Sound Mixer

From my earliest childhood memories, my Dad worked in radio. During a few hours in the days he was the DJ that would pick and choose which songs to play. It was way cool because we could call the phone number for the radio station before going off to school and our requests for Ray Parker’s song, Ghostbusters, would always be played. Thanks Dad!

When your the DJ at a smaller radio station, your also the one that has to run the sound mixer, otherwise known as “the board”. Dad was also the “Voice of the Madison Bobcats”. Which meant someone else would have to run the board while he was at the high school doing the play by play for the game. When I turned 14, I got my first job at the radio station doing just that. It was really fun! I would play the music before the game, connect the feed from the field to the radio station, run the commercials when there were time outs, and then link everything back up to the satellite feed when the game was over.

Working the high school games eventually evolved into me having my own radio show on Thursday nights focusing on local high school events and music. I also had to wake up early on Sunday mornings to put on the eight hour show “The Sounds of Sunday”. It was one of the best jobs I can remember having. Where else do you get to play with a large mixing board, two turntables, cd players, and walls and walls of music. Of course, back in the day we did not have the luxury of computer based mixing and digital music files. Now you can run your own radio station right from your phone!

With ScouterLife, I put on a weekly podcast called “The Scouter’s Minute” I use pretty much the same type of equipment I did back in the day at the radio station. I have my headphones and mic. The only difference is that I do not have an analog mixer on my desk… it’s all digital! I use a digital mixer called VoiceMeeter Potato. It’s awesome! It’s capable of mixing my mic with music stored on my hard drive and sounds from the browser. A total of 5 hardware inputs and 3 virtual inputs… Way more sophisticated than the little remote mixer we would take to do the play by play at the games.

The purpose of the sound mixer is just that, to mix everything together. Next time your in the car, turn on the radio and listen to talk radio. I know, talk radio is soooo booorrrring. But in reality, there is a ton of mixing going on! Take a look at what I heard in 10 minutes of listening to the local station:

• News

  • Two anchors, mixed

  • Intro music

  • sound bite involving the topic

  • fades back and forth between various sound bites and the anchors opinion

  • fade to weather

• Weather

  • Music fade in

  • Music bed behind the weather reporter

  • Exit music - fade out to sports

• Sports

  • High intensity music fade to Sports anchor

  • Multiple mix between sound bites of games and anchors view

  • Back to News

There is a ton going on behind the scenes to make the magic sound great over the air waves!