How I Got interested in Audio and Radio Broadcasting

When I was about seven or eight, I discovered my parents' 'shoebox' audio Compact Cassette recorder. Audio Compact Cassettes were invented by Philips in 1963 along with, naturally enough, the first Compact Cassette recorder, to go with it. It was this recorder that my parents had. Here's a pic from a page on the company's website which briefly describes the product:

Photo credit: Royal Philips

Note that the white section of the microphone and the white leads and plugs were black on my parents' recorder and the whole ensemble came with its black, shoulder-strapped leather case through which it could be just as easily operated—perfect for taking to the streets for those essential vox pops and roving reports!

I don't think my parents would have had an audio recorder if it hadn't been for the fact a family friend was a TV and radio repairman. Over several cassettes they'd recorded family conversations. Maybe not strictly fly-on-the-wall in that, a toddler, I seem to remember the recorder on a table and in full view of everyone although, I'm sure, after a while, people's mindfulness of its presence was soon lost. I definitely remember listening to a particular recording and hearing my parents and maternal aunt chatting with each other—and me swearing ('Bugger!'), for which I got a very mild telling off, all of which I simply found funny. Those recordings have long since ceased to exist; as such a young child, not realising their future nostalgia value, I recorded over them, the cassettes eventually thrown away.

But I had been bitten by the audio bug.

One of the things I noticed about the recorder was that, when in record mode, an second head engaged with the tape. By sticking a small piece of sticky tape over the face of that head, it was confirmed, as I had predicted, that existing recordings on a tape would not be erased when making a new recording; the pre-existing recording would still be there, the new one 'superimposed' on it. I later found out that this is a recording technique known as 'overdubbing'.

This was a thrilling revelation: it meant I could complete a recording project over several sessions, adding sounds one at a time, on top of what was already recorded, rather than adding all sounds at the same time, recording everything in one 'take'; without the ability to overdub, if only one piece of material had been supplied unsatisfactorily, all that work would have to be re-done. Of course, it was possible to add a single sound unsatisfactorily, with no way of correcting that, but, with overdubbing, the risk is reduced to a minimum. A second recorder with a back-up of the previous recording would have been nice but I had only one recorder. The much better alternative to this overdubbing is, as I later found out, is to use a multi-track recorder; instead of recording sounds on top of each other, you record them alongside each other, creating tracks, with one sound per track. Subsequently, my mother purchased for herself a new cassette recorder, this one much more compact and, stylishly, chromed metal. Inevitably, I got hold of it. Inspecting the device, I found that the erase head contained not a permanent magnet but an electromagnet, meaning that it was magnetised and therefore able to erase recordings only when current was passed through it. This was fortunate for two reasons: one that access to the head to apply sticky tape to it was difficult because the cassette compartment lid was designed to only partially open. The other was that, in any case, it would be much more convenient to exploit the fact the erase head contained an electromagnet by inserting an electrical microswitch into the circuit powering the electromagnet. That way I could record onto the tape, erasing what, if anything, was already recorded on it, or record onto the tape as an overdub, the 'underlying' pre-existing recording left present, toggling between the two at the flick of that switch, during recording or otherwise.

At around the age of fifteen, c 1986, I somehow had the money to go out and buy a bunch of audio equipment to set up an amateur, hobby radio studio. With only a couple of hundred quid to spend, I headed to the neighbouring town of Middlesbrough and its Maplin electronics store, which I think was up Linthorpe Road. I walked in shortly before closing time and quickly decided what I wanted: a four-channel mixer; two cassette players; a cassette recorder (a hi-fi 'seperate'); a microphone; a gooseneck microphone desktop stand; and necessary audio cables. These were all Maplin's own-brand—'Realistic'—products. One thing about this own-brand range was that, apart from value-for-money, there was some unusual stuff, an example of which were to two identical cassette players I bought. These were small boxes, about seven inches wide by five inches deep by six inches high—ideal, like their professional-grade equivalents, eight-track cartridge players—for the limited purpose of playing out idents (jingles) and commercials. I took a bunch of blank cassettes and opened them up. I unhitched the spool-end of the non-recordable piece of leader tape from its spool, cut it off, and hitched the end of the now-leaderless tape to it. This solved the problem of getting idents, commercials and any other recordings to play, and, if desired, be quickly replayed the instant I wanted them too. If I had left the leader tape in place, I would have had to cue up the tape to the start of whatever I'd recorded on it. This would either be by trial and error, fast-forwarding or rewinding while listening to the tape output, or simply rewinding to the start of the tape and waiting until the recording started playing then back-cueing a centimetre or so, having remembered to fully close the fader channel the tape player was connected to otherwise the fragments of audio from the player as I tried to find the start of the recording would be recorded by the cassette recorder that was recording the radio show this was all a part of the making of. So, with leaderless tapes, all I had to do was hit the rewind button on the cassette player to rewind the tape fully, engage the pause button, and then hit the play button (which released the rewind mechanism). The tape was thus all cued up and ready to play out the jingle, or whatever the audio was, the instant I released the pause button. Recording a jingle or other audio was similarly done: take a blank tape, rewind it fully to the beginning, engage the pause button, hit play and record buttons simultaneously (which released the rewind mechanism), then release the pause button the moment the audio I wanted to record started to play. Once a jingle had been played out, it only needed to be rewound to the beginning, the pause button engaged, etc, as above.

Eventually, my interest in my set-up waned and I abandoned it. I had never wanted to be a DJ or any other kind of presenter. Putting together a show was one thing but my passion lay in the technical side of things, such as sound balancing; working out how to configure audio networks for maximum flexibility so that any audio source could be made available to any audio destination, for example; hooking up and configuring equipment; making patch cords; coming up with solutions to problems, such as how to turn a cheap, consumer grade tape player into a jingle player that was funtionally as good as its purpose built, professional equivalent; etc. But with very limited funds I was very limited in the equipment I could buy and, as I said, it wasn't as if I had a passion for producing content with it.

Within a few years I'd left school (it didn't have a radio station, btw) and taken up a place on a Youth Training Scheme (YTS) with a provider, 'Studio 64', on Corporation Road, Middlesbrough, to train in video (camera work and editing). I wasn't really interested in video but there were no local, if any, YTS training opportunites in audio or radio; this was the nearest thing available and, of course, video work involves electrical signals, and, usually, audio ones as well, going from 'A' to 'B', using similar technology and equipment. There were two other trainees on the course and we were led by a brilliant tutor, of Jamaican heritage, who obviously cared about his subject and his trainees but was as frustrated as we trainees in the totally inadequate government funding provided. You have to bear in mind that this was the eighties, when things were still very much in the analogue domain; analogue equipment being much more expensive than its digital, functional equivalent because of the fact that it's harder, and therefore more expensive, requiring higher-quality components, to maintain a given level of audio or video signal quality with analogue than digital. We had a few cameras and a Betacam or Umatic edit suite but there was little practical training we could do. After a few weeks, I left to go to college.

College was a much better proposition. Its media studies course, while not specific to audio or radio, nevertheless was much better funded—they had their own radio studio, donated by the BBC, investing in an upgrade. The course was comprehensive, covering the physics of optics, including recreating Einstein's famous slit experiment to demonstrate the wave-particle nature of light, taught by a teacher the stature and spitting image of Brigitte Nielsen. Our tutor was the manager of a local, historic picture house. As it turned out, I was able to complete only a few weeks of the course as funding for my place on the course was suddenly withdrawn. To be honest, it was a blessing; there was a significant and disruptive immaturity of many of the other sudents, one particular example being a disturbing incident of bullying towards a person with disabilities. It was also difficult to get to the college because of a lack of bus services meaning that, despite the college being in the neighbouring town, I was forced to arrive into class after around an hour's cumulative travel time fifteen minutes late every day.