Please Listen...
 

I made a radio show, because I'm trying to get on college radio and you have to have experience, so I would be much obliged if you gave it a listen.

Any criticism would be appreciated...

http://www.clickcaster.com/themowinghour

Thankyou!

I was a college radio DJ 2 years ago, I'll see what advice I can give you.

I like your show (I did sort of skim it because I don't have time for the whole thing right now), it is very good. Having live sessions with musicians is very cool and not many DJs do it. You also have a very pretty voice and your delivery when speaking is very real, which is good. You don't want to sound like a robot. I also really like how you had him write a song to end your show. That was a nice surprise.

My experience with college radio (WRCT wrct.org) is that you just have to approach the radio station and ask to join. WRCT had a manual to read and then a test to take. You learn a few technical things about radio- the wattage of your station, etc. But then after I took the test, they paired me with a DJ with similar taste. So I assisted him in DJ'ing and slowly learned how to do everything:

• answer the phone
• do public service announcements and play promos from a machine called the CART (stupid prerecorded messages telling you that you are listening to WRCT)
• How to censor out swearing
• How to enter your playlists into the computer
• how to queue up vinyls and CDs and make smooth transitions between them in realtime
• Using the mixer so that you can be at unity and not clip the signal when it goes out over the air
• How to enter your playlists
• How to turn the station on or off
• How to sign the logs

They only had a few requirements:

• You do the callsign every hour (WRCT Pittsburgh for me)
• You do 1 minute worth of atleast 2 promos and 1 minute worth of atleast 2 PSAs (atleast 30 seconds spoken through the mic) each hour
• You play 3 bin cuts an hour (CDs in the bin are CDs that have recently been released and therefor chart in say, CMJ) labels and distros that send you CDs want to see that they're new CDs have been playing. This is the stations way of showing them, so they can keep getting free CDs. (Radio Stations spend very little on music)
• You enter a playlist into the computer for online listeners to look at
• You fill out your logs properly
• If you are the first or last DJ, properly turn the station on or off and play an appropriate sign on/sign off CART.
• No obscenity, Indecency, or Profanity (which is widely open to interpretation, yippee!) I don't know how the laws are in the UK, if it is as shitty as with the FCC or not, but yeah, you get my point.

After I learned how to do everything, I took a test, passed it, and got my own show at a very desirable time.

In your case, you might do things a bit differently if you are going to have live performers, you'd have to be trained in production as well, although if you just record it home and bring it in on CD-R then you wouldn't.

Hey, thanks a lot for listening. I appreciate you spending the time to do that.
I'm going to talk to them straight away when I get there, 'cause they probably have a stall at freshers fair. I can deal with taking a test (I hope). Did you not have any experience when you went on? How often was your show, and for how long?
Thanks again.