Episode 1 - Dave Foxx

ANNC: This, this is The Producers with Ryan Drain, a podcast designed for radio imaging, commercial production, all things audio. Feedback is encouraged at ryanontheradio.com.

RYAN: Welcome to it. Here it is, the very first edition of The Producers, a podcast geared towards audio folk, obviously producers. I think voiceover talent's gonna find this pretty informative as well, because in this day and age, it seems to me anyone who either starts or has continued to do audio production really of any sort has found their way into the voiceover world, you know, maybe successfully, maybe just sort of. Anyway, the goal of this podcast is I'm really just gonna get right into it 'cause I have Dave Fox, the interview, waiting. I'm kinda just wanting to pay it forward, really. I started off, I've been doing this for about 10 years. Radio imaging is, I guess, my specialty. I do a ton of other different little things production-wise. Yeah. But I know that I had a lot of help from above when I came into it, and I imagine there are a lot of people out there that would like the same help. There's also a lot of people that just do this and just want to learn more about it. That's great. There's also voiceover talent that would like to become proficient at production so that they could help themselves out instead of having to pay for demos or pay for any sort of production whatsoever. So hopefully everybody finds it a little beneficial, but I'd love to get feedback. That's really what I want to say right now is, as we get through this interview and you kind of hear what we talk about, I'd love to find out what What would be better for you to hear? What would be, you know, what was good, if anything? Hopefully something will be good here. And, you know, what you want to hear in the future, as I hope to do these about 2 or 3 weeks, every 2 or 3 weeks or so. All right, we're going to jump into the Dave Fox interview again. I did this just moments ago. There was a bit of a problem with his— they moved into new studios in New York. I want to bring him up on the ISDN, which of course, me causing him problems, but you know, why not? There was a loopback problem with the first question. He talked about what he's been doing right now. He's traveling a ton. to speak. He speaks a lot. He's at that point. His side work, I know he also mentioned, has become mostly voiceover. And now I will ask Dave, how many stations are you imaging right now?

DAVE: Well, officially I'm only doing one.

RYAN: Officially?

DAVE: Officially. But I am also producing the imaging for one of our stations in Chicago. the, the KISS outlet there. I'm overseeing production of, all our stations here in the New York cluster, although I have to admit that most of that's hands-off. I've got, I've got 2 really capable producers working with me here in, Kwasi Hewlett, whose, primary task is Power 105, and Rick Ganji, whose primary task is Q104.3. The 2 of them are also covering KTU And well, Lite FM doesn't really have any production, but when there is, one of us picks it up and I'm still covering Z100.

RYAN: Let's talk about your background now since you mentioned Z100. You've told me this story before. I like it. But basically, where'd you start and at what point did you get to Z? How'd that happen? And you've been there quite a while too.

DAVE: Yeah, I've been here 21 years. Still counting.

RYAN: Yeah.

DAVE: Still alive. Which is, that's frightening to me when you stop and think about it. The average life expectancy of most disc jockeys at a radio station is about 18 months.

RYAN: Mm-hmm.

DAVE: But for some reason, I just keeps, you know, it's like the Energizer Bunny here. I've been through a lot of administrations, a lot of PDs, a lot of owners. In fact, every owner that has owned this radio station has paid me a paycheck. So it's kind of frightening.

RYAN: How many owners have you been through there?

DAVE: Well, we had Mallwright and then we had Shamrock and then we had— oh shoot, what was the name of that? I can't think of the name of it. Something Broadcasting.

RYAN: We're talking CC would be in initials?

DAVE: No, that was later.

RYAN: Okay.

DAVE: This was This was actually just prior to Clear Channel getting involved, but it was, so I guess what, 5 owners? I've had 2 general managers, 3 general managers. No, 4 general managers. I keep forgetting that one guy. And I've had 2 program directors. Actually, Kingston wasn't program director. He was the operations manager. Scott Shannon was the program director. When he left, Steve never really took on the title of PD, although he was doing the PD job. And then when Tom Pullman came in to replace Steve Kingston, and he's been here ever since. So just 2 PDs really. Right.

RYAN: 2 pretty heavy hitters, I would have to say.

DAVE: Yeah, yeah. Pretty good-sized names in the business.

RYAN: I just wanted to point out real quick that I didn't do much of an intro for, for you, Dave, because A, I'm pretty confident most people that are paying attention to this podcast are gonna already know who you are. But also, it's fun to just hear these stories. But you, you've worked with some of the biggest names in radio. Not just that, you are, at least in my opinion, my humble opinion, one of the bigger names in radio.

DAVE: Yeah, I have. I've worked with some really big heavy hitters with Scott Shannon, Steve Kingston, and before that, a person that I still admire, even though he has passed on, is Al Casey. some really great programmers, some great names in, management as well with, John Fulham and, Rob Williams. Some just really awesome people in the business. talent-wise, I've worked with some great people too. I worked with Joe Kelly and Ernie Anderson. Gosh, it's a long list. And—

RYAN: go ahead. I was just gonna say, to go back, I wanted to make sure that you told the story of how when you got to New York, you weren't actually brought there to do what you're doing, right?

DAVE: That's correct. When I came up here, I had been at WPGC in Washington for years. And Dan Mason was there while I was there. Scott Shannon came through and did a tour. That's how I got to know him. But I was an on-air jock. I did mid-days mostly, did mornings for 2 years, number one morning show in the market for, you know, but I can't take much credit for that because my partner was the football hero, Joe Theismann. I was hired indirectly. What happened was, is the radio station was pretty much perverting the, or circling the proverbial drain. And I decided to bail out and build up my chops. So I went to work for a station that no longer exists, B104 in Baltimore. And I was there for 6 months. And at that point, the program director, who was Steve Kingston, decided to leave to go to New York to become operations manager. On the day that it was hinted about in Street Talk, I went into his office and I said, what the hell is going on here? You just hired me here. And he just looked at me and smiled and he says, just practice saying New York. And he brought me up to do mid-days. But when I got here, it turns out that he and Scott had miscommunicated on a contract.

RYAN: Mm-hmm.

DAVE: And the gal who had the midday position had renewed.

RYAN: Oops.

DAVE: So I'm sitting here in New York with no job. Basically, Kingston said, well, all right, look, let me put you back here in the production studio and we'll get this ironed out and I'll let you know. Well, it took a year, of course, because she had renewed her contract for a year. And when the year came up, he came back and he opened the door and said, come on, we're ready. And I said, Hold on. I think I've said everything I need to say on live radio. I've been doing production my whole life.

RYAN: So at that point, you'd been doing production for quite a while. So it's not like you just suddenly had to learn this thing in this year.

DAVE: Oh, no, no, no, no. I've been doing production at PGC from the beginning. In fact, I was doing production at my very first commercial station, KOVO-AM in Provo, Utah. So I've been doing production, and even before that in college, at college radio, I'd been doing production. So production has been in me the whole time. But once I had a taste of doing it full-time and having regular working hours, I decided that I liked that a lot more than being an on-air personality.

RYAN: I love that story though. You get to New York City, you're a jock. I mean, that's kind of the ultimate And you were like, nah, I've said enough. I mean, how many people say that?

DAVE: Well, yeah, that's the thing, you know, how many times can you introduce Iggy Pop, you know, or whoever's the big name at the moment?

RYAN: Right. For me, it was Britney Spears, and I think at that point I had had enough.

DAVE: There you go.

RYAN: But, okay, obviously I don't want to take up a whole lot of anybody's time here. I know your time is valuable, but I got a number of things that I wanted to get into, more technically speaking.

DAVE: Right.

RYAN: Because again, the goal is for younger producers to kind of not just get to hear how cool you are, which you are cool, but to hear what you do and what makes you as good as you are. So talk about— basically pinpoint a few things that some young producers can do either in self-training or, you know, maybe there are just a couple classes that you know of that are amazing, or things that young producers can do to get themselves to the next level, whatever level they may be at.

DAVE: Well, if you're going to produce, if you're going to pursue production as a career, I absolutely insist that the best thing you can do is learn how to play the piano. You've told me that. You don't have to become a maestro. You don't have to become a Van Cliburn or whoever, but you do need to understand the structure of music, how it's put together. Once you do that, editing music becomes a breeze and making your promos and commercials flow so that you can get the commercial, you can get the message out cleanly, is 1,000% easier. It's just, it will make your life an absolute joy. You'll love sitting down at the console to work. Second thing I would say, take some writing classes. And when you do take writing classes, make sure that the instructor understands what you're writing for, because there are different styles of writing. You don't want to learn how to write a newspaper article if you're going to work in radio, because they are totally upside down from what we would use. Newspaper is a block communications device. You get it all at once, whereas radio and television are linear. It comes out one word at a time. And you have to write differently for the 2 mediums. You have to write on a more personal level. You have to write on a more emotional level, particularly for radio. So if you can learn music, music theory really, and it's only gonna take you 6 months. So it's not like it's a major, major, major lifetime investment. You know, just take the time, learn a little bit about music, and it will make your life so much easier. And then as you learn to write, and believe me, just take a couple of classes, get yourself started so that you can begin the process. The process will take years before you get really good at it, but you've got to start the process someplace. Eventually, as a producer, you need to know how to write. You need to be able to fix copy. You need to be able to reach people emotionally. with words. And, I mean, this is before you even sit down to do any production. So those 2 things are an absolute must, I think.

RYAN: This is going to lead me to something else I want to bring up with you. You wrote about this in, I believe it was Rap Mag. Rap Mag, by the way, another good source for producers in my opinion. And Dave writes an article every single issue, Production 212, right? Does that work? Yeah.

DAVE: Yeah.

RYAN: You talked about rhythm, and especially in promos, but you made a reference to if you were out at a club or you're dancing in some way, shape, or form, and the music Kind of gets offbeat, something happens to the music, you physically kind of stop. And talk about the importance of rhythm in production, especially long-form production, or at least promos.

DAVE: With promos particularly, it's important. When I talk about interrupting the music, it's like somebody bumps into the turntable and you get— it skips and you're expecting a downbeat and you're getting an upbeat. All of a sudden you have to stop, you have to listen to what the music's doing and find the rhythm again. When you are producing a commercial or a promo where the music does that, where you've got a downbeat coming in where an upbeat should be or vice versa, the listener stops listening to the words and starts listening to the music, trying to find the beat again. I mean, it's not a huge distraction, but it's enough of one And the problem is, is almost always the unique selling proposition, whatever it is you're trying to promote, almost always comes right around one of those transitions. So if it's not a good rhythmic flowing transition, chances are real good they're not gonna get your message. It's gonna be gone because they weren't thinking about what you were saying. They were thinking about the music. Where's the beat? What happened?

RYAN: I know for myself, since, you know, I've— you showed me a few things years and years ago when I was just a little kid, and I've now, you know, stuck with this and gotten here to Dallas. But I really have been focusing on that since I read you, you know, your article on that. And it's something that, like, at least for me, I didn't think too much of, and now I can't stop thinking about it, is that rhythm. Because you really do now, you know, I'll make a promo and And I feel like it's a good promo, but then I'll notice that I've, I don't know, whatever, transitioned between 2 beds or a song and a bed or 2 elements of some sort. And if they're off, it drives me insane. And then when I listen to other producers' work, I feel the same thing. I just think that was really important, that rhythm.

DAVE: It is. It's incredibly important. The key is drop out the voice track and listen to your music track after you've put it together, after you've assembled it. If you can dance to it, then you're okay. If you can't, you're hopeless. You're dead in the water before you even get out the gate.

RYAN: Or at least tap your finger along to your production, and if you get offbeat, then try and fix it.

DAVE: Yeah.

RYAN: Let me see here. Many, many things. Pop culture, though, is another thing I know you've talked about as being extremely important in being a good producer. You've got to immerse yourself in. Why is that so important?

DAVE: Because you need to have a bridge of communications with your audience. That's the short answer. The long answer is we've all known people like this, people who hang out at the radio station. They're at the radio station morning, noon, and night. They want to be there when the big events happen. They're clearing the wire for you. Most people don't have wires anymore.

RYAN: No.

DAVE: I'm dating myself, but I mean, they'll do anything just to hang out at the radio station. And that is like the wrong place to be.

RYAN: Mm-hmm.

DAVE: The biggest problem people who, especially jocks, but even producers, even to a larger extent, mistake you can make is to immerse yourself in the radio business. Because if you open the mic and you talk about radio, your audience is going to yawn. Huge yawn. They don't care. Radio is not anywhere close to as exciting to them as it is to you. However, if you can open the mic and talk with absolute knowledge about the Paris Hiltons of the world, I mean, even politics, and it doesn't matter, it's just anything to do with what's going on right now. If you can get on and talk about who's winning the gold in, in, in Beijing right now, then you are miles ahead of the game because that's what most people are watching on television. So I always tell people, look, you know, when you've finished your production, don't hang out at the radio station. Go home, go out to a bar, go out with your significant other to whatever other kinds of things, you know, go out to a play, go to a football game, a local high school football game.

RYAN: Mm-hmm.

DAVE: Whatever your audience is doing, you should be doing every time. You need to read at least one book a week. You need to read at least one newspaper every day faithfully without fail. You need to watch at least 2 hours of television. Because if you do not, you do not have a prayer of being able to communicate with your audience. You have to be doing the same things that they are doing So that you have a common ground, so that when you talk about the 411, they know what you're talking about.

RYAN: Talk technically for just a moment, and we're almost wrapped up. I'm gonna get you back again, and because you have Fox on the Run Productions, I mean, I would say on the side, but I know you do as much work there as you do with Clear Channel, correct?

DAVE: Well, that used to be true, but I've since kind of scaled that back. It's now It's just voiceover work is what I'm doing. The voiceover work is like, it's taken over my life.

RYAN: Which is why I wanted to actually, I connected you on ISDN here. No, we're not sitting in the same room, but I just wanted people to appreciate the Dave Fox voice, 'cause I used him, or I guess actually I still use you imaging a station out in New Jersey.

DAVE: That's true.

RYAN: But anyway, I just wanted people to hear you. But we're gonna talk about the other stuff, especially if people are interested in getting into voice work at a later time. But technically speaking, your, Are you still doing a lot of work with Digi, with Pro Tools and whatnot?

DAVE: No, only because I don't have time for it anymore.

RYAN: Okay, but Dave Fox here, my guest, used to be— what were you with them? Were you a rep? Were you a teacher? Were you—

DAVE: No, I was a presenter. I would go to shows and show them how I use Pro Tools in my work so that other people could see how easy it is, how simple it is, and frankly, how powerful it is. But I just, I just, I can't go to— I can't be going to Vegas every other week to do the COMREX and then do the NAB and then do another, you know, it just gets nuts after a while.

RYAN: You gotta fly your plane too, right?

DAVE: That's right.

RYAN: Right. Talk about just something technically though, you know, again, I assume we're gonna have the more younger producers that are interested in hearing you talk, and it doesn't really matter if they have Pro Tools. In fact, would you agree or disagree that Pro Tools might actually be a bit of an overkill for what we do?

DAVE: For some, yes. Audition is an absolutely fabulous program. You can do just about anything in Audition that you need to do for radio. So I'll just leave it at that.

RYAN: Right.

DAVE: As far as Audition is concerned. But if you want to expand your horizons, if you really want to grow, then you need to grow beyond Audition because Pro Tools wasn't designed for radio. It was designed for music. And, you know, once you start exploring some of those other avenues, the things that you can do with Pro Tools that you can't do with Audition may not seem all that impressive to the casual listener, but you can do them so much faster and so much easier on a Pro Tools system than you can with any other system. I don't care what it is, SADi or Bandit, doesn't matter.

RYAN: What about audio quality? Is there— should— I mean, I think as producers, we should all always be concerned about putting out the best quality audio. audio, period. Is there a major difference between what Pro Tools will output? And I'm just talking, you know, forget about plugins, but just simply if I record a dude talking into Pro Tools versus Audition, you know, is Pro Tools simply better?

DAVE: No, they're, they're, they're on the same par unless you're recording at 96 kHz instead of 44.1 or 48. Sure, Audition's only capable of 44.1 or 48, whereas Pro Tools can go up to 96.

RYAN: But in the grand scheme, if we're talking to radio imagers here, we don't really need to be doing that, right?

DAVE: No, you never need to do that, not for the human voice.

RYAN: Right.

DAVE: You know, 96 is something you'd use for music, something, you know, for a Star Wars soundtrack or something.

RYAN: Give us— give me a tip or a trick that people might already know, but maybe they don't know in Pro Tools that you can actually, you know, say and not have to show that people should know. Anything off the top of your head?

DAVE: Yeah. When I do voice tracks for radio, I do voiceovers every day. For example, sitting in front of me, I have copy here for a radio station in Philadelphia. And what I do is I read it with a gate on my microphone so that when I'm not talking, you don't hear anything. There's no room noise, there's no nothing else. And I'll sit there and read it. You are invited to experience a superstar. The way few ever will. Live, in person, face to face. Then I'll pause, and then I'll do the next line. Wired 96.5 welcomes Neo. Pause again, and I just keep doing that all the way through. And then when I put it back together, when I— I'll strip it. I'll use a thing called Strip Silence. It takes out all the silent parts. And then I'll say compact it with a 500-millisecond handle on each piece. And what that does is it compacts the whole file down to one smaller, much, much smaller file with 1 second in between each cut. And then when the producer gets it, if they use strip silence and it's set to say 500 milliseconds, which is normal, that's how it comes, then it strips it out. You're all edited. All you got to do is say strip silence, done. Then you start moving your stuff around. You're ready to produce right off the bat.

RYAN: Can you easily turn that gate off real quick? I just wanted people to hear what— you know, you guys have brand new studios in New York City. You're sitting in your studio, right, in New York?

DAVE: I am.

RYAN: I want people to hear what your room sounds like without your gate, if you can.

DAVE: All right, here comes without the gate. There it is.

RYAN: Yeah, it's a noticeable difference.

DAVE: Yeah, you can hear the air conditioning, you can hear my CPU. I've got a big G5 dual-core sitting down here, not more than 3 feet away from the microphone, so you can hear all of that. But once I turn the gate on, then it becomes quiet.

RYAN: Yeah, I love it. I just— I don't know, when I was younger getting into this, I envisioned these, you know, monster padded rooms that were dead silent, and, you know, just kind of a guy alone in a box with a microphone. And no, I mean, my room is really loud.

DAVE: I know guys who do that and who spend a great deal of money having isolation booths. One of them is Jeff Berlin. He had a ton of money in an isolation booth. But the advantage he has over me at this point in doing voiceover work is he doesn't have to worry about a gate. And there are subtle things that get cut out with a gate.

RYAN: That's when it's—

DAVE: For top 40, it doesn't matter. But if you're gonna be doing a rock station, you know, I only have 2 rock clients right now. One's in Denver, KBPI, and their whole thing is KBPI rocks the Rockies. But some of that gets lost with the gate. And so Jeff can go and he can do— he has a lot more rock clients than I do.

RYAN: Right. Jeff Berlin, someone I've made contact with, and I will hopefully have him on one of these podcasts in the near future. Well, let me, let me let you go, Dave, because I know you're, you're busy. Everybody's busy. We want to get through this. I thank you so much for being the first guest though, and hopefully we're starting a resource here that young— it's gonna keep people coming back, you know, and learning this thing we're doing. And hopefully if guys like us just keep telling people all the secrets, then they'll keep getting the jobs, because that's the thing. You did that for me. I— what I did is I emailed you after I got my very first issue of RAT Mag. This was in '02, late '02, and you said you know, in novel form, hey, send me your stuff, I'm gonna tell you everything I know about this business. And it was amazing for me, you know, to have this guy at Z100 New York actually spend that time and write me back. And then, you know, you critique my stuff, and I owe quite a bit about where I am now to your help. So we got to keep doing that.

DAVE: Absolutely. And my whole thing, my, you know, my mantra, if you will, is is please don't send me money. Pay it forward. You know, if I teach you something, I want you to teach 5 other people, and I want them to teach each of them to teach another 5 people. You know, eventually what I want to do is I want to raise the tide because all boats come up in the tide. And if we do that, if everybody does that, it's going to raise the quality of the work that we crank out every day, day after day after day.

RYAN: Yeah. Thank you so much. Do you want to send anybody anywhere listening your website, Fox on the Run Productions, or any more specific?

DAVE: Fox on the Run Productions has a couple of nice links for things that we've produced in terms of commercials and a couple of radio shows, all of which I believe are defunct now. The RuPaul Show, for example, not on the air anymore.

RYAN: Really? Yeah. Surprising.

DAVE: But actually, let me give you an address right now. If anybody ever wants to listen to any of my imaging, they can go to this address. It is where I post stuff for my program director to listen to. This is cool. When I don't have time to sit there and wait in the outer office for them to listen to a promo to get approval, I just post it, send an email, say it's there. And then when they get around to it, when she gets around to it, she'll go and she'll listen and she—

RYAN: Can I just get something straight real quick?

DAVE: Yeah.

RYAN: D, Dave Fox, still has to get approval?

DAVE: Sort of.

RYAN: Leave it at that.

DAVE: Yeah. Well, actually, 99% of the time it's always, yeah, that's great, Dave. Thanks.

RYAN: Yeah, I figure.

DAVE: But yeah, every once in a while, because sometimes we'll get our communications crossed and I won't do it quite right. Here's the address: http://www.foxrun.com/client/whtz. Everything is in lowercase.

RYAN: That's cool.

DAVE: You go there and what you'll see is in that immediate directory, you'll see anything that's current, something else that I put up in the last day or two.

RYAN: So this is— I was gonna ask that. This is day or two stuff.

DAVE: Yeah, but there is a previous uploads folder. If you click on that and burrow down, you will go back as much as 6 months to a year.

RYAN: Because I know even for me right now, I still like— like, in fact, I've been listening to a lot of production and imaging from a guy, Ben Needle. Is that how you say his last name? You may be familiar with him. He's over at—

DAVE: I don't know how to say his name. I've read it a million times on email, but I've never actually heard him say it.

RYAN: I love his stuff, but just to, you know, people got— you got to hear good production. Sometimes just to get yourself going again.

DAVE: Exactly.

RYAN: And, you know, everybody steals, but it doesn't mean you have to steal. It just means you got to hear the good stuff, and that, that's a great resource. Thank you so much, Dave.

DAVE: My pleasure.

RYAN: All right, Dave Fox. Thanks again to Dave Fox. I just want to toss a quick outro on this thing to let you know that I do really appreciate you checking out the first episode. Of course, the beauty of podcasts is you might be hearing this 6 years from when I actually produced it, and everything's changed. But hopefully not. I'm going to definitely request your feedback. I just want to hear what you thought of it. Was it good? Why was it good? But probably if there's things that you'd like to hear changed, love to hear about that too. Again, it was my first interview. I'm not 100% sure how I want to take this, you know, in what direction I want to take it, but we'll figure that out as we move along. Guest requests. If you have people you specifically want to hear from, maybe you look up to a certain producer, that you have never heard talk, I can maybe help with that. I have a list of people in my head that I either know well, know a little, or don't know and will not look forward to my phone call, but I'll make it anyway. And we'll get a bunch of cool people on here, most of which, at least the ones in my head, do some voice work, some of which do major voice work. so again, like I said, hopefully voice talent will find this pretty interesting as well. Again, ryanontheradio.com is my site. Please contact me there. there, if I've figured out the technical aspects of this, there should be a nice easy way to comment on this specific podcast. If not, then, you know, email and carrier pigeon and whatnot will be just fine. So one more time, thank you so much for checking it out. We'll get another one up in a couple weeks. The producers, the producers. Send your questions, feedback, guest requests, love, and of course constructive criticism to show@ryannontheradio.com. Episodes available through iTunes, other podcast sites, and RyanOnTheRadio.com. We thank our guests for their expertise and time. We thank you for listening.