A look into the studio

ok ... let's try this.

My intent was to put together a mini ‘how to operate the board’ tutorial. This isn’t it. Instead, I guess it’s just a peek into the studio, a la 2009. Important note: I are not a photographer.

Welcome to the WTUL studio. We cleaned up just last week—really—but it still looks a little messy.

This is a shot of the console looking from the left, where the computer resides. We use the computer to enter our playlists so we can satisfy the FCC, which for webcasting requires that information including song title, artist, and label be available for internet listeners. Or something like that.



This picture shows the phone, main mic, console board, and at the far end, our cd players. (We have 2 microphones, the 2nd, guest mic, can partially be seen hunkered down next to the main mic.


This is little bit better shot of the cd players (left) and turntables (you know where they are). The computer at the bottom left in the crook of the console is cabled to the auxiliary cable, which allows broadcast from ipods, computers, etc.


A closeup of the board. The yellow lights indicate the corresponding device (mic, cd player, turntable, aux cable) is off, or in a waiting status (I guess). The corresponding device is activated by pressing the red button & sliding up the corresponding white knob (as seen just above the red buttons). The green/orange/red band at the upper right portion of the picture indicates that the channel is running too hot. Heh. The board is pretty clearly marked with black Sharpie to show which slider/button goes with each device.




A shot from behind the console. Roomy enough for two (or more). You can see the computer monitor on the left, the board in front of Mark, the bohemian hippie folk guy who’s doing an air break, cd players to mark’s immediate right, and turntables there at the bottom right of the pic. Again, notice the laptop to Mark’s immediate right. He’s got it cabled in so he can play songs from his hard drive. Important note: the table is actually broken. We postulate that someone used it for table dancing or perhaps a launch for crowd surfing. Some things never change.



For the observant amongst you, you might notice the white thing at the bottom of the pic behind Mark’s elbow with an unside-down black sticker reading TOM. (That’s a sticker for The Tomatoes, a local garage rock band.) That’s the monitor for the computer that hosts our connection to the transmitter. DO NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER. Thank you.

A couple of things to stop the panic attack now descending on you:
1 Current staff DJs will be on duty in the station during the entire alumni weekend. They will act as your board ops, your vinyl fetcher, your DJ slave (did you guys used to have those for marathon?), or will sit quietly in the other room using the office computer to play games or cruise porn.
2 You will have paper playlists that the current staff DJ will magically transform into online playlists. (We use wtul.radioactivity.fm to post our playlists. It is a very simple procedure which you may or may not want to learn, but that the current staff DJ will handle. Close to realtime posting is required by the FCC for our webcast.)
3 We still file the vinyl numerically & we still have the cookbook. It’s not the same one you used, but if yours was falling apart & missing pages, it will look just like that & you won’t be able to tell the difference. (We also have a soft copy on the office computer.)
4 I can’t think of anything else, but I bet you can. Email me any questions.

A few general pictures of the stacks

This is the left half of the stacks. The empty bins you see in the front are the result of a massive reshift of all the Cds. We moved them around to make room for new stuff coming in. Our MD is a reviewing machine, and we add approximately … 120-200 new CDs every month. The wall on the left is progressive viny, ranging from 0100 to about 9500 or so.



These are the stacks from the right side. We have about … 6 maybe? … rows of CD shelves, which hold CDs by genre, i.e., progressive, jazz, classical, electronic, cheezmuzik, and a few others I can’t remember right now. The vinyl against the back wall is progressive continued, which now goes to somewhere around 14000. I think.



Against the wall to the right, which obviously you can’t see, are LPs by genre: jazz, country, classical, hip hop, and electronic. We have a few of the blues albums broken out into a separate section, but whoever started that project lost steam & never finished.

This is a view from the stacks into the studio, against the far wall of the studio. From the left, we have local, country/folk, blues, and world CDs. Continuing around the corner are metal and merits, then compilation CDs.





So now you have an idea what WTUL looks like in 2009.