• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Grease Pencils and Razor Blades

T

Tynosaur

On another blog this morning, contributor Radiosaur mentioned a subject near and dear to my heart...editing. I always loved splicing audio tape to get an effect or correction I wanted in a "piece of audio"(I almost said audio file!) I always thought of myself as the best cutter I ever ran across and offer one memory for an example.

Back about 1971, the legendary advertising ace, Dan Conaway, started his areer with the Brick Muller, Swearingen and Dorrity agency in Memphis. Dan was fresh out of UT-Knoxville and a-boil with ideas and drive. He and I worked on many different campaigns together in those years - best known was his McDonald's "2 All Beef Patties, Special Sauce, etc." jingle that went national. The time I'm thinking of was a session in the basement of the Peabody at WREC for Keystone Industries hair product, Long Aid K-7. Dan showed up with a half-hour reel of chat between New York models about the product. We were to produce a series of commercials from this raw material.

We built quite a few spots out of that rambling and on one memorable :60 spot, with Dan directing, I made 30 razor edits. To our ear, it was seamless and worked fine. I was working at 7 1/2ips because the old Ampex I had in the production studio was iffy at 15. It was quite a sight to watch that tape roll across that playback head with all those splices - one every two seconds or less!

That's my champeen editing memory. Years later with a computer screen and SAW (Sound Audio Workshop - our first digital editor at WREC/WEGR) or Dalet or CoolEdit and much later with NexGen, such a feat became small potatoes. It's a closed chapter in audio production now, but those of us who knew how to use a razor and a grease pencil consider ourselves worthy, but unsung heroes of radio. And rightly so!
 
One thing I remember from production back in the old days was how difficult it was to put voices or sfx on separate tracks of a stereo recorder when the record head was about an inch or so ahead of the playback head (or the other way around) This was the case with an old (new at the time) TEAC (I think() reel to reel at the station where I broke into the biz.
 
Yeah, taking the ninth caller (who usually had an iffy grasp of the English language at best) and then editing the phone calll down to something useable, all during a 3 minute song was always rather exciting, that's for sure. When you got it all pieced together and played it back as the song was fading out.......ahhhhhh, that was just fun. But then again, I'm also the kinda guy that misses slinging carts and actually 'running' a board. I remember that being a pretty impressive compliment too. When someone would pop their head in to the studio and say 'Man, you sure do run a tight board. The station sounds great'.

The Hal 9000 has it's upside on holidays and for vacations, but I do have a certain hankerin for the 'good ol' days'. *sniff*

JPS
 
Matter of fact....the more I think about it, I may have to see if Citadel Memphis would be interested in selling me that old Otari MX 5050! he he he
 
I guess all us "Old Schoolers" consider ourselves a whiz with the old razor blade and grease pencil. I know I do. I loved the one in the C.R. that I used to edit phone calls. It can be difficult enough to digitally edit calls during a request show and do it in a timely manner...but it was a freakin' HOOT trying to mark cut and tape during a good old 2.5 to 3 minute "Pop" tune.

I remember my amazement when I realized that not only could I do it better digitally, but so much faster with it being even tighter. I suppose I would have felt the same way had I been around when the combustion engine took over.

I also recall trying to master the "segues" between songs (back when a liner wasn't necessary between EACH song) with those old turntables 3 feet wide with 33,45, and even 78 RPM on it. Do you recall the "gearshifts" to switch between? And what about those big tone arms balanced so carefully that if you sneezed in the wrong direction it'd come off the record.

Remember "slip-cues?"

And..."CUE BURN". God...How long has it been since you heard that at the front of a song? And..patch chords to play the preacher in the production room right after the preacher in the control room?

hahahahha! Those were the days....................... :D
 
I produced a syndicated beautiful music format that required every pop and tick from the vinyl be edited out without being noticed. The worst was French horns and pianos. Almost impossible to get a clean edit. I developed some really radical "tongue and groove" type cuts that solved some pretty tough problems. Really tough tracks could have several hundred edits. It was all mastered at 15ips which helped a bit.
 
You don't have to be "Old school" to have done all of this. You have to have spent some time in a small market! My first radio gig, we still had equipment from the 50's, 60's and 70's. I ran my first shows on the Harris "Stereo 80" board, with KNOBS!!!! Half the pots didn't have a functioning cue, Always interesting. We ran turntables on the AM and 1 in the FM side until 1999, when the old owner finally sold the station, and it was subsequently automated. Production was done on MONO reels, and mono cart until 1999! The motor in the Reel to Reel always was 1 foot in the grave, and in all of our spots, you could hear it. It was loud enough to be heard over the 1950's mic that was still the source mic in production at the time. Ah, good times.

I can tell you, there are few who are better than Meepster, on reels, especially on live "call in" shows. Pam Yates, back in the day, was quick on the "Love Songs" show on WRVR, when a working reel was our "phoner" recorder. Bill Bannister was pretty quick on "Solid Gold Sundays' with that same reel. I remember when Minidisc was a "Revolution"! SAW, and Cool Edit were hard to comprehend at first. Ah, good times.... Now back to my rockin' chair, to tell kids to get off my lawn... CFKane
 
On the engineering side, back in the day…when you hit the “Plate ON” switch on any decent sized transmitter, you got a nice loud “kerchunk” and all the building lights dimmed a bit. If you got a double kerchunk and a loud bang, that meant an overload. Nowadays, you just flip the little plastic switch, the green lights come on and the needles (or the digital readout) reads something other than zero. Somehow it’s a lot less exciting.
 
AND...I remember on our Fm side...there were TWO microphones for STEREO sound! hahahahahahaha!!!
The old board had two switches over the mic "pot", and you had to flip them BOTH before you talked, or it would only come from one side. And, 'Saur...I DO recall the "thunk" sound. I recall having to have a license (was it THIRD class radio engineer?) before you could sign transmitter logs and be left alone in the station.
I had to actually take a test for my first one, I think.

The days when you'd go into production with 15 spots to cut, and 15 just erased 40 second carts. You'd have 30 minutes to get 'em done ('cause that's all they'd pay you for) before your board shift...so you'd grab a Tanner LP, and hit the 30 second cuts and record 'em straight to cart. Gutsy production, it was.

I recall later in my career fussing because I had to stoop so low as to dub and tag some digital spots from the computer into the system. I guess I was bothered by having to click the right icon to send it to all three stations at once. jeez! ;D
 
John Paul said:
Matter of fact....the more I think about it, I may have to see if Citadel Memphis would be interested in selling me that old Otari MX 5050! he he he
Click to expand...

I SOOOOO Loved the Otari MX 50/50's - we had 3 of them up in Jonesboro at KJBR/KIYS/whateverthehellitisnow. And they were the absolute BEST for editing. Doing nights, I had to do phoners all the time, and they were all on the 50/50, and one big contest we had going at the time had us using up to 3 carts in audition that the contest caller could hear down the line so that we could record all of them for promos. I had just gotten a big winner - excitement, etc., etc., you get the point.

I got it all edited - had to do like 3 quick splices ALL in the span of about 2 songs - then went to hit the playback of the winner.

WELLLLL, one of the edit tabs was NOT exactly alligned right and as it went over one of the rollers, it caught on it and popped the splice right as we got to the result part....

Whoopsie!!

So I jumped in, and said something to the effect of "If you wanna see if he wins, just keep listening after this' and went into commercials to fix my edit. Got it fixed - played the whole thing back after the spots with the winning and all and everyone was happy.

Thing is, the GM heard it and thought I had done that on purpose to keep up the 'tsl' through the spot break, and he said it was best thing he'd heard.

I didn't argue.
 
I SOOOOO Loved the Otari MX 50/50's - we had 3 of them up in Jonesboro at KJBR/KIYS/whateverthehellitisnow. And they were the absolute BEST for editing.
Click to expand...

Back in the mid-70s, I loved editing on the Scully 280. The 280 was like the 1955 Buick Roadmaster of tape machines. Then, when I was at Media General in the late 80s, we had Otari MTR-10 two-track machines. They were beyond great -- best reel-to-reel I've ever had the pleasure of using. I love the MTR-10 so much that I bought one about seven years ago, and it sits proudly in my home studio. Obviously, it doesn't get a lot of use, but it is a Godsend when I come across an old reel of tape.

Just my personal preferences ...
 
In the Peabody, WREC and WREC-FM-aka WZXR-aka WEGR, had 8 RCA RT-21 reel to reel stereo machines rack mounted, two in FM, two in the news booth, and four in the recording room. When Deloss Waker started his king-maker run with Southern governors, he would record 5-minute interviews with his candidate (Bumpers, Waller, et al). Milton Brame, our studio engineer, father of Bob, and beloved of all who knew him, would work with Leonard Blakely in setting up all 8 of those RT-21s to high-speed dup these interviews. Milton would record, at double speed, the interview to a CARTRIDGE(!) and then on a cue, he and Leonard would fire all 8 reel-to-reels, then hit the cart. The reel machines were also running at double-speed. The cart would recue with 30 seconds of dead air after the interview, Milton would wait 5 seconds for a 10 second front end dead roll and then fire it again. With 8-hour long Ampex pancakes loaded on the RT-21s, they could get about 10 or 11 clean dubs on each reel for a total of 80 or so. Then they would spend a good half hour rewinding each interview to a 5-inch reel, cutting it, boxing and labeling it. In a little over an hour they could turn out 80+ (then) state-of-the-art dubs!

When I started "The Tynes Line" about 1971, we had no delay system. Milton initially set up an hour-long reel on the left-hand deck of one RT-21, feed the tape across the heads straight to the next rack to the take-up deck of a second RT-21. We recorded the audition channel to the first machine and played it back from the second one on the air. At 3 3/4ips, it gave us about a 5 second delay, but was a bit muddy. Shortly after that, Milton took a RCA cart deck, reversed the record and playback heads, loaded 10 seconds of tape on a cart and rolled that for the delay. It worked much better...except for the splice crossing the playback head every 10 seconds! We'd go through a cart a week with all that use. It was a couple of years after that before we got an electronic delay unit!

That's what a good studio engineer could do for a radio station.
 
Back when we were all live and on the fly, it was amazing how much good, quality work we were able to produce within 3:05. I even use to amaze myself from time to time. ;)
Hands, heads & elbows flying every which way creating "the theatre of the mind".
But the art of running a live, hands-on board is virtually no more.
Sad.
 
What I LOVE about these boards... sitting here, with all three of my area lakes near or over flood stage, waiting for the next deluge...and going 'back in the day.'

ZekeTerry, ya think anyone nowadays has had enough situations to let 'em have a chance to pull off your quick thought on "did he win it? we'll find out"? What the big print giveth, the small print taketh away...technology edition.

Growing up at KAKC/Tulsa with Dick Schmitz, Harry Wilson, Don Kelly, Roger Borden, Dick Ralston, etc, my only "production" experience was: doing my Froggy the Gremlin "Carling Brewing Co., Bellville, Illinois" tags for "Mable, Black Label" agency spots. To make matters worse, next stop was WHBQ...Jack Parnell, Skip Wilkerson, Harry Chapman, Dave Brown, John Froland, George Klein -- Dick Romine wouldn't even let me SPEAK OUT LOUD in a production studio. And a few years later, I went to WNOE-FM/New Orleans, replacing SONNY FREAKIN' FOX. Hallo? Croaker me, still with my top-40 delivery, replacing not only one of the primo sets of pipes, but also one of the best AOR jocks ever. Wondered exactly how many DAYS I'd last in that scene ... until I noticed everybody else hit an instrumental track, faded it down, did a one-take read, fading it back up-and-out, carted the SOB, and went down to The Chart Room to meet Sweetthang du jour. And that's when Mr. Blade and I got busy and saved my job...then made me a bleep-load of money doing an entire year's worth of "Marshall Tucker Southern Salute" spots for Beaver Productions. OMG, where was CoolEditPro back then?
 
lol sounds like ole "QOX days when many of us were taught how to splice tape to prepare us for small market.

1st we found out we like to eat


......then came klove
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom