WCSB 89.3fm in cleveland: a virtual tour

i've been meaning to do this for a while now. WCSB is the student/staff volunteer run radio station out of cleveland state university. the station has been running for over 30 years, and by next november i will have been a member of it for 5 of those years. within the past year we moved to a bigger (nicer!) studio, so here is a virtual tour of where i spend 2 hours every tuesday nite :)

i forgot to take pictures of the outside of the building. we share a spot with the college's newspaper. once you walk through the computer lab, you come to this:



you need a special little id card to scan yourself in and then the door will open for you. when you step inside, you enter this hallway:



on the left side you see all our fliers and posters for upcoming events:



beyond that, you are in our music library. we are lucky enough to have a really big library! this comes in handy when people make requests, or when you are tired of everything in your own personal collection. some people program their show entirely out of our library! personally i like to bring my own things and only pull stuff from the library when i get a request for it or when it's something i want to hear that i don't have or didn't bring.

everything is organized by genre and is in alphabetical order. we have walls and walls of cds for every genre imaginable!:







we also have a huge collection of vinyl. a lot of the vinyl library is old, original pressings, out of print, rare and/or hard to find. we're super fortunate to have such a cool collection! every shelf you see with one of those black handles (they look sorta like giant filing cabinets in the photo) is filled from floor to ceiling (and front to back) with records. i can only dream about having a personal collection this big some day!:







if you take a right off the main hallway, the first room is our production studio. i don't have any pictures of that because someone was in there working on something when i was up there. it looks just like our main air anyway, and i have some pictures of that.

next is our lounge/live band room.






this room acts as a live studio where bands can come play and be broadcast over the air with amazing sound quality. usually, i just punk rock it and have bands set up in the main air studio with me, but this is our other (higher quality) option. when there are no bands playing here, it is where you can sit and chill til you have to go on the air. there are computers with internet access and chairs to lounge around. and now we apparently have an arcade game in there, although i don't think it works at the moment.





here is josh hanging out until hot trash begins:



you see that black foam stuff on the walls above josh's head? that's to soundproof the room when bands are playing live. apparently it is also very expensive and it's a huge no-no to even touch it. good to know!

here's our mailboxes. sometimes i get penpal letters from an inmate in prison. i don't know him, but he used to pick up the station when he was in prison around here and i guess he loved hot trash. he started writing me letters with lists of request from the other inmates that he would go around and collect when they were out on the yard. he is into punk and garage stuff. ha. eventually he got moved somewhere farther out and couldn't pick up our signal anymore, but he still sends me letters and calls me funny nicknames like "queen of the airwaves" and stuff.



this is out in the hallway. it's a working grid of all the shows currently on the air:



the executive staff members have some offices, but it's nothing interesting to photograph. so that leaves main air. this is where all the magic happens! or something.



featured in this picture of the main air studio is a shot of the ever-elusive DRICORE, who takes over on tuesday nites when hot trash is done. getting evidence of him on film is like catching a rare glimpse of an endangered species of exotic bird. he is standing right in the middle of all the action -- right by the main microphone where i broadcast the show and surrounded by all the equipment like turntables, cd players, and the board.



here are two of our three turntables. i love playing records:



and here are the 3 cd players. we also have tape players that i use on occasion, but in general my show is about 50% vinyl and 50% cd:



and this is the main board that i use to run the show. it looks a lot more intimidating than it actually is to work:



we still dj the oldskool way. THIS IS THE BEAUTY OF COLLEGE RADIO! we don't use computerized playlists or have assistants and interns. we don't have to play a required "top 40" list, we get to choose whatever we want to go over the airwaves. we can choose to talk a little, or not at all. if we start playing a song and it's awful, we can just stop it right in the middle because we want to! we can let our personalities shine through the show we create and execute. remember when they used to call them "dj personalities"?! those of us who have a nite time spot are able to play words over the air that most commercial stations would be banned from playing. we do everything ourselves to run our own shows. and there are so many different shows/genres/formats on one single station that it has the potential to blow minds. seriously people, college radio is a GODSEND.

at any given time throughout my 2-hour show, i can be found:
-picking out what song i want to play off a cd/record/tape
-programming the chosen song on the specific player
-paying attention to time and starting/stopping each song by pushing buttons on the board (bonus points for smooth transitions!)
-answering the phones and taking requests
-running into the record library room, finding requests, pulling them out, and refiling them back into place
-playing station IDs every hour on the hour (or reading them when the computer isn't working)
-playing content disclaimers every 30 minutes (or reading..)
-playing at least two PSAs every hour (or reading..)
-filling out a legal log
-keeping my own setlist of songs to read back on the air
-checking any internet requests (email, myspace, facebook, etsy, etc!)

PHEW! sometimes it's a miracle the show runs as smoothly as it does. you definitely have to be able to multi-task to run a radio show like this. a lot is going on behind the scenes and those people tuning in have no idea how lucky they are that all they hear is the rock'n'roll coming out of the speakers and not me swearing and huffing when something isn't working or i drop all my cds or i can't find someone's request. ; )

i'm really lucky to have an opportunity like this and i love being a part of the station. if you ever tune in, be sure to let me know so i know YOU'RE the one responsible for making me run around like a maniac getting everything done. if it weren't for you, being a dj on college radio wouldn't be nearly as fun. ; )

HOT TRASH
tuesday nites
11pm-1am est
89.3fm or www.wcsb.org
http://myspace.com/hot_trash