Dave Foxx, Production Director, Z100, New York, NY
by Jerry Vigil
This month, the RAP Interview stops at the number one market and checks in with the Production Director at the country's top rated CHR station. With just under twenty years of radio under his belt, Dave Foxx finds himself at Z100; and, believe it or not, this is his first official title as Production Director.
Grab a cup of coffee and sit back for this one. Then crank up the monitors and check out Dave's work on this month's Cassette.
R.A.P.: Give us your background and tell us how you wound up at Z100.
Dave: I did my baby DJ work at a little station in Provo, Utah. At the time, it was KOVO. They've since changed their call letters three or four times. First Media bought the station while I was there. About a year and a half later I got the call to go to their flagship station in Washington, DC which was WPGC. I stayed there for nearly ten years and saw the good times and the bad times; I saw the 11.9, and I saw the 4 shares.
Then I went to B104 in Baltimore. Most of this time I was doing middays, although I did do a two year stretch at WPGC in the mornings. I worked at B104 for six months. Steve Kingston was the PD at the time. Then the rumors started in R&R, and I went into him and said, "Please, please, please." He said, "Just practice saying Z100." Sure enough, about six weeks later, he came up to Z100 and gave me a call, and I was here as Production Director.
R.A.P.: Had you been doing much production at WPGC?
Dave: Yes. At WPGC I was the de facto Production Director. They didn't really have a Production Director, and, as midday guy, as very often happens, I did the work. So I ended up doing a lot of the production at WPGC.
I wasn't Production Director at B104 either. I was doing middays, and the bulk of the production was being done by another fellow. But, when it came to promos and stuff like that, I would produce them. That was one of the reasons Steve wanted to hire me, because he knew I could do the promos.
R.A.P.: Would you say Steve hired you for your style of production as it was at B104, or has he molded your work into something a little different for Z100?
Dave: I'd say he wanted my style. He knew what he wanted, and that's why he called me. I worked for Steve originally at WPGC. He was there for about a year before he left to go to B94 in Pittsburgh. That's how I first met Steve, but that was back in '79. I also did promos for him while he was at B94, not all the time but on special occasions. So he knew I had the stuff when he called me up and wanted me to come to New York.
One interesting thing is that he already had a Production Director at Z100 in J.R. Nelson. Steve divided up what J.R. and I were doing. When I first came up here, J.R. was doing the promos, sweepers, and station production; and I was doing all the commercial work. It was about a year and a half later when J.R. decided to leave, and I moved into J.R.'s seat. That was about a year and a half ago.
R.A.P.: Do you have any help?
Dave: Yes. I've got an assistant, my assistant has an assistant, and then we also have another producer at the station who works exclusively with the morning show. As Production Director, I oversee all of this; but we have a pretty good crew, and they pretty much work on their own.
My assistant takes care of a lot of the commercial work - dubs, tags, donuts, and that kind of thing. I'll do the heavy duty commercial work where the spots are being totally produced in house. Of course, I also work on the promos and sweepers and the parody songs for the Morning Zoo. They keep me hoppin' -- like a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest.
R.A.P.: Parody songs? Are you a musician?
Dave: Yes. I studied piano extensively, formally for nine years. I got into jazz piano when I was in high school, and then I studied a lot of theory in college. I now play mostly for pleasure, except when I'm at work, of course. I do a lot of parody work at the station.
R.A.P.: What gear do you have in the studio you work out of?
Dave: I've got a Roland D-50 and a D-110. Together, they give me nine-voice polyphony, and I don't have to sit there layering things. I can actually do it on the sequencer and get most of the track done in one shot. Everything's on MIDI. I've got a couple of samplers, both Rolands. I've also got the Yamaha SPX-90. It's been interesting to read in the last few issues of Radio And Production all the interest in the SPX-90. I guess more and more people are discovering how versatile it is. I also have an Eventide H3000, which I love. But, even though it can do most of the things the SPX-90 can do, there are some things the SPX-90 can do better. I've noticed the SPX-90 is a little smoother. You don't hear as much clock noise in it. So I get a better reverb out of it.
Our multi-track is analog 8-track. We're not tapeless, but that's coming. We test drive so much equipment. I bet we're number one on the list, or in the top five anyway, for manufacturers to have us test drive equipment. They've all been through here. We had New England Digital in here for a couple of weeks with the PostPro. I've had my hands on the AKG DSE-7000 and the ProDisk 464. It all comes wandering through eventually. So, as far as my equipment goes, it really depends upon what week it is. It changes from one week to the next.
R.A.P.: Does it make it difficult to do your job with all these new machines coming into your studio regularly?
Dave: No, not at all. It was interesting when we had New England Digital come in. I took out my 8-track. It's an old MCI JH110 model that works great, but I just took it out and put the New England unit in its place. I figured that way it would force me to learn how to use it quickly. Before the first day was out I produced a promo on it.
R.A.P.: What were your thoughts on the DSE-7000?
Dave: A great machine. It's very radio oriented which I really like. I think if you're looking for really heavy duty production, it's probably not the best system out there, but for the price, it's hard to beat. It's something that any disc jockey can walk up to and learn in just a few minutes because it's got all the familiar buttons on it like fast-forward and rewind. On the other hand, the New England is all icon driven on a computer screen, and some disc jockeys are still computer shy. But, I like the AKG. It's got a good sound to it and a good feel to it. The one thing I wish is that it were direct-to-disk rather than being RAM based. The direct-do-disk systems, I find, are a lot more flexible. For example, when editing with direct-to-disk, it's easier to change your mind later on down the road. With the AKG, you can change your mind if you haven't gone too far. But once you've gone two or three steps down the road, then you're done, and you've got to go back and start from scratch.
I have to laugh when people say they want to get a digital system because it sounds better or has a better signal-to-noise ratio. Unless you're doing a lot of bouncing around of your tracks, it doesn't make any difference because the best FM transmitter in the world only has about a 65 dB signal-to-noise ratio. Anything below that is lost in the mud anyway. The main reason for having a tapeless system would be for editing.
R.A.P.: The ProDisk 464 is a monster machine, isn't it?
Dave: Yes. In fact, when we do go tapeless, and that's in the not too distant future, I think that's going to be our system. For the price, it by far and away outstrips everybody else. It comes the closest to New England Digital for the number of things it can do, the amount of storage it has, and the capabilities it has; and still, it's a lot easier to reach than the $140,000 plus that the New England goes for. You can get into a basic ProDisk system for about $35,000. I think that's for the 4-track system. Then you add on, in increments of four, up to sixty-four tracks. I'm not sure about the costs. My Chief Engineer keeps track of the money. I just say, "Yea, I like this one." He likes the price, so we're in agreement on that one.
R.A.P.: How many production rooms are there at Z100?
Dave: We have three production rooms. One is dedicated exclusively to the morning show from five a.m. until about three p.m.. Then from three p.m. until about eight p.m. at night it's in use for commercial dubs, tags, and stuff like that.
We have another studio I guess we'd have to call our "money" studio. This is where most of the commercial work happens. This is also where we pull down satellite feeds. Also, our offices are separate from our studios, and very often tapes will come from agencies or other outside sources to our offices instead of our studios. So, we have a microwave hookup, and we transfer those tapes to our studios via microwave into this second studio. A lot of other things happen in this studio as well. We produce a show that's heard on a station in Tokyo, Japan in this studio. We do a lot of our research tapes in there. Some promo production happens in there on a daily basis. We actually have an hourly promo that changes every hour. It's our "Free Music Sample" promo. We'll do fifteen to twenty of these every day in this studio.
R.A.P.: Are these other two studios multi-track also?
Dave: The "money" studio is multi-track; it's 4-track. The Zoo studio is not, much to our Zoo producer's chagrin. He ends up spending a lot of time in other studios trying to get multi-track work done. But the main purpose of the Zoo studio is really to pull clips from television and do the daily grind like putting drops in jingles and dubbing from comedy sources like the American Comedy Network. That's all basically 2-track work anyway.
R.A.P.: Tell us more about this "Free Music Sample" promo.
Dave: We have two stopsets every hour -- one at :20 and one at :35. Going into that :35 set we'll play a promo saying, "Coming up, another non-stop music sweep including...," and then we'll play three artists. We'll play the hooks from the songs, and the announcer, Mitch Craig, will announce the artist and title of the song. The whole thing runs about twenty or twenty-five seconds, and this goes on every day.
R.A.P.: You must keep Mitch Craig pretty busy with the hourly promos.
Dave: Actually, most of it we keep in stock. We had him do all of the artists we thought we'd be using over the next few months, and then, on a weekly basis, we have him do the work for any new artists that we put in. Mitch also does most of our promos. Ernie Anderson does most of our sweepers. We also use Vic Carolli a lot. He's the voice of MTV. We use him to do promos particularly for the evening. For instance, we're giving away a concert by Slaughter for a school spirit contest, and we had Vic do all the voice-over work for that. We co-sponsored the MTV premier of Madonna's movie in New York, and because it was co-sponsored with MTV we got Victor involved in that. We also use Joe Kelly on some sweepers. So Mitch doesn't carry all of it.
R.A.P.: That's quite an impressive array of voices to work with!
Dave: Well, it keeps the station sounding very fresh. One of the things I know Steve Kingston worries about is not sounding the same all the time, not being entirely predictable.
R.A.P.: How much of what you're doing is promo production?
Dave: That's what I spend probably about fifty percent of my time doing. Our promos at Z100, as I've already described with the Free Sample promos, are very high maintenance. For instance, last Thursday, we gave away twenty thousand dollars on the air in the morning. To support that, we had ten winner's promos all based on that one winner. The basic track of the promo is the same, but we changed different lines in it and maybe changed the effects here and there.
R.A.P.: What is your voice used for?
Dave: When a spot is an in-house production I'll do that; ninety-nine percent of the time I'm the voice. Occasionally we'll need a female voice or it's a dialogue and somebody else will be involved. I also do a few things for the Zoo and end up on there quite a bit.
I also do promos for other radio stations as well. I've been doing promos for KDWB for quite a while. I do a lot of European stations. I'm on RTL in Luxembourg, and I've got a whole chain of stations in the south of England that I do. I get to stretch the vocal chords from time to time.
R.A.P.: It sounds like your free-lance work is doing well.
Dave: Yea, it's working well for me. I keep it mainly in the area of promos and sweepers, but I do some commercial work. I do go around and visit the big houses from time to time. It's been a while since I've done a national spot, but every once in a while my voice will show up on one. I did one for Coke a while back. I do a lot of industrial work as well.
R.A.P.: What's the name of your free-lance company?
Dave: Foxx On The Run Productions out of Montclair, New Jersey.
R.A.P.: Do you have a studio?
Dave: No. Part of my deal with Z100 is as long as it doesn't put any kind of burden on the radio station, I generally have free use of the studios there.
R.A.P.: How long has Foxx On The Run Productions been up and running?
Dave: Probably about two and a half years now. It's kind of a low profile company, if you will. We haven't really gone out to solicit work other than my going into big houses to solicit commercial work. The promo work that I do for radio stations has generally come by word of mouth.
R.A.P.: One would expect that the Production Director's job at the number one CHR station is the country is something pretty special. Is it?
Dave: It's very special. I'll tell you a quick story. When I was in elementary school, and I remember this very clearly, I read a story about a small Swiss village in which the kids would run out to play in the morning, like they do everywhere else in the world, and they'd run past this woodcarver's shop. As they'd run past, he'd be there carving clocks or ducks or whatever. The kids would pass by again as they'd come in for lunch and he was still carving. They'd go back out in the afternoon, and he was still carving. They'd come back late at night; he was still sitting there carving. One of the kids went to him and said, "Why do you work so much?" The man had this puzzled look on his face and said, "What do you mean, 'work'?" That's when I decided I wanted to do something that I really loved doing. Every morning, I get up, I go into what has to be the greatest radio station in the world, I sit in a little padded room with all of my toys and play all day; and every two weeks they give me money! I think that's great!
The best thing about Z100 though is the people. It's a fabulous, fabulous atmosphere. Everybody there is a joy to work with. Everybody is everybody's best friend. We have a softball team, and this is the first radio station I've ever even heard of where EVERYBODY at the station shows up for softball games. The Christmas party is jammed every year. It's a great atmosphere to work in.
R.A.P.: It sounds like the dream station everybody else has trouble finding.
Dave: I think it is. I really do. When I first came up to New York, somebody asked me, with a look of disdain on their face, "What do you want to go to New York for? What in the world can you do AFTER New York?" I looked at them and said, "Anything I want to." I'm finding that that's mostly true, but I don't want to go anywhere else. I love it here. I really do. I'm not exactly crazy about some aspects of living in New York. The crime is high. There's garbage and there's homeless. It's got all the big city problems, but when you get into your radio environment, there's no place better.
R.A.P.: When producing a spot or promo, what are some things you listen for or try to do to make it a good spot or promo?
Dave: Mainly, I try to make every spot or promo a complete symphony. There is a place in any musical arrangement for each instrument, and it has to be at just a certain place and just a certain time in order to make the symphony work. For instance, if it's a heavy duty spot, it has got to be just the right piece of music. You've got to have just the right sound effects to go with it, the right special effects if you're going to use any of what I call zings, zaps or zoodads. And the voice has to be exactly right for it as well. One of the hardest things for me to listen to is a spot that's produced very well but has the wrong voice, or the wrong piece of music, or the wrong sound effect. It makes me cringe because I know from experience that it can be done right.
Not to get to far away from your original question, but I think one of my biggest pet peeves is hearing Program Directors, General Managers, Production Directors, and sometimes even salespeople say that commercials are an automatic tune-out. That is wrong, wrong, wrong because as soon as you take that attitude, I guarantee you it's going to be true. For eight minutes of every hour on our air, I'm in charge of the radio station -- that's commercially speaking. That doesn't count all the music I've carted, and all the promos and sweepers. For those eight minutes, that's my gig. I'm on twenty-four hours a day, every hour for at least eight minutes. I am not willing to surrender my audience to the competition simply because I'm doing "a commercial." Commercials can be as fun, as entertaining, as exciting as any of the rest of the programming on the radio station if you'll think of them in those terms.
Obviously, every radio station in every market, large and small, has to put up with things like furniture outlets that have some "hayseed" reading the spot, and if you get it from the agency, what do you do with those? You've got to play them, but you bury them in the set. Put them as far towards the back of the set as you can, and put your good stuff first. Drag your audience through the first couple of minutes of the stopset, and they'll hang out. They're not going to go anywhere because they know they're that much closer [to the end of the set.] They instinctively know that it's almost over. They're that much closer to their favorite song or that really funny bit that the DJ's going to do. If you really pay attention to the details when you're doing commercials, then the whole thing becomes a series of symphonies that nobody wants to go away from. They want to stay, and ultimately, your cume goes through the roof. I really feel that commercials can be a big help to a radio station if they're handled the right way.
R.A.P.: It's interesting to note that you, being a musician, use the symphony analogy. When you look at producing a spot or promo with that point of view, it almost becomes easier to see how everything should fit together.
Dave: Absolutely. In fact, one thing I would recommend to any Production Director "wanna-be" is take piano lessons. You don't have to take them for the rest of your life. You don't have to take them for the whole year, but take them for six months and get a basic understanding of music -- of melody, counterpoint, tempo, and rhythm. You'd be amazed at how often that becomes a really important building block in a commercial or promo, or just in the overall feel of your job. It's something I've recommended to any number of people.
I've met a lot of people in this business who have had no musical training. They like music. They've listened to it all their life, but they don't really understand it.
I'll never forget.... Don Geronimo, who is doing mornings at WAVA, was working at WPGC when I was there. He was working on an edit with Bruce Kelly, who is out in Phoenix now. The two of them had been working on an edit of a song for thirty minutes, and they could not get it to sound right. Neither one of them had had any musical training. This is not to say they're not good jocks. They are. They're excellent. But I walked in and they said, "Foxx! Help! We can't make this work!" I sat down, listened to what they had done, and fixed it. It took me a minute and a half, and it was done. They both sat there and looked at me like, "How did you know?" It's because I understand music. I understand that the four-beat has to match the four-beat. You can't jump it around. The bass line has to match up. You've got to do things to make the edit work. If you don't, it's going to sound jumpy. It's going to sound like a bad edit.
R.A.P.: Do you write commercials and promos?
Dave: Actually, no. As far as promos go, I have to give a lot of credit to Steve Kingston. He's a terrific writer. He'll run into writer's block from time to time, and he'll solicit the aid of others; but he knows a good phrase when he hears it, and he writes 99.9% of all the promos that go on the air.
When it comes to commercials, I'd say that about thirty percent of the time I end up re-writing what other people have done. Not because what they have done is particularly bad, but I can see ways that I can make it a little bit better. At Z100, the sales staff basically writes their own spots. There are a couple of the salespeople who will come to me and say, "I'm stuck. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to do this." I'll give them some pointers, send them on their way, and they'll come back with a pretty decent little spot.
R.A.P.: As far as the spots you do write, do you have much creative freedom?
Dave: Loew's Theatres is opening a new complex with seven theatres in one building. They're having a grand opening next week, and I got the order. [The copy] was really short. It was supposed to be a sixty second commercial. So I got really creative with the music. I used music from Batman and a couple of other film scores. I used these big crashing crescendos, tension where it was needed, and a cute little waltz from Batman towards the end. The overall effect of the spot was like it was a little movie for sixty seconds. So I find ways to be creative, even when I'm not always allowed to be. I get a fair amount of freedom, enough to keep me satisfied anyway.
R.A.P.: What about the salespeople that don't "get stuck" writing copy? Are they writing some creative copy?
Dave: Some of them are writing very creative spots, some of them too creative. Some of them ask me to do things I can't do. "You can't do that in radio. I'm sorry." Or they'll have this big idea that has fifty people in it, and I don't have fifty people around here. Some of their spots are very creative, but a lot of it is pretty much straight sell. With the volume of work we do here, a lot of times I can't always fix that. That makes me sad because I'd like to be able to make sure that every commercial is just so. But sometimes you just have to do the work and get on with the next one.
R.A.P.: A lot of people might be surprised to find that Z100 doesn't have a copywriter. Why isn't there one?
Dave: I guess it's because at Z100, their philosophy is that everybody involved in the process should be able to do every part of the process. They may specialize in one area, but they should know how to do the rest. In other words, the salesperson might specialize in actually selling the client on buying time. I specialize in putting it all together, but any one person in the chain should at least have an understanding of what the next person in the chain does, if not be able to actually do it. They have rather high expectations of the staff at Z100.
Lonnie Gronek, our Sales Manager, requires his salespeople to be able to fully service the client as well as be able to sell them. That's one of the things we pride ourselves on. We are a full-service station. We do commercials that are of a national quality. In fact, a few times we did commercials that ended up going national from our studios. This happens on a regional basis a lot.
Basically, we don't take anybody on as a salesperson. All of our salespeople, for the most part, have either sales experience or they've worked as a buyer of radio time. So they really understand the process. They all have an understanding of what it takes to put a commercial together, the time involved and the creativity needed in order to do the job.
R.A.P.: Are you suggesting that your salespeople also need to be copywriters before they come on board?
Dave: For the most part, yes. If they are particularly strong in another area, he might take them on without the copywriting skills. I know in one case he took on a person who had been a buyer at a couple of the big houses in New York for a number of years. She didn't really know how to write copy, but she was bright enough that she figured it out quickly.
R.A.P.: There's a lot to be said for salespeople writing their own copy. It gets them really involved with the client's advertising, and they'll sit at home and pay a lot of attention to that copy if they want the client to get some good results.
Dave: Exactly. And they're also the one person who is closest to the client. They're not having to explain things to somebody else to have that person sit down and write the commercial. I wouldn't be against having a copywriter at the radio station, but the way things are set up right now, I don't know if we really need one.
R.A.P.: Well, we can't get past this interview without talking about Scott Shannon and Mojo Radio a little bit. What has Steve Kingston done since the Mojos moved in?
Dave: The only thing we've really done is tighten up a little bit. We've made the promos a little leaner. We're not quite as self-indulgent as we might have been. Where we used to take forty-five seconds to do a promo, we're now doing it in twenty-five or thirty seconds. We're getting a little more direct and to the point. It's the way Steve has always operated. I mean, we didn't like to fool around in our promos or anything like that, but we don't spend as much time sampling, for instance. We keep it down to one sample, maybe two during the promo, and only for emphasis. Whereas before, we'd do it for fun and because it sounded neat. It's more of a take care of business first attitude, and we let the jock on the air have fun with it.
We've streamlined the station a little bit, and we're all more conscious of the fact that we have some competition now. For years, WPLJ was a doormat. It was through no fault of their own. They had some good people working there from time to time. I happen to think Larry Burger was a fine Program Director. Everybody who worked for him really liked him, but he never could make a dent in what we were doing. Gary Bryan we obviously liked because now he's doing mornings at Z100. But again, he could not make a dent in what we were doing [when he was at WPLJ]. I think Scott is going to find the same problem.
Frankly, we don't view WPLJ as competition at this point in anything other than a professional sense. We're not worried so much about our audience going over there, and it's for one simple reason. As good as Gary Bryan was as a Program Director and morning man at WPLJ, when you have a radio station that is as dominant in the market as we have been for almost eight years now, the only reason someone is going to go away to WPLJ is if they have a reason to -- if we give them a reason to, if we screw up, if we don't play their songs or we play the same songs to much. We have to screw up. It's basically out of their control, and until we are willing to relinquish our hold on the audience, they're not going to have a reason to go across the street.
I thought when Scott came in that there probably would be quite a large number of people who would sample the station to see what it was like, and, unfortunately for him, I don't think they found anything worth switching to. Scott died in L.A.. I don't believe in reincarnation, and that's kind of where all of our heads are right now. In fact, we don't really view Scott as our toughest competition. Our competition is with Hot 97 for the bulk of the day. In morning drive, our competition is Howard Stern.
We try not to react. We just do our own job the best way we know how. One of the reasons Steve and I work so well together is because we've been doing it since 1979 and we understand each other. We do the best job we know how, and if we win, we win. If we don't, we won't. But, I'm of the opinion, albeit a prejudiced one, that we're going to win and do it quite nicely.
R.A.P.: Of all the effects used in production, two of the most basic, EQ and compression, are often the most misused. How do you use these effects on your voice and in production?
Dave: It depends on what I'm doing. If it's a commercial, I don't use a lot of compression, just enough to help me get more control. I don't want to flatten out the VU meters on anything I do, but when it comes to a promo, I'll use a lot more compression because I want to pull up all of my effects, my music, and all the other fancy do-dads that I'm doing. I almost have to, to ensure that everybody's going to hear all the words.
I think the problem most producers run into is that they forget that compression and equalization are tools to be used, and they very often end up getting used by their tools. They go in with the idea that they've got to compress this and equalize that, but you've got to make it sound good too. You can't just go in and automatically compress everything and equalize everything to a point where it's a real strain to listen to.
On the other hand, I'm not a big believer in that kind of listener "ear strain." Six or seven years ago that got to be a real popular theory, and a lot of radio stations started pulling their compression and on-air processing back because they felt it was too hard to listen to for any length of time. I think the thing that has washed out of that whole era is that most people still listened to the radio about the same amount of time as they did before. So I don't think that's a major concern. It's a matter of using the compression and EQ when it's called for as opposed to compressing and EQ-ing everything exactly the same way.
I don't hear this problem with Rick Allen [Hot 97]. Rick Allen's a great producer, by the way. I really like his work. He tends to do a lot of cookie cutting sometimes, but maybe that's because he has all that neat equipment. I mean, he'll use a lot of the same effects from one promo to the next. But when I'm in another market and I hear a promo or a sweeper, the one thing that always strikes me is that they've put so much compression and equalization into it -- they've pushed up the high end and maybe a little on the bottom end -- that they've lost the middle ground, and it's not something that's pleasant to listen to. I think that sends a very subtle message they may not want to be sending if they realized they were sending it.
While you want the promo to stand out from everything else you're doing -- that is the purpose of doing a little more compression and a little more EQ work on it as I do - you don't want to go too far because it makes it stick out like a sore thumb. It makes the rest of your commercials sound flat and lifeless. It makes the rest of the station sound that way. You've got a disc jockey who is live and should sound as alive as he can, and he'll play a sweeper that is just so brilliant and so bright and so piercing that you're sending mixed messages. There's no sense of continuity at the radio station.
I think the problem most people have with it is that they do go overboard. What I've found to be very helpful is instead of compressing the hell out of something the first time around, or even the last time around, I'll compress it two or three times on different passes. For instance, when I get a voice track from Mitch Craig, I'll compress it as I load it onto my multi-track. Then I'll bounce all the tracks up to one track so I've got one continuous vocal track, but I'll do that flat. Then I'll compress it again. Each time it's just a little bit -- 5, maybe 7.5 dB. Not a ton, just enough to know that it's there. Then I'll compress it as it comes off the 8-track onto my master tape when I'm doing my mixdown with all my other goodies. And then, if the promo warrants it, I'll add just a touch more to the overall production as it goes on to a cart to go on the air.
Compression is not cumulative, so to speak. In other words, if you compress at 5 dB each time, after three times it doesn't end up at 15 dB. It just nudges it up a little bit more, flattens it out a little bit, and gives it a stronger impact.
R.A.P.: When you are laying your voice down for a commercial, let's say, do you record it flat or do you add EQ at that point?
Dave: I'll keep it flat to begin with when I'm laying down the original track to multi-track because I find that it's easier for me to hear what I'm doing to it on speakers rather than headphones. Then I might boost it a little bit around 125 Hz and again around 3.5 or 4 kHz.
As far as compression goes, I don't like to put a lot of it on my voice, but every voice is different. Some voices work better with it, and some don't. I don't put more than 5 or 6 dB on my particular voice.
R.A.P.: What are you using for production libraries?
Dave: I've got Firstcom's Maximum Impact which I like a lot, although with the amount of production we do, it gets kind of thin sometimes. I don't really have any other libraries that I can put a handle on and say, "This is what I'm using." I do the time honored tradition of scouting through CD's and records trying to find tracks that I like. I also produce a lot of my own. I've got a library of probably eighty or ninety tunes that I've put down on tape at one time or another. When I can't find anything in Maximum Impact, when I can't find anything on a CD or album, I'll just pull something out that I've produced before because I know that stuff. I don't have to search through it. I know what I've got.
In terms of [promo material].... It's one of the ironies of life. I bought Chainsaw last year when it first came out. Of course, M.J. Kelli [co-producer of the library] was then working at Pirate Radio with Scott Shannon. Now he's working at WPLJ with Scott Shannon and hating it because he can't use his own material. I hold the license for New York. I like Chainsaw a lot, and I like the effects on Maximum Impact as well. Those are basically the only library effects that I use. Everything else is home grown. In fact, I'm hoping to put out my own CD in about three months. I get calls from time to time from people saying, "I heard a great promo. You had the neatest effect on there. Where did it come from?" Most of the time, it's something I grew at the station. So I've been saving that stuff, and I'm going to put together a CD. It's not that I want to make a ton of money on it or anything. The main thing is that I've gotten so much from this business that sometimes I feel I need to give it back. Though I'm sure nobody is going to accuse me of being totally humanistic in my efforts to sell these effects, it is a motivator. It is part of it.
R.A.P.: How about another tip for our readers before we bring this to a close?
Dave: Well, here's a technical tip that I thought would be common sense, but I've been running into more and more people in this business who have never thought of it before. I'm constantly amazed when watching someone cart something up. They'll roll their tape, and when the mark rolls around they'll hit the start button. I think to myself, "How accurate can that be?" I went and had our engineer spend about thirteen dollars in parts and put a remote switch on each one of my pieces of gear. I turn the remote switches on and then hit a master switch that starts all the machines simultaneously. Then I've gone through and made marks on my tape decks. I back the tape up exactly the same amount every time, so I know that every cart at my radio station has a 250 millisecond delay. I found that 250 is good for us. We're using ITC cart decks, and 250 works perfect. It never burps at the end, it's always tight, and it's consistent, I mean dead bang consistent. So when the jock hits the button, he knows exactly how long it's going to take before the sound comes on. I've worked in some stations where different people cart things up, and it's all over the place. One cart might have a half second delay and the next one a full second. Others are instantaneous.
The biggest tip I could offer is what we talked about earlier. Don't look at commercials as being "commercials." They're part of your programming, folks. That's eight minutes of time every hour that belongs to your clients, but it's still your radio station. You've got to produce the commercials like they are a part of your radio station. Make them fit in. And if you get a hayseed reading furniture items and price/item stuff on the spot, where you can get away with it, add some music. If you can make it a little faster or a little tighter, don't be afraid to edit up a spot. Don't take any words out, but take out some obvious gaps and make it smoother. Do what you can to improve their spot so that your station sound is always a hundred percent. When you do that, your cume is gonna go up, and your share will go up. Things really start to happen when you start doing things like that and take that kind of care with each and every commercial.
Production is the canvas, the paint, the frame that the radio station exists on. The DJ's will come along and dabble in the corner with the paint, and maybe the jingles on your station are the signature at the bottom corner. If you're a Production Director, you should realize that your job description should say that you are in charge of everything that goes on the air that is not live. When you realize that, you realize that ninety-eight percent of what's going on the air is yours. Granted, you're not picking the music, but you're making sure the technical aspects of the carted songs are perfect. You're producing the sweepers. You're producing the promos, the commercials, everything. Even the bits. Hey, that's a heavy job responsibility, and you've got to take it very seriously on every level. The commercial level is the one I think gets shorted the most.
R.A.P.: Thanks for your time for a great interview and thanks for the insight into great production and Z100.
Dave: I love your publication and I particularly enjoy The Cassette. In fact, on the last Cassette I heard a bit that I really liked, and we called Mark Mitchell down in Norfolk and asked him if we could just rip it off. He said, "Yea, that's what it's there for." It's a great bit. It's the one about the Joy of Sax. It was produced very well and we wanted to embellish it a little bit. We came up with a few more "sax" things that we wanted to include. Being in New York, you've got to include Saks Fifth Avenue. We're still in the process of doing it. We haven't produced it yet.
R.A.P.: Well, when you do, we want it for The Cassette!