krlaughlin

As a teen in the sixties, I took over my parents Ampex reel-to-reel and started recording airchecks from WLS and WCFL. Not satisfied with listening to all the commercials and voice-overs, I acquired a second reel-to-reel and dubbed the airchecks to the second deck, editing out the chatter and re-arranging the songs in an order I preferred. I would sometimes record outside ambient sounds and create new shows using those ambient sounds, my voice-overs, and the aircheck segments. These shows, while technologically crude, were very popular at parties. Around 1968, I became inspired by the work of John DeWitt, creator and producer of "The Young Sound" which aired on many CBS affiliates, including WBBM-FM, Chicago. "The Young Sound" consisted of a series of pre-recorded fifteen-minute music sets--specially arranged, blended, and mixed such that the relationships among the songs were as artistic as the songs themselves. This inspiration led to 30 years of taking that production concept to a whole new level. The result of this effort led to a programming concept called ESP--an acronym for Eclectic Set Programming (described in "My Station"). My enthusiasm for broadcasting is based on my love for arranging, blending, and mixing sounds such that the set becomes greater than the sum of the songs. Check it out for yourself.