, or heck, I’ll upload it for them. I just did that this past week. Jerry Clark came in from Ireland and Neil Harp out of Annapolis. An old, dear friend of mine brought him in and they did two tunes, and they’re now sitting up on my YouTube site for people to look and listen to.
And this brings me to a point I want to make about radio stations: You’re no longer a radio station. You’re a media outlet, and unless you’re thinking about expanding your website for audio and video, I think you’re in trouble.
JV: Do you think the better radio stations and groups out there have figured that out by now? How to maximize and monetize video?
Ty: I haven’t been to all of their sites. You can tell how well they’re doing typically by how much advertising they have up on the page. I’m not a sales eagle. There are many more people who have much more business acumen than I do. But I don’t see a lot of video up on the sites. I don’t see as much as I think there could be.
And specifically to the production community and the readers of Radio and Production, my point is, get yourself some video editing software. Get a camera. You probably already have a camera. Start messing with it if you aren’t already, and be able to bring that to the table to enhance your position with the station you’re working at. Show them what you’ve got.
Probably what’s up there on the site now is music content from the artists that the station would normally play. What I’m saying is, “Commercials.” There are a lot of retailers in larger markets that cannot afford to buy television any more. They can’t even afford to buy radio schedules that make any sense for them. But if your rates are set up the right way on the website, you’ll be able to sell them.
There’s a guy here in Baltimore that’s just started one of those weekly flyers that comes to your house in the mail, selling those weekly specials for the whatever-county area. This guy’s got an e-version of it and I’m talking to him now. Right now all of the information is still shots and text, and I’m talking to him about video. I could go out and shoot a little something for him. I don’t want it to be a typical spot. I want it to be somebody’s face who is like a significant person within the company. We’ll figure out what we need them to say, but we just want to make the page move and make some noise a little bit. Make them say something. It would be more attractive.
JV: I think an important point to make is that you started out in radio production and worked a lot of different aspects of the radio business -- engineering, programming, on-air. But a lot of the skills that you’ve developed really kind of came from that initial set of production skills that you had. Would you agree?
Ty: Absolutely. As I look back, Murray Blum at WANN in Annapolis, who I had my very first meeting with before I ever got in radio, said, “Young man, you need to get your first phone.” And I said, “What the heck’s that?” That took 9 or 11 months of study to get. We don’t need it any more to be on the air, but I knew it gave me a backbone of technical knowledge. And I guess I actually have to go back a little bit before that. My mom bought me my first reel-to-reel tape recorder when I was nine years old. It was a little Japanese tape recorder that ran on batteries, and it was quarter-inch tape on inch-and-a-half reels. I recorded everything and anything I could think of, and that polarized me to this thing with sound.
I was a bit afraid to even get into the video stuff, but I said, “All right, I’ll get into it without fear by working with it in situations where I don’t have to answer to anybody.” I’ll figure it out first. And I continue to figure it out.
I know people who know Photoshop, and their fingers are a blur on the keyboard and things look amazing. There are people like that with Final Cut Pro, which is what I use. I’m not one of those people yet, but I can put it together. I can make it work. It’s just like that reverb box that everybody has; how many times have you been below the first or second level of parameters? You may have half-a-dozen pages with 500 tweaks, but normally you end up using somewhere around seven. So, the background helped me. My own personal curiosity helped me, and I think probably you’re not into audio production at a radio station unless you’ve got something like that going on.
JV: Do you think the skill set most production people have is enough to get them into the video side of things without too much of a learning curve scaring them away?
Ty: I don’t know. I think it’s different for each person. I think that the software developers have made it easier and easier. I’m working right now as a technical editor on a 40-minute documentary about the country of Turkey. The story basically is they’ve talked to four or five people from around the world who have ended up in Turkey and really, really like it. And, by the way, Midnight Express is a horrible example, a mis-example of life in Turkey.
This came to me about two months ago. They shot it. They had a guy working on it. He’s working in Final Cut Pro. Something got bogged down and the people who were behind it were acquaintances of mine and had worked with me in audio and they said, “What do you have over there?” I said, “I’ve got Final Cut Pro on a fast Mac.” They said, “Can we bring this in and can you edit it for us?” So the hard drive was shipped to me and we plugged it in. I saw what was on the timeline, and I talked to them about what they needed, and hey, I’ve got 20 paid hours over the last two weeks working with the artistic editor/producer, and he and I are old friends and it’s a great time. We can usually work for two to four hours at a shot putting this documentary together. Maybe three years ago I could not have done that. So anybody who’s at a radio station now, that’s why I say get into it now. Stick your face in it. Maybe get Final Cut Express, which is the low dollar entry version. I’m big on Final Cut Pro and not Avid, which used to be the leader. Friends of mine now who are in post production shops that are failing because the business is no longer there have told me that wherever they’re looking for new work, being able to run Final Cut Pro is a must. You have to be able to use Final Cut Pro.
JV: The most exposure to video in radio is going to be to Vegas, Audition, Pro Tools, that type thing. But eventually they should look at Final Cut Pro. Is that what you’re saying?
Ty: For now. I mean surely that pendulum will swing, and I don’t know who will be there then. I know people who still work in Adobe Premier and do their video in Adobe Premier, and apparently they’re making a living with that. So that’s another contender.
JV: You have another book out. Tell us about it.
Ty: It’s called The Audio Bootcamp Field Guide. This is for people who own cameras. It was written specifically for people who went out and bought anything from a $1,000 to a $4,000 camera to do their personal films and/or more commercial things and found that they could make pretty good pictures but the sound was horrible. It’s about audio for video, specifically location audio. I don’t cover post.
JV: You’ve also created a CD of soundscapes for mediation and healing. How’s that doing?
Ty: That’s moving well. This is a very interesting project. In October of 2007 I had a hemorrhagic brain stem stroke during a job on a weekend where there was a gal in from California who’s just extremely remarkable. Her name is Rosalyn Bruyere, and she’s a healer and lectures on the topic. The venue had hired me for the last three or four years to record when she comes into town, which is fun from the audio side. I’ve got a Countryman E6 on her ear. I got two room mikes up. They go into my Sound Device’s 442 mixer, and they split out and go into an HHB CD recorder and an RCA CD recorder, and I just hit the index buttons and keep rolling. The reason why we have two machines is in case one does burp and, you know, one will.
My background is electrical, and she graduated from college as an electrical engineer and then got into the more mystical side of things. Maybe because of that I kind of understood what she was talking about. I did some research and that led me to the concept of chakras, and these are energy centers in the body. There are seven: One at the base of the spine; one at the top of the head; every place you have a joint in your body is considerably defined as a chakra, and there are other places as well that are not on joints. The concept being that the seven main chakras from the base of the spine to the top of the head are assigned the colors from red to purple. I had always wondered as a kid what it would be like to compose in light frequencies but didn’t have the Internet to help me out to do the math, and this time I did. So I looked it up, and I’m looking at red, and the center of red is 435 terahertz, and of course infrared we don’t see. Red is the first visible color, and you go up from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to violet and then we’re into ultraviolet, and you can’t see that. So I looked at the spectrum… 435 terahertz for red, 750 terahertz or so for violet, and I went, “Oh, interesting. This is an octave in terahertz. I wonder if anybody saw this coming.” So I said, “All right. Let’s decimate it. Let’s take away the powers of ten. Let’s make it 435 to 750. Now we have 435, which is really close to 440, which is A. So the first chakra is A, and the seventh chakra is G. Isn’t that something?
Well that conflicted with much of the stuff that was already out there, which was that the first chakra was the key of C, and I said, “Well, why would this be?” I asked around to some of my other keyboard friends and they were like, “Well, you know, it’s the first key. You learn it first. It’s simple. It’s all white keys…” blah, blah, blah. And I went, yeah, right. But this is not about music. This is about sound frequencies.
So I proceeded to create a CD of seven sound pallets, if you will, soundscapes, each one of which had nothing but sounds in A. For example, the first chakra, A, had A and octaves and harmonics and sub-harmonics of the 440. Then I went all the way up through the scale through G. At the end of the project I had the seven cuts up on Pro Tools and I’m looking at it going, “What would it sound like if I played them all together? Would that be cacophonous? Would that be horrible?” I played it, and it was cosmic. I never expected this. I didn’t know what it would sound like, and when I heard it I thought, “Wow.” I’ve got samples of that up on the website. There’s a chakra balancing link on tyford.com that explains how I got there.
So I made the CD. I played it for different people because this is all theoretical stuff. I don’t have any science to back this up other than that which I’ve already said. So now I’ve got this CD, and I’m working through other people who are very sensitive and into these kinds of body energies, and the feedback that I’m getting is, “Yeah, you’re right on. Good for you.” So that’s starting to take off now. So in addition to the little book, I made a presentation to 40 people about three weeks ago and sold $200 worth of CDs that night.
JV: Congratulations! That’s great.
Ty: It was a surprise to me. I have learned that there are forces that we are not in control of, but we would probably do well to pay attention to. In January, I had begun video recording a documentary on kidney stones. I had serious kidney stone issues last year. I got curious about it during the process, and as it turns out the kidney stone museum is about 20 miles from my house. So I thought, “You know, I gotta go down and talk to the curator,” and I did that. Even within the last 12 years, the medicine has changed so drastically that it’s gotten so much better and so much less painful to deal with all of this stuff. So if you know somebody who has had kidney stone issues and starts talking to you about the severity of the pain during the whatever processes they are required to go through to get rid of them, it’s not like that anymore.
I woke up one morning in January and was searching for some sort of direction -- I do this and I suggest people do this in whatever way they wish; I find my bedroom ceiling works really well -- I asked the bedroom ceiling for help that morning, and inside of me I heard this voice say, “You have everything you need. What are you waiting for? Go do it.” It was a little spooky and it caused me to say, “What do you mean I have everything?”
I had all these tools. I had all these capabilities. I had all this knowledge. And from that came the chakra CD and the now-in-progress video documentary about kidney stones, which I may find some funding for.
January and February were very slow for me, and that allowed me to get this CD recorded, mastered, and find some local guys who were friends of mine who do print work to get the insert, the printed material for the CD up and out.
The guy I needed to talk to for the kidney stone museum thing wasn’t in town until May, but now I’ve got a two-hour conversation with him. I had to wait to talk to him to get the whole drift of the documentary, to find out what he knew so that I could then kind of formulate what direction that piece was going to go in.
So this is not unlike guys and gals at radio stations who have to go out and talk to a client to find out a little bit about the business so they can write copy and make a commercial. These are the same kind of skills. These skills are definitely transferrable.
JV: Any other irons in the fire?
Ty: There is one new thing, and I didn’t have anything to do with this either -- which goes to show you that when you start to open yourself up, stuff starts to happen. About a month ago I get a call from two casting women that I know here in town, and they sometimes work for Pat Moran, who’s the big-time casting gal here in town. They said, “Look, we have a friend who has come to us with a movie script and we think what we need is a way to sell this to somebody. What we need is what’s called a pre-vis.”
A pre-vis is like a trailer for a movie, except of course you’ve already shot the movie and you’re just taking pieces of it out to make basically a long commercial. The pre-vis concept is, people don’t seem to be able to read scripts and see anything anymore in this culture, so you’ve got to show them something.Anyway, Pat Moran’s comment was, “Get Ty Ford to do this.” This is what they tell me. And I’m like, “Really?” I don’t know that Pat’s ever seen anything I’ve ever shot but okay. Now I’m curious. How would you do this? Well, it’s a sex farce about a woman who goes through early menopause because she needs to have a hysterectomy. And then merriment ensues. It’s a nutty, crazy thing. The pre-vis can’t be much more than about three minutes. We got about 20 scenes in it.
I read the script. I pulled the scenes and called in a friend of mine who writes well. He’s a performer. He’s an AFTRA-SAG guy. He’s also a director and has produced. I thought, because it’s comedy, you need a good director for comedy. So he’s in. And just this week we are nailing down three shooters and a guy who does lighting that makes video look like film.
So we’re going to make this pre-vis and make a little money making it. We don’t know where it’s going to go after that, but it’s going to be probably four days of shooting, and then I’ll do the edit and then we’ll kick it around out there. So again, I’m being pulled over into this video field without any control whatsoever, and I’m just happy to be there.
JV: I think radio people that are just getting in are probably wanting to stay in radio, at least for a while. People that have been in for 20 plus years might be thinking, “I need to find something else,” What advice would you give to both these groups?
Ty: To the new hires at radio stations that are into production, and want to stay in radio, there are a couple of books. The one that comes to mind most rapidly is an old one. How To Win Friends and Influence People. Make this your Bible. I think early on, new hires are grappling with how to get up to speed, how to please everybody, and they can be intimidated, and there’s just stuff that they don’t know about how to communicate. How To Win Friends and Influence People is a masterful book in explaining human relations and where you need to be coming from in order to communicate effectively with people. There are probably other books that would be similar to it, but that would certainly be one of them.
And for that matter, this is good reading if you’ve been in the trenches for a long time, especially if you are suffering from the kicked dog syndrome. I’ve talked to guys and gals like this. They’ve been in it a while. They’re bitter. They hate it. And this oozes out of them and it poisons the work that they do with the people with whom they work.
You need to deal with ways of getting rid of that poison for your own health, thank you very much, but also for your career. Getting back to the chakra thing, the people who know this stuff will tell you that blocked chakras, chakras that aren’t working well or that have a block between them, are in evidence 18 to 24 months before a significant disease of that area occurs. So the blocked chakras are kind of like the canary in the coal mine. And I’m not saying that you have to get into that stuff; what I’m saying is if you’ve got the kicked dog syndrome and you’re working in production, or in any other part of radio for that matter, and you love it but there’s also a very big hate side of it because of how you may have been treated or how you took how you have been treated, then you need to address that because it’ll poison you and you will be spat out unless you can deal with those things.