Outrageous Radio: The Philosophy

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. And I used to think it was bad with these national formats like “JACK FM”, "playing what we want." Now, we have to deal with Ryan Seacrest everywhere, playing the same stupid songs and making the same stupid jokes. It’s ridiculous.

So we do something different. Once a month, on a Friday evening, we fire up the 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 close to 30,000 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 old school way... and use some fine equipment amassed over the years. We add big Lexicon reverb, deep and fat dBX compression, and finish it off with a few trick boxes from Aphex and TC Electronic. We shoot for a full and rich sound, that processing you remember from when radio was exciting, that processing which 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.

We take the sonic quality of our broadcast VERY seriously.

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

94.3 WACN Studio
Where the magic happens: The Outrageous Radio Broadcast Studio, December 2010

Equipment List (from Left To Right):
Pioneer SX-3700 Receiver (Best $10 spent at a garage sale)
Alesis DEQ-30 for room monitors
Gentner Digital Phone Hybrid
Denon DNC-30 CD Players
Tascam Dual Cassette Deck
Radix 2x8 Distribution Amp
Dorrough 40A Meters
Tascam DAT deck
DBX 286 Microphone Processors
Wheatstone Audioarts R-5 Console
Technics SL-1210-M5G Turntable
Aphex Compellor
Lexicon MPX 550 Effects Processor
Aphex 204 Aural Exciter w/ Big Bottom
TC Electronic DBMAX 5 band processor
Aphex Dominator II limiter
Computer w/ mAIRLIST software and Echo Audio soundcards

Outrageous Radio broadcasts in Microsoft Windows Media v9 format.
Get it for MAC | Get it for PC