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 picked up more about gain staging from making mistakes live to an audience of about eleven people than most sound engineers manage 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 properly comes down to two skills wearing a trenchcoat, which are actually seperate abilities that just look like one from outside: not touching things you don’t need to touch, and knowing exactly which one thing you do need to touch when it goes wrong. Every station teaches the first one on day one, and almost nobody bothers teaching the second, which is the one that actually matters once you’re live.
The desk
Most university stations run some variant of a small format analogue mixer, a Behringer or a Soundcraft with somewhere between twelve and twenty channels, which is more than any single presenter will ever need and exactly the number the sales sheet demanded, and the first thing worth learning on one, before you touch anything else, is where the gain knob sits (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). Set it once, at the start of the show, with your voice at a normal speaking level rather than the voice you use when you’re excited about something, and then leave it alone for the rest of the night.
The fader only ever needs to move between zero and unity, and unity is the one setting that actually matters, because it’s the setting your gain staging was calibrated for in the first place, so anyone riding the fader up past unity to compensate for a quiet gain knob isn’t adding volume, they’re adding noise, and will be quietly judged by anyone in the building who owns a decent pair of headphones.
Levels, and what actually clips
Listeners will forgive a badly worded intro, which just sounds like a nervous nineteen year old (which, to be fair, it usually is), but they won’t forgive clipping, because a red, distorting peak sounds like the station itself has stopped working rather than like a presenter having an off night, and that ends up being the one mistake people actually notice.
Check levels against 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 on the nights the show’s going well enough that you’ve forgotten to be nervous
Set your ceiling against that, not against the calm read-through you did in the car park beforehand.
The one time playout software will let you down
Every station runs 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’re mid sentence with nothing else to say, which happened to me once during a segment about, of all things, buffering, a detail I’d have cut from a script for being too neat if I hadn’t lived through it.
A better piece of software won’t fix this, but a backup track will, cued and ready to fire without you touching a mouse, so dead air turns into four bars of jingle instead of four seconds of you audibly panicking, and I learned that particular lesson in week three so you can learn it now, for free, in whatever week you’re currently on. Whether the big commercial stations actually have this solved with something more reliable than a cued backup track I honestly don’t know, York never had the budget or the contacts to find out.
Running order
Write a running order with rough timings against 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, and it’s the one habit that actually separated the presenters worth listening to from everyone else at York, more than any smoothness of voice or gift for talking ever did.
I still write one now for things that have nothing to do with radio, chairing a meeting, giving a talk, anything with a clock attached to it, mostly because I’ve never once found a situation where knowing exactly what you’re two minutes over on makes things worse.