A "creative" part time solution...

Shortly after I took over programming WRQR, I found myself in a bit of a pickle.

There were NO quality part-time air talent available in Wilmington, NC.  All of em that were decent were working.  Wilmington is so far from anywhere, you couldn't farm from another market.  So what I was left with was a pool of decent part time workers, but no air talent.

I wanted BIG sound on the weekend.  I also didn't want my full time guys on 7 days a week...even though we could with voice tracking, I never liked having guys on everyday.  How can you talk about the great weekend you had...you were "on the air".

I learned that it was quite simple to hire a part timer...I didn't need to go through any red tape or anything.  It was easy.  So what I did was have my friend Dave North (living in New Mexico) and Lonny Tyler (living in Illinois) fill out part time paperwork, told the office manager what I was up to...and suddenly I had out of market voice tracking talent!

The first shift I was going to do this with was on Saturday afternoon...and I am pretty sure we did all the work on Friday to set it up :)

I emailed Dave and Lonny the music logs, copies of all our liners and promos, and a couple web links.  Each of them recorded their breaks and uploaded the dry audio with an FTP program.  I downloaded them in the WRQR studio and recorded them into the operating system by hand.

So our first test...WE HAD A REMOTE POP UP!  So now Dave has to throw to a remote...fine we can do that.  Then at the VERY last hour on Saturday I was given information for fishing reports we had to air....ok fine we can do that too!

While I recorded in the guy's breaks, I ran the board for the remote and took the reports for the fishing tournament.  In a couple hours, I had the whole weekend loaded and was on my way home listening to the best air talent in the market...finally on MY station!

This air check is VERY cool but audio quality isn't the best.  I recorded it on a radio shack cassette recorder with the studio monitor feed (which we never could get right).  We got the two hours of the remote.  I also recorded as much of the station I could so Dave could hear it for the first time.

Dave gave me two versions of this audio...one is a trimmed up version and the other is the same way I sent it to him.

Visit Dave North's AWESOME web site Direct From Studio B here

Here is the first one

Play in Popup (listen while browsing)

and here is the second, longer version (my favorite)

Play in Popup (listen while browsing)