In this age of voice-tracking and syndication, I often come across people who never listen to themselves on the air.

In the old days, we had cassettes, usually one for each day of the week.  And I’d take the cassette, and play it in the car as I drove home or ran errands, just listening to the show.  Not to see how “wonderful” I was (I don’t think there was ever a show that seemed perfect to me), but to have an accurate feel for how I – or we, in my team show days – came across on the air, and to pick up on little “crutch” habits or words I used too much.  Maybe I laughed too often as a sort of reflex, for instance.  After HEARING it, I could start working immediately on CORRECTING it.

Okay, cassette days are gone.  But they’ve been replaced with truly incredible technology.  We have computer audio files that we can access remotely, we have devices for our phones or computers to record the show, and there’s simply no excuse anymore for not really knowing how you sound on the air.

If you want to get better, listen to yourself.  At least once a week. PDs often don’t have time to do aircheck sessions much anymore.  And if your station doesn’t use a Talent Coach, you can get into some nasty habits pretty easily.  (One woman I worked with laughed like a water buffalo being electrocuted.  But she was totally unaware of it.  Had she EVER bothered to listen to her OWN SHOW, she’d have realized it herself, instead of having to have me tell her about it.  Boy, was that session not fun.)

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

We hear it all the time.  “Be yourself on the air.”

Being yourself IS what you want to be, UNLESS your natural “self” is too exuberant for the intimacy of radio.

Loud talkers, for instance.  Those jocks that seem to SHOUT everything.  Over the course of coaching somewhere around 1700 people, I’ve dealt with a lot of these foghorn types, usually old Top 40 jocks who make “announcements” or “present” things.  And they always say the same thing when I point this out:  “But that’s just the way I talk.”  (Actually, they say “BUT THAT’S JUST THE WAY I TALK.”)

Well if that’s true, you’ll need to change.

To become a great talent, you need to fully understand, master, and be able to control your “instrument” – your voice.

When you SHOUT at me on the air, you’re forgetting that I can hit a button and turn you OFF.  And believe me, I will.

If you need to get loud to express excitement or outrage, back off the mic a few inches, even turn your head away from it.  That way, I still get the Emotion, but I also still have functioning eardrums.

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

One of the things I get asked about a lot is phone calls.  Some PDs think that putting a lot of phone calls on the air is the whole point; that putting people who’ve never had any sort of training in mass communication, speech, acting, or writing will somehow be better than an air talent who’s had years of experience and doesn’t ramble on about insignificant details when he or she is telling a story.

It’s not that I don’t like callers being on the air; I’ve done shows that were extremely phone-intensive.  But you have to have a sense of what the real point is.  So think of it this way:

You don’t want to take phone calls.  You want to take verbal photographs from people.  If what’s being said doesn’t make you see something, or imagine in your mind what it would be like to be in that person’s shoes, it’s not worth airing.

And let me clarify that you want snapshots, not movies.  Every second that you let a caller continue to talk, you face being driven off a cliff.  If possible, record and EDIT every call.  In a Talk format, be prepared to simply cut off a caller, then go on to make your point, or hit the button to go to the next thing.

Whenever I tell a group of people this stuff, someone says “But won’t that sound rude?”

No. What’s rude is subjecting the Listener to a boring, information-driven call that seems ten times longer than it actually is.  Frankly, the listener deserves better than that.

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

“Look at how she treats me…” immediately followed by the guy who said it laughing at his own remark.

That’s what I heard an air talent do the other day on a team show that I was listening to.

Sometimes in coaching, I ask a talent “what were you trying to do there?”  What that question really means is something I really don’t want to print. : )

Besides the fact that this line was just a useless, extraneous remark, when you point something out like that guy did, it only gives off the vibe that you really didn’t like it – or even worse, that you’re just trying to draw attention back to yourself.

Don’t “explain” it or comment on how you’re “mock”-being-taken-advantage-of.  Just let it sit.  People will like you more.  When you over-act (or overreact), you become a caricature instead of a character.

If I’d been that guy’s partner, we would have had a serious talk after we got off the air about his killing the moment.

Sometimes it’s the little, tiny things that make or break that connection with the listener.

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Beau Weaver is an excellent Voice Actor in Los Angeles.  I’ve worked with Beau on and off ever since we first met as radio babies decades ago, and his transition from being a great disc jockey to succeeding in the voiceover universe has been inspiring.

At a seminar we did together in L.A. a few years ago, one of the things that Beau said to a roomful of radio people who were looking to move into the voiceover arena was “Sometimes you have to be willing to become a beginner again.”

As this is being written, I’ve just finished listening to an aircheck from a jock who always answers comments from his Program Director with “I’ve been at this for 25 years,” a defensive mechanism that’s keeping him from learning.  To put it gently, I fear that his situation will not end well.

At key times in your career, you have to be willing to become a beginner again.  Unless they’re making another Jurassic Park movie, no one is looking to hire dinosaurs.

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

The words “information” and “details” are poisonous words.  You should try to avoid them.

If you’re a regular follower of my tips, you know that “left brain” thoughts or words don’t really click with the listener as much as “right brain” stuff.

For the uninitiated, the left brain is about order, reason, math, numbers, percentages.  The right brain is where emotion, art, creativity and allegiance all live.

When you say something like “Find the details on our website” or “Go to my Facebook page for more information,” what people HEAR is “There’s a bunch of crap in a really tiny font that you can go read.”

What you SHOULD say is something like “Find out more on my Facebook page” or “Everything you need to know is at khip.com” instead.

You’re talking to a PERSON, not a robot getting information.

ALWAYS live in the right brain.  “A juicy steak” is better than just “a 14-ounce rib-eye.”  You want to paint PICTURES with words, not numbers or lists.

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

The future of radio – no matter how it’s delivered – is going to be about Personalities.  Air Talent that seems like your best, most entertaining friend; that person that always finds just the right word to describe something that we’re both going through or thinking about.

But radio isn’t the Chuckle Shack.  We’re not standup comedians, and shouldn’t really want to seem like that, anyway.  You just want to be that one person that always gets invited to the party because you’ll be interesting and amusing, and make the person who’s hosting the party look good for inviting you.

Here’s the way it works:

Job One is to only talk about things that are relevant and top-of-mind to the listener.  Once you’re zeroed in on “narrow focusing” your Content to that degree, Fun grows out of that.

But there’s a difference between being perceived as fun versus seeming like someone “trying to be funny”.  I think that the very core of “trying to be funny” is when you take something that ISN’T relevant and attempt to make it entertaining.

You have to CHOOSE.  One way leads to tremendous, never-ending growth.  The other leads to actually having to WORK for a living.  Ewww.

Work joyfully on getting better.  If you hit a wall, get a coach.

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

In the last tip, I talked about Repetition and Redundancy, two things that can wreck a show.

(It also hurts Imaging and commercials, by the way. Imaging doesn’t need to say “Magic 102.9/102.9” with that second time repeated or slightly overlapped.  Ugh.  And I’m sure we’ve all wanted to unload a double-barreled shotgun at the TV when we heard a phone number given for the thirteenth time in one of those “Call right now!” spots.)

Anyway, the last tip ended with this:

Repetition HURTS breaks.  Redundancy KILLS them.  Radio – at least GREAT radio – is always about how concisely you can get things said.  A good rule of thumb is “say things ONCE.”  What you leave UNSAID is just as important as what you say.

Now let’s add two more rules to that:

1. Make ONE point.
2. Give ONE example.

When you do more, it’s tedious, and makes breaks SOUND longer than they actually are.  And remember, trying to be thorough is the enemy of editing.

There’s a LOT more to this… but as John Lennon said when a reporter shouted out “Sing something for us!” during the Beatles’ first U. S. press conference, “We have to have money first.”

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Repetition is defined as “the act of doing or saying something again.”  Flip on the radio and you’ll hear this constantly; this almost compulsive-sounding need to say something, then repeat it, like the listener is an idiot.  (For a while, people were being COACHED to do this.  Remember those double time checks?  “Seven-fifteen, fifteen minutes after seven o’clock.”  Ugh.)  Redundancy is defined, for our purposes, as “the inclusion of more information than is necessary for communication.”

An example of this is “82 degrees and raining outside.”

“Outside?”  Well, thank goodness.  If it were raining INSIDE, that could lead to some pretty expensive roof work.

Recently, I heard a talent start a break with, “This is maybe the best example of ‘for better or worse’ that I’ve ever seen…” and then tell about a man who had been the President of a university in South Carolina, and how his wife of more than forty years, a woman named Muriel, had contracted Alzheimer’s.

Then, instead of going directly to the audio clip of the man making his announcement, he added, “This is his announcement to the university that he was resigning so that he could take care of Muriel…”

Then he played the audio clip of the announcement, which basically was just the man repeating everything the host had already said!

This break should have come with a “spoiler alert”.  In the mind of the listener, it’s “been there; heard that.”

Here’s the lesson:

Repetition HURTS breaks.  Redundancy KILLS them.

Radio – at least GREAT radio – is always about how concisely you can get things said.  A good rule of thumb is “say things ONCE.”  What you leave UNSAID is just as important as what you say.

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

On a recent ‘listen’ to a guy in New York that I coach, he came out of a Peter Gabriel tune by saying “I still remember when that song was in ‘Say Anything’… back in the late 80s or early 90s… that John Cusack film…”

Oops.  Incomplete prep.  Not good.  With all the resources we have today, there’s simply no reason to not have the information ready.  He could have (1) looked it up on imdb.com, (2) Googled the movie, or (3) just asked Siri.

Here’s what I told him: People don’t tune in to hear you GUESS about things.  You’re supposed to KNOW, whether it’s just when a movie came out, or what time an act will go onstage at a concert the station is hosting, or telling me about a contest or promotion.  Deliver information, not just guesses.  YOU’RE the authority.  (Or at least you SHOULD be.)

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.