Episode 3 - Part 2 - Chris Stevens

CHRIS: 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: Just in case for some reason you did not tune into part 1 and you're just randomly finding this, this is part 2 of a 2-part interview. You should still find it pretty interesting. It's Chris Stevens from TM Studios in Dallas. He's obviously not originally from America by his voice that you will hear here in seconds. We're gonna get into more of the radio tips, production tips, tips and tricks here in this one. I'll wrap things up at the end. Here comes part 2 with Chris Stevens.

CHRIS: The European stations will go quite far out with the imaging sometimes. You listen to KISS in London or XFM in London.

RYAN: I was going to bring up XFM.

CHRIS: Which is a great station, and Ben Needle, who set up a lot of the station sound there, is doing fabulous stuff through his company now. Or you listen to some of the stations in Europe. I'm trying to think of some of the names of them. I've heard stations in France that do great stuff, and the Netherlands.

RYAN: Wee? Or what's—

CHRIS: Wee FM does some great stuff. They, I used to get some of their podcasts for their mix shows and stuff, and I'd hear bits of production on there as well.

RYAN: I heard Ben's stuff from Wee.

CHRIS: Yeah, he's done some bits there, which I get.

RYAN: Ben Needles, I've brought him up before, I think, with Dave. He's an imaging producer in London, but he owns Noise Fusion, and therefore kind of is a freelance— I mean, it's kind of like freelance for a ton of stations.

CHRIS: Check out noisefusion.com and listen to Ben's stuff, particularly the XFM stuff is really good. Some of the beat matching in there is—

RYAN: And iD1 is an effects package that I actually just got for KSCS. I'm trying to make this station sound, you know, off the wall, out of the ordinary. So I figured why not get some European guy's made-for-alternative effects package, throw that on the station. It's sounding pretty good. I think people are liking it.

CHRIS: Yeah, there's a lot of new production companies appearing in Europe. Pure Tonic is another one in London who— our stand was next to theirs at the NAB Festival recently over in London, and they do some cool, interesting stuff, and there's some great production libraries over there that haven't really made it to the US.

RYAN: Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. I'm looking at our time here. I try and keep them to 30 minutes or less. I'll do some editing. We'll get this down to 30 minutes.

CHRIS: Cut out the dull bits, you'll get it down to 2 and a half or something.

RYAN: Yeah, we'll cut it down to 3 minutes and 18 seconds. divaweb.co.uk is your site.

CHRIS: Yes.

RYAN: So what kind of stuff are you doing on the outside, and how is it being a producer of imaging while you're also a jingle guy— I mean, the jingle guy, really— and you're producing imaging for still some European stations?

CHRIS: I mean, I find it's all very beneficial for me, actually. There's a danger when you leave a radio station and move to a production house or whatever part of radio you're in. If it's not an actual radio station, it's amazing how quickly you can can lose touch with what's going on actually at the coalface. You know, it's amazing how quickly you forget the pressure when the promo has to be on that day, or when the client isn't happy with something that's going out, or whatever else, or, or trying to write the world's best promo that doesn't last more than 30 seconds, or whatever it might be.

RYAN: Right.

CHRIS: So I'm lucky that I'm still doing my DivaWeb work. DivaWeb is— I set it up some years ago to do basically freelance audio production, and now I We've got about 12 or 13 stations in the UK that we do all their production on retainer. And then we do a lot of one-off projects as well for stations. Sometimes maybe a competition suite where they get all the, like a full kit of elements to run or some custom music sometimes as well. So that's, it's really useful. Partly because I enjoy doing it. I don't want to stop doing that kind of stuff. And partly because it just keeps my, the reality of radio going for me. And it's all very, very complementary in that It helps me know what those stations want for jingle packages as well, which helps my TM work. And then when I'm doing the TM jingles, a lot of the stations I'm producing for are using TM jingles. So I then get— after creating the package, I'm then using it at the far end, you know, adding sponsor tags to it, mixing it in with promos, and learning what, what's worked well with the package.

RYAN: Because when you get to produce the jingle package into an actual station, it helps you know how to produce a better jingle package.

CHRIS: That's when you learn the faults. That's when you think to yourself, yeah, actually we should have done 2 slow tempo cuts in this package, or whatever else it might be.

RYAN: Or this particular medium tempo just ain't mixing right on anything.

CHRIS: Absolutely. And it also teaches you stuff about, you know, how even how the jingles are being mastered, because by the time you've thrown it into your Pro Tools and put something else on, you're running a bit more mastering on it.

RYAN: Sure.

CHRIS: You want to make sure that's not going to start pumping and being too overproduced. So it's really useful, and I enjoy doing it. It's all— it's primarily UK stations, a couple of stations in the Middle East.

RYAN: So talk about, again, pretty quickly here, how did you market yourself? How did you get new clients? You know, for those producers out there that are listening that want to get some extra clients, how do you do that?

CHRIS: Mainly word of mouth, I think.

RYAN: 'Cause of BBC 2? I mean, Radio 2, sorry.

CHRIS: It was pretty much before that. In fact, that was one of the times I had to do less than normal because there was more conflict of interest going on there with it being a national station. Mainly word of mouth. Good producers will survive. If you work hard, if you're making good stuff, and you're a nice person to work with, and I sincerely hope I am, but—

RYAN: Well, I think everybody listening now knows you're a complete prick, so—

CHRIS: Yeah, completely. Buy my stuff, damn it! No. I'm kidding.

RYAN: I hope everybody knows I'm kidding.

CHRIS: If you're a good person, you're doing it for the right reasons and you're making good stuff. It's like, it's like jocks. It's like any part in radio. Even with all the cuts that are going on at the moment, most times the good people are the ones, and the talented people, and those that are willing to go the extra mile are the ones that will, will survive through it.

RYAN: Right.

CHRIS: because people want to work with good people who make good stuff. So if, if a new producer is going out there, I mean, I started— when I started off DivaWeb, I did my first load of stuff for free, which I know is always a Kind of, you can argue whether that's bad or good at first, but I just had to do stuff. I had to get it out there.

RYAN: Well, it's like a drug dealer.

CHRIS: Absolutely.

RYAN: A drug dealer goes out. You don't think the drug dealer is selling from the get-go.

CHRIS: I'm inspired by Nestlé and their third-world milk projects where they get the kids hooked. I don't mean that, obviously. But if people try what you're doing and they like it, then that's the best way. And even now, I mean, with the clients I've got now and the client base, I'm still thinking to myself, you know, what can I do to give them something extra they're not expecting? At the minute, it's all Christmas stuff. You know, last month it was all Halloween stuff.

RYAN: Sure.

CHRIS: Over here, I'm sure it's all Thanksgiving stuff. In fact, the Lighthouse guys who do our AC package that I'm involved with, the other week were going, well, do you think these stations would like a free Thanksgiving jingle? I was like, well, I'm pretty sure they'll take that. So that kind of just, you know, throwing something in.

RYAN: Yeah.

CHRIS: And, and, and listening to the station as well. It's great making stuff for a station, but it's not until you hear it being used on air that you really know whether it's working or not.

RYAN: Well, I was gonna ask you about advice, but it sounds like we're getting some good advice for producers right now. So yeah.

CHRIS: Yeah, I mean, you know, make it, listen to how it's being used. I was listening to a station that I image a couple of weeks ago, and I was thinking to myself, yeah, actually the, the opening of that news ID jingle isn't as strong as it should be really. And I'd done this in my studio, this really cool stereo effect on some— I think it was an entertainment news tag. And I was listening to the web stream, which was like, you know, low bitrate, mono, whatever else.

RYAN: So did it phase out or something?

CHRIS: It didn't entirely phase out, but it didn't have the strength it should have had. Oh yeah, the joys of phasing, where you listen to it on your clock radio and you can't hear what's being said. But, and so I still learn stuff from that. And, you know, I'll listen to to cool producers, and I'm thinking, yeah, that's, that's really good. I should be learning from that.

RYAN: I've mentioned this in a previous podcast, but I'll do it again because I know it's bitten many a producer in the hindquarters. Phasing, just in case, because I actually had someone— I don't know who it was— somebody told me that when they heard me talking about phasing, I think with Jeff Berlin actually, they're like, wow, so that's what that is. And this was a producer that had been around for a while. They just never Basically, if you take a piece of audio and you shift the left and right channel to give it a really cool stereo effect, what can happen is it phases out, or it— what's the proper term? It sums out, or—

CHRIS: Yeah, it kind of cancels itself out.

RYAN: It cancels itself out. It disappears, and that's what'll happen. So every piece of production you do, make— you know, you want good stereo effects because this is the 2000s after all. Let's make it sound cool, but You know, mono it out and listen to it again.

CHRIS: Listen to it mono and listen to it on really crap speakers.

RYAN: That's another good thing to do.

CHRIS: Because the majority of your listeners are not listening on these lovely expensive studio speakers in the perfect position. And yeah, you know, by the time they're listening, they're in the car, the kids are shouting in the background, they're thinking about whether they're going to get to the shops in time. You know, the radio is not— it's there just out of habit, it's background noise. You know, and they've got to still hear the sponsor name and the promo— promotion name, and of course the station name through all that. So—

RYAN: Yeah, you know, the message.

CHRIS: Yeah, absolutely.

RYAN: Make sure your message is getting through.

CHRIS: It's, you know, simple is often best, right? There are times when you can go completely over the top. I was listening to some clips of KROQ LA from the '80s, their Rock of the '80s stuff, which was completely off the wall and awesome. But there's only a few stations that can get away with that kind of thing. If you're doing a promotion with Walmart about, you know, down at the store this weekend, then you know, it's just got to be clear and easy to understand. You've got to be able to— the listener's got to know when it was, where it was, why they're doing it. Oh, that's kind of— yeah, one more annoying thing while I'm on my rant.

RYAN: Go ahead.

CHRIS: A lot of the promos I produce are written by the station, and by the time they get to me, the creative side has already been done. I get some really unnecessarily overwritten scripts. It's like, you know, next week listen to the breakfast show, which is what you'd call a morning show, and, you know, call in to win at quarter past 8. If you win, you'll get this, and you go through to the draw at the end of the week where you might win this, and you can answer another 5 questions, get 4 right, and you'll win the star prize. I mean, what? Who's gonna remember any of that? And promos that give the phone number for something that's not happening for another 3 days.

RYAN: Yeah.

CHRIS: It's like the point of the promo is primarily to get them listening to that part of the output. If it's a big breakfast promotion happening tomorrow morning at 8:15, get them listening tomorrow at 8:15. The jock can do all the details while he's on air.

RYAN: Sure.

CHRIS: And also, this is something that an old boss of mine, John Simons, taught me, who was one of the best PDs I ever worked for. He— at Christmas in the UK, you're not in a ratings period. It's not being— there's no diaries or PPM or equivalent. And we were doing these really big shows, big interviews with Paul McCartney and Celine Dion, all these kind of names. And he very wisely told me that very few people would actually listen to the shows because of when they're on and what was going on in people's lives, but they were there for the promos. And everyone would hear the promos and it would make the station sound big.

RYAN: Yeah.

CHRIS: And it would build on what the station was doing. And I'd never really thought about that before, but sometimes the promo is more important than the actual program.

RYAN: So in other words, you're saying, you know, an average listener is like, wow, you know, this station's awesome. They hear that promo, it makes them stick around, but they're not necessarily gonna come for the main event.

CHRIS: Yeah, absolutely. It's like, you know, wow, they've got Paul McCartney presenting a show on Christmas Day.

RYAN: How cool is this? That's the station I wanna be a part of.

CHRIS: But they're not gonna cancel their Christmas dinner with their family to listen to it.

RYAN: Right, or they're not gonna shut everyone up and have the radio on loud while they eat. Absolutely, absolutely.

CHRIS: Absolutely. But the fact that you've got that kind of stuff is massive. It's like the promos that radio stations are— we had, say, Brooks and Dunn on the morning show, and you can hear a podcast of that now on the website. The percentage of people that will hear the podcast isn't that great, although it's great to be doing it. It's a growing medium. But the percentage of people that will actually hear the promo and subconsciously think, oh, that's cool, They had Brooks and Dunn on the morning show, you know, and the kind of psychological link is, well, they clearly are the country station that has the big stars.

RYAN: Sure.

CHRIS: So these things work at multiple levels, and it's not just as obvious as what the script itself says.

RYAN: Yeah, the phrase that I heard long ago that I always keep in my head is sell the sizzle, not the steak.

CHRIS: Yep, absolutely.

RYAN: And that's important to keep in your head all the time. I don't care if you write it or not, but when you're producing it, If you feel like you've just said some details that are not pertinent to get it, you know, like, you don't want to give them the stuff that teaches them how to play the contest. You want to get them to the— bring them to the party.

CHRIS: Yeah.

RYAN: Just the promo just needs to bring people to the party.

CHRIS: If they can win a car, that's what's going to get them interested, not how many questions they have to answer or whatever else. And there's always exceptions to the rules. I thought so. Oh yeah, one more. I've got time for one more tip.

RYAN: Why not?

CHRIS: Okay. I've wasted the rest of the open reel tape. Old-school joke there.

RYAN: Right, exactly.

CHRIS: Say you're making a 40-second promo, and in this day of networking and everything else, often it is 30, 40, 50, 60, whatever it might be for scheduling purposes. If you've made a great promo that's 40 seconds, as a little kind of task for yourself, and I do this now and then, it's really, really interesting to do. What if that promo actually had to be 30 seconds? What would you take out? What would you change? Remake it for 30 seconds and listen back to it. If you've not lost any of the meaning, the power, the excitement, or the message, you've gained 10 seconds of airtime.

RYAN: Sure.

CHRIS: And in this day and age, yeah, 10 seconds is a lot. So that's 10 seconds more music for the listener. It's 10 seconds more commercial time, which is more money for the station. Whatever, however that 10 seconds is used is irrelevant really.

RYAN: But I would expand on that and actually say eventually you'll get to the point where you can be making things in 20. Yeah, right now My goal with every single promo that I make on KSCS is 20 seconds. That's where I start. Some things it can't happen, but most things it can if you really try, and you're gonna get the message out there. And really, all you've cut out usually is crap that maybe the client really wanted, but they don't have to have, and, you know, stuff that's not gonna bring people to the party. So—

CHRIS: I thought of one more thing.

RYAN: Keep it coming.

CHRIS: I've gotta stop soon. When, when I was in commercial radio, a lot of the time there's this kind of almost like battle between creative and programming and sales. And it was kind of like sales are trying to get this, all this awful stuff on the air and these horrible sponsor tags, whatever else it might be. And we're trying to run this pure radio station.

RYAN: Sure.

CHRIS: Sounds brilliant. It's not until you've been in radio for a while that you realize actually there's a bigger picture than that. And it's one radio station. And to the listener, it's all that one radio station. And working with the sales team and the S&P team and with clients is a far better way to get great things done. And I used to enjoy winding them up and telling them they couldn't do things, whatever else. And in hindsight, and I guess it's with maturity as a person as well, you start to realize that actually, you know, they're just doing their job as well. And they're bringing in money for the radio station. And, you know, it's everyone needs everyone else to make a really good radio station.

RYAN: And plus the climate keeps getting worse.

CHRIS: Oh yeah.

RYAN: You know, if you're gonna be one of those guys or girls that's gonna constantly battle the sales force, I guarantee you, you'll lose after a while, because it's so much more difficult to sell radio now that after a while, they're gonna— if they have to choose sides, they're not gonna choose your side.

CHRIS: Completely. It's a hard time for radio. It's gonna be a very hard 2009. We're gonna see positions being cut left, right, and center, which goes back to that bit at the beginning about the good people Yeah. Are the ones that will predominantly see the results.

RYAN: I think it's a good piece of advice because, I mean, just do everything you can to make yourself the best at what you do. And then, you know, you know, there's some people that are doing this that maybe they don't have all the skills in the world and they never will. But if you're a hard worker and you show that you're doing everything you can to make yourself the best, then, you know, given the choice of the guy who always complains, never does anything extra, or the person who works their ass off, then who are you gonna pick?

CHRIS: And you never know who you're gonna meet again in the industry.

RYAN: That is very true.

CHRIS: I've got, produ— there are producers who I was training up when they were like tech ops at 16, 17 years old, and I was training then, who are now PDs and buying jingle packages off TM.

RYAN: Yeah.

CHRIS: and I'm sure if I'd been a complete asshole to them back then—

RYAN: Yeah, they'd go to—

CHRIS: Asshole, you would say, I guess, but, —

RYAN: They'd go to, one of those other companies.

CHRIS: They'd be on the phone to Seattle before you can say boo, so, You know, it's—

RYAN: Is that where Jam is? Is that Jam? Is that the other company? Actually, I'm so inbred or whatever, in bed, whatever the word is, with TM, I've never dealt with any other jingle company. I don't even know what they are.

CHRIS: I'll take you on a tour of the town off mic.

RYAN: I mean, I know there's a couple more in town here.

CHRIS: Yeah, Jam's in town here.

RYAN: Oh, they're in town, okay.

CHRIS: And Thompson are in town here. And then if we wave at Seattle, then you'll see Real World and IQ up there.

RYAN: Oh, Real World's in Seattle.

CHRIS: Okay, so I've heard of them. Though I must say that beyond the selling, actually everyone's very friendly in all the companies, which is really cool.

RYAN: Oh, cool.

CHRIS: So that's— yeah, I'm going to have to stop before I start thinking of 1,000 other things to say to you.

RYAN: Yeah, well, no, I've got some editing to do. I'm going to edit this out too. But I appreciate it. I mean, obviously this is a podcast, so stuff's typed out, but Chris Stevens from TM. He also has divaweb.co.uk. Check out his stuff. He does good work. Do you have a demo section up there? I forget, but I appreciate it.

CHRIS: Yeah, there's a load of audio on there. I think like many people, I don't keep it quite as up to date. to date and updated as I should do, but there's plenty on there.

RYAN: And you, you're gonna give me some audio to put on the site though?

CHRIS: Yeah, I'm gonna send a few clips of stuff that's happening from, from Europe.

RYAN: Yeah, I think it'd be good for people to hear, especially people that aren't fully familiar, you know, those that are interested in radio production, imaging and whatnot that, you know, and then I know I have a lot of people listening that aren't actually, but, you know, voiceover artists that are still interested in the tech side of things. But anyway, if you're not familiar with the European sound, or at least with what's going on on radio over there.

CHRIS: And I'll send you some links to some, some cool companies and some cool people making some good stuff out there as well.

RYAN: Yeah, and I would say if you— let's say now you only have 5 minutes of your life to go stream a station, for my money, I will first say Radio 2 because it'll be fun to hear where you came from, but XFM has got to be my favorite station from over there.

CHRIS: XFM is really good. That's in London. Kiss 100 in London as well. If you want to hear a station that's very energetic, they pitch the songs up, they cut all the instrumental bits out, so every song is like, you know, 2, 2 and a half minutes long. Yeah, they've got some cool stuff going on there. And Radio 1, which you can get on Sirius as well—

RYAN: Radio 1's a lot of fun.

CHRIS: Is really worth listening to. And check them out. And also, if anyone who's listening wants to get in touch with me for any reason, if they want to find anything out about, you know, foreign radio or about TM or anything, you know, like yourself, Ryan, I love talking about this kind of stuff. Yeah, I could do for hours. So my email at TM is chrisstevens— that's with a V in Stevens— chrisstevens@tmstudios.com. Oh, and add me on Facebook if you're on Facebook as well.

RYAN: So there we go. I'll throw links to all your stuff on the site too. We'll do the little show notes part of this podcast, so check it out on the site. Again, ryanontheradio.com.

CHRIS: I feel very privileged. Dave Fox, Jeff Berlin, and then Chris Stevens. Like, wow, we suddenly have to dig really deep now.

RYAN: Gosh, I hope not. 3rd episode, I'm already— no, no, it was good times, great.

CHRIS: It's cool to be on here, and thanks for asking me along.

RYAN: There you go. Thanks again to Chris Stevens, TM Studios. Go to my website, RyanOnTheRadio.com. You can hit the podcast show notes. There's stuff there on the first 2 podcasts as well, and you can figure out how to contact him. I'll also have some audio there on the site. If you're downloading this the instant it's posted, then it might not be up yet, 'cause I'm still waiting to get it from him, but it should be up by the time you're hearing this podcast. And also some contact information for Chris Stevens as well. I'm not gonna promote too much in the upcoming 'cause we're gonna talk to different random producers over the next, you know, few months. I'm trying to do at least once a month. If you missed the first part, yeah, I had an interview on a hard drive and that hard drive told me to go screw myself. So I gotta talk to that guy again. A lot of fun people to talk to, but I would love to hear who you might want to hear from. Maybe you've got like a favorite producer you've always wanted to learn about. I'm not afraid to reach out to some folks, even if I don't know them. So tell me who you want to hear from, I'll take the time to do it. And again, I'm really not looking to gain much out of this thing, just except to pay a little forward. That's the, that's the rule Dave Fox taught me a long, long time ago, and I think it's kind of important. So hopefully you do the same. Again, thanks again for checking this out here. Hopefully you enjoyed it. I look forward to seeing you soon.

CHRIS: Yeah, okay. The Producers. Send your questions, feedback, guest requests, and of course constructive criticism to show@producerspodcast.com.

RYAN: RyanOnTheRadio.com.

CHRIS: Episodes available through iTunes, other podcast sites, and RyanOnTheRadio.com. We thank our guests for their expertise and time. We thank you for listening.