Rock Radio Scrapbook

AIRCHECK OF THE WEEK
For week of May 9, 2010
Weekly issue #579

(Photo courtesy Patrick Bergin)

Scott Carpenter's "Saturday Night Solid Gold Rock 'N' Roll Party" displayed his skill as both a broadcaster and a producer. The show - which debuted on CHUM in January, 2007 - brought Carpenter back to the station after an absence of nearly 30 years. Voiced and produced by Carpenter from his home in Fredericksburg, Va., it was one of the major highlights of the last years of music at the Toronto station. His show - and the rest of CHUM's oldies programming - disappeared from the airwaves when the station began simulcasting the all-news cable TV station CP24 in March, 2009.

"Brad Jones and I had spoken numerous times over the years about doing a show, but we didn't know what to do. Finally ... we decided to bring back The Boogieman. But it had to be a more mature approach, a sort of grown up Boogieman I guess.
 
ISDN lines are no longer available where I live, so we had to use a telephone codec for the voice tracks. We tried a Comrex, POTS codec, and were surprised that the quality was more than sufficient. I used a  $30 mike that I'd been using as a drum overhead. My sons and I recorded the bumpers in my recording studio. We just picked some songs from the 50's 60's and 70's with recognizable hooks, and riffed on them. The requests were handled by using a Vonage virtual number in Toronto. I simply downloaded them as mp3s and played them back from here.
 
We wanted the show to sound live, so I had to adjust each track because of a 1/2 second lag. That took a lot of time. Also, I did the tracking a couple of hours before show time, so I could slide in bits that were time appropriate.
 
In the two years I did it I received dozens of e-mails from PDs and OMs across the US and Canada asking if I flew up each week to do the thing live. Very few people ever guessed it was voice tracked."

More airchecks from the 2000s here!

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