The Larson Family

I’m workin’ tonight. My boss, Ed Schultz, is holding a town hall meeting in Seattle and I’m here at the studio in Fargo on Recording and Production duties.

If you’re nerdy enough to be interested, this is what I’m doing.

Through the miracle of modern technology, I connect our studio in Fargo to the venue, Seattle Town Hall in this case, where an engineer is on hand to pipe the sound of our studio through the sound system at the venue. We do multiple checks to make sure the audience will be able to hear the sound I play through our control board in Fargo, and that I will be able to record the audio coming through Ed’s mic and multiple house mics.

About an hour before the show, the on-site producer arranges with the engineer an onsite spot where they will each stand so they can see each other. Ten minutes before the show, I call the engineer and give him the ten minute warning. He holds up ten fingers for the producer, who relays the warning to Ed. At five minutes before the show, the engineer relays the five minute warning.

When I get down to thirty seconds, I give the warning to the engineer, and I hang up. At exactly 8:05:53 I play an Ed Schultz Show intro customized for the Seattle Town Hall. It is heard instantly across the country at Seattle Town Hall. the audience applauds, and Ed comes out and does a progressive talk presentation for an hour.

At the end of the hour, I call the engineer and repeat the five minute countdown. We finish the hour when I send a ten second music bed down the line to Seattle. When Ed hears it, he knows he has ten seconds to wrap up the hour. We take about eight minutes off, then do it all again for the final hour of the town hall.

Tomorrow morning I will spend most of the morning taking those two recorded hours and breaking them up into ten segments of specific length to make room for commercials and network breaks, two hours of radio talk show. Then at 11am Central, I feed the produced show down the line to Denver, who in turn send it out to nearly one hundred affiliates nationwide.

It’s in the Pacific Time Zone tonight, which means a later night than usual for me. — Troy