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WORST PROD. FACILITY EVER (Happy Friday)

H

hungryhawk

Who has a good story?

I'll start with mine...
Last year I was sitting infront of an audiotronics board (circa 1976) with a Valley Audio 401 processor (garbage btw) and an RE20. I was getting ready to cut some station liners when all of a sudden I hear a whack-whack-whack noise in the Sony headphones I was wearing (these were the stations cans which of course were held together with electrical tape...) The engineer explained that this studio wasn't designed as a radio studio and so the single paned window to my right was not blocking the sound of nearby construction. I'm a patient guy so I wait while the engineer runs out to the parking lot. I hear some yelling in my headphones and then the hammering stops. Good I think until WHHHOOOOOOOSH... An airplane flys overhead. The station really is in the flight path of landing aircraft. Fine. That can't happen too often I think here in this small town of 10,000. WHHHHOOOOSH it happens again, and this time the noise lingers. The engineer shoots me a look, I guess he can tell from my facial expressin that I'm hearing something in my cans that I shouldn't be hearing. He whacks the console with his fist and the buzz gets louder... another whack and it nearly disappeers. I do my read, he throws some plug-ins on it and we listen back. What is that humming noise on my track? "Oh he says, just the cooling fan from the PC under the desk."

Happy Friday Everyone!
 
When it comes to audio boards, one name should strike fear into the heart of any producer:

PEAVEY!!!

AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

This brand should not be anywhere near a broadcast facility...but I know a place where one is!

Why just limit this to a production room? I once worked at a -- ahem -- "cluster" of stations that at one point had to share A SINGLE CART DECK between three stations and the "production" room! For whatever reason, we would go months with this one cart deck because nobody at the place would bother to fix it. The only engineer this company could afford had to be peeled off of whatever floor he happened to be passed out on, and that's just the way it was.

Our routine was like this:

To play a stopset, you had to first unplug "The Official Station Cart Deck" in the production room, run down the hall to your air studio, hook the player up there, and play your spots. To do that, you put in your first spot, played it, took it out as quickly as you could to make room for the next cart, and so on until the stopset was mercifully finished. When you went back into a song, you then spent your time re-cueing the stack of un-cued carts you just played. Then, you unplugged the cart deck and took it to the jock at the next station down the hall, and so on and so fourth.

Needless to say...it sucked!

We would go months on end like this, but I guess we were lucky it was a record and play deck, so we could at least still record our spots! I initially wanted to work for that station because it was the only one in town with live jocks at the time, but I soon realized the reason for that. It was becasue all their automation...was broken! They had to have jocks! And it was great when we went to the satellite in the evenings with busted automation. We would just let those closed-circuit dead breaks air as is!

What a great business!
 
I'ev worked at stations with less-than-ideal production facilities, but never one with huge problems. I do recall applying at a small station when I was trying to move up. I was currently employed and I was looking for a reasonable step-up.

The production studio had a TINY board (don't know make or model). It was about 12" end-to-end. It had eight blue, large round pots. No sliders. I couldn't guess the age, but I guessed it to be older than myself. But it gets worse...

The monitoring system was an AIWA hi-fi boombox.

The mic was a Radio Shack dynamic stage mic that had the bulb screen pulled off.

The PC was an antique, running the old four-track version of SAW. (This was in 2001, so it was well out-of-date)

The floor was green vinyl that had peeled all around the edges. There was also a place under the chair where the vinyl was word down to the wood. The walls were all covered in cheap, worn yellow capet.

There was, of course, no such thing as mic processing.

When I got home, the PD called and offered me the job for $13k/year. Of course, I declined. About 15 minutes later, the GM called and yelled at me for being stupid and not taking this "great opportunity" I had been offered. I told him that I couldn't produce quality audio in that facility. He said the facility was fine and no one else had any problems with it. I told him that I wouldn't work for that kind of pay. He told me that it was a good offer for someone my age (18). I offered to work there for $20k (still low, IMO) and a $5k budget for new equipment. That was the end of that converstaion!
 
I almost went to work in Carlsbad, NM where the production room was a turntable and a Roberts tape recorder. HA
 
Hey guys,

I've yet to find a radio station, or a group of radio stations that have good production facilities. It's a crime, really...especially when you consider that your product for financial support is the commercial.

By the way, if there's bad equipment out there, I've had to use it at one time or another. I try to do most of my voice work in my home studio.

nelz
 
At my first station, we were in a barn (literally) when I first got there. The production board was a Peavey (!) and you had to set all of your levels before you started dub something in. If you moved the slider, a loud crackling sound could be heard for a few seconds.

In the on air studio, cart 2 never worked, so it was 1-3-4-1, etc for stopsets. We always swept with cart 4 because it was the newest cart deck. We recorded phone calls into a cassette deck. To record a call, you had to hold the mic pot, the phone pot and something else in cue during the entire conversation (the cue buttons wouldn't stay down by themselves!)

About 6 months after I got there, we moved into much nicer studios.
 
Joel, you sparked a memory.

My first paying job (part time) was at a three station cluster in Tuscaloosa, Al. We called it the radio ranch. Why? The stations all broadcast from a cow pasture. Quite often you had to honk to get cows to move so you could park your car. Now 2 of the stations were okay to work in since they were housed in a permanent structure. But Star 101.something. Star was housed in a portable shed. Seems like it was still sitting on a trailer too maybe. I recall wheels. Anyway, you'd be broadcasting, or doing some prod work and the whole damn shed would start shaking. Scared the bejezus out of me the first time it happened. As it turns out, cows like to scratch their head and asses. And as it turns out, the corner of portable sheds makes a darn fine place to do just that.
 
joelr --

Exactly! The crackling is very painful with headphones on; I'm sure some evil-doer somewhere has already developed it into a reliable torture method. BTW, I like listening to those Wilks outlets whenever I'm in Lubbock, Mix/LLL/Rock right? They sound great!

Brian Hart --

That story simply RULES!
 
Good times, good times. Of course that was way back when we still smoked in the studio.
 
Brian, i also heard they cloned a calf in one of the station vans..first case of cow-van-clone genes.and are you sure that wasn;t the GM scratching himself on that building.I wen t to that site once to visit Steve Russell (Doug Webb), one of my former employees.Right in the middle of the cow field. We had cows next to our building, i went to the fence with a mic and literally got that cow to moo on cue.It was funny as heck..or maybe just boring humor day..
 
menotti1 said:
Brian, i also heard they cloned a calf in one of the station vans..first case of cow-van-clone genes.
Click to expand...

Now that's funny.

Steve/Doug was the PD and morning guy at the oldies station when I was there for my short stint. I think it was on the 94.1 frequency but for the life of me I can't recall. So, does that mean I'm getting old or that I've worked at too damn many stations?
 
Station in metro Buffalo..could not do ANY production until after sign off at 12 midnite, They had no production studios but it didn't matter because the station was run as a huge tax right off for the owner. We did however do PSA's, and a buddy of mine (the 7-midnight guy named "gag" Mike Melody) and I were known to enjoy several adult beverages after he got off the air. At one of Buffalo's fine establishments we distinguished ourselves until about 2:30am..when my friend remembered that he HAD to produce a PSA about safe driving...The station had no production library or sfx library..nothing..I was the one who suggested a car crash noise at the beginning of the spot..so he unscrewed the ElctroVoice 664 mic, and steched a mic cable out to Genesee St...I turned on the Lafayette tape recorder, and he waited for an Erie County Transit bus to come along on it's way back to the city garage..at the point it reached the station's front yard, he tossed a big empty galvanized trash can in front of the bus..instant sound effect! Beautiful..but one of the neighbors was out in his yard watching his dog pee, and saw him do it and called the sherriff...He got fired, and I felt bad about his getting "canned" over the garbage can incident. Studio was an old 1951 RCA 4 channel console..two Gerrard turntables, and two Lafayette tape recorders (price around 59.95 then in 1968) no cart machines..no processing except a Kahn Symmetra-Peak, and a Gates Level-Devil. Station was in a house in a residential neighborhood with the dinky tower in the back yard. transmitter was in the bathroom.
 
Which Mike Melody?

Jeff,

"Be Big. Be a Builder."

-Rox

PS - WNIA in Buffalo & WSAY in Rochester were properties of Gordon P. Brown. Thankfully, I avoided working for Mr. Brown, and his PD, Marie Lounsbury(sp?).
 
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