The Outrageous Radio Philosophy
I am sick of corporate radio. Generic talent. Computer selected music. Voice tracked broadcasts. All of this creates a very sterile, controlled, and perfect environment. You can go from city to city, and find the exact same selection of stations, with carbon copy talent and the same tired music being played over and over again. Taking this to the extreme, we have these national formats like “JACK FM” which bills itself on not even having announcers, and “playing what we want.” Yeah, sure. There isn’t anybody there, so they are playing what the computer wants. And how does the computer know that people in New York like this song, and people in Chicago like that song. It doesn’t. It’s ridiculous.
So we do something different. Once a month, on a Friday evening, we fire up the old studio. And we do a radio broadcast the ‘obsolete’ way, the fun way, the RIGHT way. There is no voice tracking. There is no computer automation. There are no prewritten scripts, or staged telephone calls. We take requests, and we PLAY them. We maintain a library of over 10,000 titles in the studio. We are Pop, Rock, Classic Rock, Alternative, Indie, Country, Rap, and Soul. Look at some of our playlists, the variety speaks for itself.
We process the audio using some fine analog equipment. We add big Lexicon reverb, deep and fat dBX compression, and finish it off with a few trick boxes from Aphex. Analog has such a beautiful, full, and rich sound, that processing in that domain yields a sound that has its roots in the great AMs of the 50s and 60s.
We choose the music as we go, and sometimes we are scrambling to find the very next song as the song playing is running down. Sometimes we pick a song because it flows, sometimes because it will change up the sound, and sometimes, well, just because we want to hear it.
We play most of our music off CD, some from a computer, and some from the original vinyl. Everything is controlled manually. There is no electronic wizardry. We know the intro times and the outques, we overlap IDs and songs and talking and sound effects. Just running the board for a 4 hour show is exhausting, before even talking. But it is all absolutely live.
We do not believe in canned programming.
We do not believe in preselected music lists.
We play songs that people want to hear, because they have asked to hear them.
And most importantly… we have fun… and THAT is what makes the show enjoyable.
Please join us for our next broadcast. Request some songs. Turn up the volume. And enjoy listening to radio the way it should be.
Thank you all for making Outrageous Radio a success.
Sincerely,
The Mike Bonte Program
