Radio Drops #13: Talk Over Intro

If the DJ ain’t talking over song intros, it ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll radio. The video runs 4:30.

Watch the video on YouTube: Radio Drops #13: Talk Over Intros

Talking Up to the Post

The first time I heard a rock and roll radio station, and a disc jockey talking over the intros of songs, I was 10 going on 11. The station was out of New Orleans, Louisiana.

I’d heard a little rock and roll by then. The local station in town played it from 4:30 until sign-off, which in the wintertime was about an hour and a half. The disc jockey, if you could call him that, sounded like great-uncle Fred. It was not exciting, and he didn’t have the best records anyway. I could just feel there was more to it than this.

Then I heard that New Orleans station. You could only get it at night, a long-distance signal, and the disc jockey talked over all the intros. I hadn’t heard that before, and it added a sense of immediacy. It was like there was so much exciting stuff going on, so much he had to pack into the hour, that he didn’t have time to stop and just talk. He had to keep the music going and talk over it.

Three years later I heard the superstar disc jockey of WLS out of Chicago, another late-night big signal. He talked over the intros too, and this guy was having more fun than anybody I had ever heard. Then at 16 I became a disc jockey and got to talk over the records myself. It was such fun, all the time I was on the air.

Hitting the Post

The thing was, you wanted to talk over the intro right up to the singer. You wanted to hit the post. That means you don’t step on the vocal: you’ve said your complete sentence and ended it a fraction of a second before the guy starts singing.

But I don’t think you should try to hit the post every time. Then it becomes a little self-indulgent. Beyond 10 or maybe 15 seconds, there’s wiggle room.

Take the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” It’s got a 14-second intro before Mick starts to sing. There’s a good place to stop at the seven-second mark, or the 10-second mark, which gives the listener a little more of Keith Richards’ guitar before Mick kicks in. And with a killer intro like that, maybe half the time you play it, give the listener the entire intro, so he can rock out to that Keith Richards riff, circa 1965, the way it’s supposed to be rocked out to.

How It Can Go Bad

Now here’s how it can go bad. When you rip a song into your automation system, the professional systems let you set whether a voice track can lay over that song’s intro. And the song may have a 17- or 20-second intro, or longer. You got to think: how much talk on that thing are you going to allow?

The worst case I ever heard: I was driving into Austin, Texas, not long ago, listening to one of the big-market, big-owner stations, totally voice tracked. They do very well with voice tracking. The young lady on the air sounds like she’s right there in Austin, other than the fact that she never says Austin, Texas all that much. That’s a different subject, though.

She starts talking, and in the background comes the intro to the classic “Take On Me” by a-ha. The first time you heard that record, it grabbed you. It’s one of the great intros to a pop record of all time. It just grabs the imagination.

That intro is 34 seconds long, from the first note till the first voice. Thirty-four seconds. And this canned voice track from a nice-sounding lady started talking and hit the post on “Take On Me.” It just irritated me to no end.

It’s a rookie mistake, or an oversight. The audio file had 34 seconds as the intro, and the automation system was set to let voice tracks lay over song intros. And there you go. That’s something I think you ought to give a little consideration when you’re putting music on the radio. Keep it smooth.