GUIDE How to Host a Radio Show Without Everything Breaking
Two years presenting the tech show on student radio taught me everything I now confidently tell you to do.
I presented the tech show on University Radio York for two years, every Thursday at ten, and in that time learned more about gain staging from making mistakes live to an audience of about eleven people than most sound engineers pick up in a proper job, which says more about how low the bar is at most student stations than it does about me.
Running a show is mostly two skills wearing a trenchcoat: not touching things you don’t need to touch, and knowing exactly which one thing you do need to touch when it goes wrong. Everyone teaches the first skill. Almost nobody teaches the second.
Learn the desk before you touch a fader
Most university stations run some variant of a small-format analogue mixer, a Behringer or a Soundcraft with somewhere between twelve and twenty channels, more than any single presenter will ever need and exactly the number the sales sheet demanded. Find the gain knob (the small one at the top of each channel, not the fader, which is the long one you’ll be tempted to ride for volume instead) and set it once, at the start of the show, with your voice at a normal speaking level, not the voice you use when you’re excited about something.
The fader then just goes up and down between zero and unity, and unity is the only setting that matters, because it’s the one your gain staging was calibrated for. Anyone riding the fader up past unity to compensate for a quiet gain setting is adding noise, not volume, and will be quietly judged by anyone in the building who owns a decent pair of headphones.
Get the levels right before you get the content right
A show can survive a bad link. It cannot survive clipping, and clipping is the one mistake listeners actually notice, because a badly worded intro just sounds like a nervous nineteen year old (which, to be fair, it usually is), while a red, distorting peak sounds like the station is actively malfunctioning.
Check levels on your loudest source, whatever that happens to be for you:
- A guest who gets animated when they talk
- A jingle or bed track dropped in at full volume
- Your own voice when the show’s actually going well and you’ve forgotten to be nervous
Set your ceiling against that, not against the calm read-through you did in the car park beforehand.
Playout software will let you down exactly once
Every station has some flavour of playout software queuing jingles, beds and pre-recorded links, and every single one of them will, at some point, fail to load the next item in the queue while you are mid sentence with nothing else to say. This happened to me during a segment about, of all things, buffering, which is the kind of detail I’d cut from a script for being too neat if I hadn’t lived through it.
A better piece of software won’t fix this. A backup track will, cued and ready to fire without you touching a mouse, so dead air becomes four bars of jingle instead of four seconds of you audibly panicking. I learned this in week three. You get to learn it now, for free.
Plan the show like you already know how it ends
Write a running order with rough timings next to each segment, not because you’ll follow it exactly (you won’t), but because knowing you’re two minutes over gives you something to cut on purpose, instead of running out of things to say and hoping the next song starts itself.
The best presenters I heard at York weren’t the ones with the smoothest voices. They were the ones who’d written a running order and stuck to the timings within a couple of minutes, every single week.