Ann DeWig, Creative Services Director, WWDC-FM, Washington, DC
Count on your fingers the number of really talented women in radio production, and you’ll probably have enough fingers left over to finish off a plate of hot wings. And the most talented women in radio production are usually found on the commercial side of things. So, it’s even more rare to find a female producer handling the imaging for a station. Let’s make that station a rocker, one whose target audience is young males, and now you have enough fingers left to pop a beer to go with those hot wings. Ann DeWig is the Creative Services Director for Clear Channel’s DC101 in the nation’s capital. Plug in this month’s RAP CD, give her demo a listen, pick your jaw up off the floor, then sit back and read all about this fast rising prod-goddess.
JV: Tell us about your radio journey to WWDC starting from your first radio experiences.
Ann: I grew up in Denver and ran away to college in a small town in Iowa where I jumped head first into their entire mass media program. Immediately, I showed interest. They threw me on the campus radio station. They threw me on the campus television station. I was anchoring weather. I was also doing a weeknight show on the radio station. It was a small town, so it wasn’t really a big deal. Before I knew it, one of my classmates suggested I join her doing part-time work at the local commercial radio station because they were looking to hire. So, I started board op-ing for Twins games up in Iowa, and they soon moved me over to the big Top 40 FM to do board op-ing for Casey Kasem. That turned into weekend overnights, which turned into weekend swing shifts, which turned into middays. And in Sioux City, Iowa, the turnaround is such that at 18 I became the Program Director of the AM station, which was Big Band, and they asked me to switch it to a Talk format. So, I worked my butt off and put in an automated system. I was throwing Michael Reagan on… “oh, that sounds good. We’ll put Dr. Laura on.” I had no clue. I wet my feet in that arena and played around as the Music Director on the Top 40 format. This was back in ’93 and ’94. It was amazing at 18 to take such an active role in a commercial radio station. That’s also where I got my feet wet in production with an 8-track reel-to-reel machine. It didn’t really spark my attention but it was something fun to do at the radio station, and it was actually something I had to do being the Program Director, producing all these IDs for Michael Reagan, Laura Schlessinger or whatever.
I was doing this at 18, and I noticed all my college classmates graduating and getting jobs at the Quickie Mart down the street—not really doing so well. I grew up in a big city, and I didn’t want to be stuck in Sioux City for the rest of my life. So, as a sophomore, I started throwing out all sorts of tapes and resumes looking for a disc jockey gig. I sent a tape and resume to every radio station in Denver thinking it was probably safe to move back home. Luckily, I got a call back from KBPI, a Jacor property, and they asked me to do weekend overnights. I guess you can say I became a jack-of-all-trades. I think at the time there were four Jacor stations in that building, and I made it a habit before leaving every day to go to every department head and ask if they needed anything. Before I knew it, I was producing a show on K-Talk. I was doing weekend overnights on both KRFX and KBPI. I was a Production Assistant for KBPI and KRFX. I filled in for traffic and continuity. You name it; I did it. When someone went on vacation, they called me. And that’s how I jumped into production because Todd Little, who was the Creative Services Director at KBPI and the one that returned my call when I was in Iowa, left to take a programming job. They filled his shoes by asking me to fill in. They weren’t really expecting me to take on the job full-time, but I think I showed such incredible drive, and everyone they were looking to hire was asking for such big money that they thought…this might not be a bad idea. So after about six months of filling in as the Creative Services Director at KBPI, the great guys at Jacor called up Eric Chase in Tampa and asked him if he wouldn’t mind me visiting him for a couple of days. So, I went down to Tampa and spent two days with Eric, and I became a Creative Services Director in those two days. I’ve never soaked up so much so fast. I really absorbed a passion for production from him. It was unbelievable. I came back more fiery then ever, and they put me on as Creative Services Director for $20,000 a year. I did that for six months before the word got out that a young punk was doing pretty good, and I got romanced by KEGL in Dallas. I went down there in ’97 and joined Nationwide Communications at KEGL, which Jacor bought, and now it’s Clear Channel. I was with KEGL for about nine months when DC101 came calling. I arrived here in November of ’98.
JV: Did they hire you as Production Director?
Ann: I was hired as the Creative Services Director for DC101. And this is the first rock station that they decided they wanted a female to be the primary voice of. I was actually doing, not only the voice work, but a majority of the production from Dallas as a freelance producer. Then, after about six months they said, “None of this. You have to be here.” So, they made it worth my while to come up. I’m the station voice and the Creative Services Director.
JV: What were those two days with Eric Chase like? What did he teach you?
Ann: He didn’t really know how to teach me the fundamentals. And no one can really teach you the fundamentals of production. The best thing that someone can do is say, “I want you to listen to everything that I’ve got here,” which would be either his own work or someone else’s work, “…listen to all of this. Tell me what you like about it. If you don’t know how to do that, I can teach you.” So we sat down and listened to, not only a great deal of his work, but work from one of his mentors, Jeff Thomas, who was at KISS FM in LA for quite a while, and now he’s back in Australia. Jeff Thomas had Eric’s head ringing. We listened to a lot of his stuff together, and Eric really opened my eyes to the world of EQ and compression. Up to that day, I kind of had an idea how to put things together in a cool way, but my stuff was very muddy and very hard to sift through. I had no concept of equalization and compression, and Eric gave me that. And now from that, for the last five, six years, everyday I experiment with frequency and equalization. Every time you sit down and get a little bit better at figuring out what EQ means and where it’s strong, you get a little bit better as a producer. I’m a big advocate of learning equalization and compression. Eric taught me enough those first couple of days to help me clean up my stuff. And in cleaning up your stuff, it allows you to do more. Say I had three layers and it was coming across muddy. If we cleaned it up and everything came across strong, all of sudden I found that I could throw in four or five layers and everything would come out clean.
JV: You’re talking about additional tracks with other elements on them?
Ann: Absolutely. Eric opened my eyes to the world of depth in production, Where I was just putting sound bites next to static bursts next to another sound effect next to another sound bite, he really showed me what depth was and how to achieve it.
The human hearing range is 20Hz and 20kHz. FM radio takes away from that range, so you’re back down to maybe 50 hertz on the low end and 15 kilohertz on the high end. Radio gives you just a certain amount to play with on the EQ band. You find out that maybe your male voice has a real strong presence at about 2K. And you also find out that a dog barking has a real strong presence at 2K. And you find out that a siren has a very strong presence at 2K. You find out all these things, and the last thing you want are for these elements to be battling one another. I don’t want my voice guy talking over a synth bed if they are both very strong at 2K. So what Eric taught me was how to use EQ, how to understand the frequency band and utilize equalization to make everything sound strong.
Say you start with a music bed and voice. First, he taught me how to EQ the voice so it would pop through the music more without having to ride the levels on the music or bring the levels of the voice way up. Then if I wanted, I would add a second voice, perhaps my own. I found that my voice was strong at a different frequency. So, I would play with the EQ on my voice so that it punched through the music better. And then you add some sound bites and do the same thing. You find the frequency where it will punch through that music. Do the same with sounds, footsteps, whatever you want to add. It’s to your discretion. All you have to do is find the frequency at which it will punch through the rest of the sound. So, I would layer six, seven, eight voices deep. I would layer them all with music. I would layer thunder, a very bassy thunder underneath. You play around with it. Maybe I have six people talking at once. Maybe they’re talking separately. It turned into a playground to me. It became fun to see how deep I could layer things. I tried to get my production to the point where you could swim through it. That’s something I took away from Eric, and that is one thing I can never thank him enough for. Teaching me EQ like he did was the most valuable lesson I ever, ever learned. I’ve had several people come up here for training just like I did with Eric, and that is one thing I continually try to tell and spread the love on—until you know EQ, I don’t think you can get any better as a producer.
JV: What about the creative end of your production, away from the technical side?
Ann: This is where I’m strongest, and there are a couple of people that I learned a great deal from in this regard. I will always hold them close to my heart for giving me the knowledge that they did. Eric Chase is one of them and Ned Spindle is the other. Ned is at Q101 in Chicago, and I heard one of Ned’s demos when I was in Dallas. The first thing I thought was, “You can do that?” It was amazing. Up until then I had only been copying what I had heard, and that was using sound bites and beat mixing them with a full funky beat—move your head kind of production. Not that that’s a bad thing, but that’s all I had learned. I’ve written some skits and some funny things here and there, but nothing to the depth of Ned. He is just so incredibly creative, and the production I heard out of Ned Spindle had my head reeling. It really pushed me in a new direction. I don’t like to call it “theater of the mind” because so many people take that so many different ways. It was basically theater, theater radio. There was one weekend promo I remember in particular where he never explained what was going on, but you knew that this Viking from the 1700s had found his way to present day Chicago and was running up and down the streets killing and raping and murdering the citizens of Chicago. And somehow, that turned into the weekend promo where they were giving away CDs. It was unbelievable. It was creative and funny, and it left me salivating for more.
My midday guy down at the Eagle in Dallas, who was my voice guy, also helped us. He was creative and funny and came up with some of the greatest stuff we’ve ever done. Together we kind of moved the Eagle in this new “theater” way of producing. I soon stopped using sound bites. I decided that people weren’t watching the Simpsons or popular TV shows for the sound bites. They liked the characters. They liked the way the show developed. They liked the way the characters interacted with each other. They liked the relationship. It was about the entire show, not necessarily every single punch line. I adore the Simpsons, but I adore it as a show, not just for the punch lines and the outtakes. So I stopped using sound bites in my production and started coming up with characters, relationships, shows of my own. One character that has followed me from Dallas is Bill, and he’s a quirky intern who gets stuck with all the crappy jobs that nobody wants to do. Basically, he just loves music. He’s so into music, and he has that California Valley girl style—he talks really weird. He just sounds stupid, I guess you can say. Bill has become a long-term character. He was at the Eagle, and now he’s at DC101. And a lot of the listeners call requesting those promos. “Hey, what’s Bill doing now?” And when we go to appearances, people ask, “Where’s Bill? I want to see Bill.” I think that’s so much more important than using the popular Simpson’s sound bite.
JV: That makes perfect sense.
Ann: Because of Ned Spindle, I really have taken a turn in my philosophy on production. When I got into it, I was just making funny noises on the radio. You know, “Hey, this sounds cool!” But because of Ned, I started to rethink what my job was, and you have two trains of thought. One is: it’s my job to remind people as often as I can that they’re listening to DC101 so when they get that diary they’ll write it down. Black and white. I’m just there to remind them who they’re listening to so they’ll fill it out in their diary. Then there’s the other side of the equation, which I subscribe to, and that is: create passion. Give your listeners something to be passionate about so that they won’t need to be reminded, so that no matter what, when someone asks them, what station do you like, they’ll automatically reply DC101 because you made them feel passion for your radio station. You made them see your radio station, not just hear it. Sometimes when I hear my production—and I know this is going to sound silly—but sometimes when I hear the radio station for an hour or two, I’ll see the radio station as a color, like red. I’ll see color, and I think I’m on the right track with that, hearing the station to the point that you start to see the radio station. It kind of brings on a third dimension, and that’s what I’m after. I don’t really know many other people who are doing that.
JV: No, that’s definitely not the mainstream approach to production. Movie and TV sound bites are still “cutting edge” for a lot of producers.
Ann: That was a crutch for me when I was at KBPI, and I knew it was a crutch for me. If I didn’t know what to do, I grabbed a sound bite. If I had a promo to produce, and it needed to be on the air right away, I would go rent a movie that was somewhat about what we were doing. It was just a big crutch. It kept me from using my brain.
Nowadays, I like to think of myself as an advertising agent. If I’m supposed to make my listener passionate about DC101, then I think I am like an advertising agent. I know that Nike and Taco Bell and all those big guys put a lot of money into how they’re going to reach their consumer, billions of dollars on how they are going to get people into that store to buy their product. Billions of dollars. And DC101 pays one person one salary to try to do the same thing. I’m not knocking that. It’s just the way it’s always been. So, I like to think of myself as a big agency, representing DC101.
How do I get my listener passionate about DC101 in 40 seconds? Every time we stop the music we should be pulling them in, reeling the listener in, getting them passionate about something. We’re a music station. We know they’re there for the music. They don’t like it when we stop the music, so when we do stop the music, it should be to incite passion. It should be to remind them of just why they’re there, remind them of how great it is to be listening to DC101, and how great it is to be involved in what we’re involved in. I think that’s probably the hardest part about my job and part of the job I take so seriously.
JV: How many character are you playing with on the imaging there?
Ann: It changes everyday, but we have maybe 20 recurring characters. We’ve got a gay couple whose job is to go out and about and make sure you can hear DC101 out in the surrounding suburbs. Those are promos that help us describe just how strong our signal is and that you can hear us pretty much anywhere—take us with you kind of stuff. And of course, there is Bill, the intern who kind of invites you into the radio station. Here’s what’s going on behind the scene, you know. I’m in the bathroom doing this, or I’m unwrapping the CDs before we put them in the control room. Stuff like that. And he’s very popular. I’ve got one character named General S. T. Delight who reads naughty romance novels, and that really lends itself to great music promos. We’ve got a character named Virgil who we always hear from. He’s an older man who is writing DC101 about how great it is. I imagine Virgil’s in his 70s.
Everyday I come up with new characters. I don’t rely on the same characters all the time. I write every piece of production differently. I don’t box myself into certain characters. I may want a policeman this day. Maybe I want him to be a country policeman, like in Deliverance. Or perhaps I want him to be a black policeman or whatever. I write it different each day.
JV: Do you do a lot of these character voices yourself?
Ann: I’ve got a great wealth of wonderful voices at DC101. My mid-day jock, his name is Shock, is amazing. He’s such an actor. If I ask him to stretch, he says, how far? Tell me where to stretch. He’s wonderful, and he plays a great majority of my characters. Also, next door to us, Clear Channel owns a business station, WRC, and a couple of the guys over there really kick ass. Jim Cuttie and Joe Clark both do business news by day, and by night they come in here and play characters for me. It’s an amazing transition to hear them doing stock reports and then come in here and play gay characters or whoever I ask them to do—Martians, baseball players; it doesn’t matter. They come alive in my studio. I don’t do a lot of the characters myself because I write mostly for men. When I’m talking to an eighteen-year-old male, I don’t usually use the sex card and play the sex kitten. I don’t talk about getting it on with a real hot chick or talk about strippers. I don’t usually go that route because I know Washington DC is a white-collar city. Many of our listeners are lawyers. Many of our listeners are politicians. And I know that they do not necessarily want that kind of entertainment. A lot of my characters are men just found in precarious situations, and it tends to be really funny and good radio.
JV: We read often in the pages of RAP about the importance of “the story” in our promos and commercials, and it sounds like these stories are a basic element of your promos. Where do you go to get these stories? Where is your creative fountain?
Ann: It took a lot of practice. I wasn’t very good at either getting in the mood to write or brainstorming. I have a couple of huge spirals for starters. Banker or drugs or Indians or smoke signals, these can be some of the trigger words that are in those spirals. Aside from that, let’s say we’re sending someone to the Super Bowl. The first thing I think of is what does my 25-year-old male listener care about the Super Bowl. Our team didn’t make it. They’re actually very disgusted with the Redskins right now. What about them is excited about the Super Bowl? Well I know when I was a kid, my brothers, and even myself to some extent, used to play football. We would play football on the schoolyard and even in the street. We’d get the gang together. We’d get everybody together and just play football. But we weren’t a whole bunch of kids playing football; we were pro-football players. Our imaginations took us so far as kids. You start to think, well I bet that inner child in my 25-year-old listener still wants to go to a Super Bowl. I bet that my average 25-year-old listener has not been to a Super Bowl and probably never will. But when he was eight, there was nothing else he wanted. So, you try to grab that eight-year-old inside of him, and that’s kind of the direction I go. I try to figure out what’s going to get my listener excited about what we’re doing, whether it’s music, the weekend promo, or a show we’re doing.
JV: Do you feel like you know your audience, the young male demo?
Ann: I’ve been imaging for mid 20-year-old males for a while. I’m not necessarily the audience, but I date them. And I think to some extent they’ve always been my best friends. Not that I know what’s going on in their heads, and not that I know how to talk to them. I don’t pretend to be able to break the female/male barrier, but I know they’re just like me. They’re human. They like to be entertained. I know that they have insecurities like I do. I know that they have to go to work everyday like I do. I know that they would rather be at home, maybe drinking a beer like I would. Those things always stay constant. So, I try to go for those generalities, the things that are generally the same between men and women. And you find that you strike deep chords that way.
JV: How many stations does Clear Channel have in Washington, DC?
Ann: I think eight.
JV: Are they’re all in the same building?
Ann: No, there are only three here in this building, DC101, the business station, and what was formally the Music of Your Life station.
JV: Are you doing work for any of these other stations?
Ann: No, I am just doing the imaging for DC101, which is a blessing, and it’s hard to come by. I’m very lucky to have held onto this one position and to be able to focus so closely on DC101.
JV: What about the commercial side of the station? Is there a Production Director or somebody that’s solely responsible for the commercials?
Ann: Not really. We’re somewhat non-traditional. I guess. We have a couple of guys who handle the commercial production.
JV: For all three stations?
Ann: No, just for DC101. We’ve haven’t really felt the consolidation yet. AMFM came in and didn’t really consolidate. They were more concerned with making our station succeed, so everyone just kept their jobs. When I came in, there were like three people handling commercial production. One would do it Wednesday through Friday, the other one Monday and Tuesday. That’s kind of been the rule, and no one has ever come in and changed that. So, we have a couple of guys who handle that, and it seems to be working fine.
JV: What equipment are you working with?
Ann: I rely mostly on my Orban Audicy. I have Cool Edit in here, but I prefer the Audicy just because it’s a lot faster. I use some of the effects on Cool Edit, but I keep the project in the Audicy. I don’t use any outboard processing. Even the Harmonizer is getting dust on it.
JV: Do you have a studio at home?
Ann: I have Pro Tools at home. It’s actually more for voice work. I voice maybe 10 Clear Channel stations, and I also do a lot of freelance production for those Clear Channel stations, a lot of launch work. I’m usually here about 6 in the morning. Early mornings are busy with different voice work sessions. ESPN is always at 9. I have a cable company session, which is at 10. Then things slow down around lunchtime. Voice work is real heavy in the morning. I do many of my auditions then. A lot of stations call around 10 in the morning wanting something, and that’s when I’ll fit it in before lunch. After lunch I try to keep it all to DC101, although the 5 to 6 o’clock hour is pretty hectic with voice work because that’s right before FedEx picks up. So, if I have any emergencies, I’ve got to stop what I’m doing at 5, get my voice work done before FedEx picks up, and then I can pick up production again. I basically have the Protools at home not only for a tax write-off, but my voice work is growing at such a rapid pace—I have about 30 regular clients right now—I figure I’d better have a backup.
JV: When did the voice thing take off for you?
Ann: When I was at KBPI. My very last day there I submitted a couple of pieces for FMQB and then I left and went to Dallas. Friday Morning Quarter Back featured one of my pieces of production on a production CD, and Paul Jackson out of WHJY tracked me down because he liked the sound of my voice. That was my very first station. Also, we had a consultant in Dallas. His name was Tom Barnes, and he believed in me a great deal. He started telling all the stations that he consulted that they should use me. So I became the station voice and started doing some freelance production for WAAF in Boston. That was my second station. Tom Barnes was instrumental in getting me some work in Salt Lake City and other cities, too. He was wonderful. He really believed in me as a voice talent and as a producer.
After getting WAAF, through word of mouth I picked up about six more stations here and there. Then I was picked up by Don Buchwald & Associates in New York, but nothing really happened for over a year. Then, when I came here to DC101, my agent, Hoss, who split from Don Buchwald & Associates and started his own agency called Atlas, called and asked me to join him. At this point, I still only had like six stations I was doing voice work for, DC101 being one of them. In no time, Hoss and this new agency were taking me places. I was in auditions three times a day for different things, and they were selling me to all sorts of radio stations. Before I knew it, my client list had jumped from six clients to 30. This last year was really the voice work year for me. I hope I haven’t peaked. I’m still trying to get the word out. People are starting to find that there’s a female voice out there who likes to stretch and can do some different things.
JV: Give us some thoughts on voice work.
Ann: Another thing I got from Eric Chase…we talked a lot about voice work when I was down there. Eric is a big fan of watching pop culture, watching other media to see what they’re doing. He likes to learn from voice people on TV, and he likes to soak in what people are doing in the movies. He’s really very good at starting radio trends based on what some of the major advertisers are doing. And that’s so valuable to think that you’re Creative Services Director is basically following the lead from all these people who are spending so much money to get it right. So we talked a lot about voices, and from that point on I stopped putting voices on my radio station that were announcers. I talked all my PDs into hiring guys that could be very conversational, very natural. Read a line as if we’re just driving down the street. “Pam, why are you listening to this radio station?” “Ahh, you know, they’re the only station that really rocks.” That’s the style that I believed in. I didn’t like the announcer when I was younger, when I was 20. I didn’t like being talked down to. I didn’t like the station voice telling me how big his balls were. I didn’t like any of that. So I coached a lot of my voices to be very natural, and that is how I started doing voice work – very naturally. I tried to be the cool chick, not the announcer. I’ve never ever been good at dripping with syrup mainly because I’ve never subscribed to that philosophy. I always wanted to be the girl next door that was telling you how cool the radio station was.
JV: You seem to be excelling in several areas at once. Your voice-over career is booming, you’re stretching your writing skills, and you’re pushing the limits of the technical side of production as well. Does this come naturally for you, or has this been a conscious effort?
Ann: The one thing I pride myself on and another thing Eric Chase taught me was that you try to be good at everything. You try to be good at everything production can do. Why do you have to have just one strong point? Why can’t you have many? And not a lot of people think you can. So I went back to the studio and I thought, you know what, I’m going to do my best to be good at parodies. I’m going to start singing. You get in the studio, and you’re real nervous at first. You’re really off key, but you give it a shot; and before you know it, it becomes very natural for you. You feel like you’re in the shower. You start to sing lyrics and start doing all sorts of wacky things on the microphone. You let go of some of your inhibitions. I know I’m off key. I know I don’t sing like Madonna. But I write my parodies and I write my lyrics so that they are funny. I’m not meant to be an expert singer. I’m not. It’s not to be taken that way.
Learn how to beat mix and learn how to do it well. And exercise your beat mixing enough that you become proficient in it. If I were asked to put together a whole bunch of bumps with some movie drops in them, just some quick transitional bumps that are fun and kind of move the music along—maybe 10 seconds or so—I know that I would be able to put those together well. If somebody asked me to come up with a promo that was creative and out of the box, I know I could do that. I’ve spent the last five years really trying my hardest to be good at everything. If I hear somebody doing something that I’ve not heard before, I tackle it. I try it. I give it a shot. And it’s not going to be good the first time. I allow myself to fall and fail, and I know the next time it will be better.
JV: You’ve come a long way very fast. Any lessons you’ve learned along the way that you’d like to share?
Ann: I was very jealous of other producers. I didn’t like the fact that they were better than I was. I didn’t like the fact that there were producers who were doing some extremely good stuff. And what that came back to was the fact that I was 20 years old and very insecure. I was trying to make it in radio production, which was full of masters, and I was a punk 20 year old, and a female at that. I had a lot of people saying, “Wow, you’re a girl doing this. That’s pretty strange.” I felt, “Well crap, I’ve got to be extremely good at this in order to make it then!”
But the biggest lesson I ever learned was from Yo-Yo Ma, the famous cellist. I was watching an interview with Yo-Yo Ma, and he was talking about how he goes around to kindergartens and grade schools and plays for the children and gets them excited about music. And whoever was interviewing asked him, why do you do that if you can make literally millions on a performance? Why do you give it away for free? And Yo-Yo Ma basically said, what’s the use of being good at something if you can’t share it? I came away from that realizing that I’ve got a lot of tricks. There are a lot of things that I do very well. What’s the use of me being able to do them if I can’t share that with other producers and help them to be better as well?
So, with that, some of those insecurities melted away. I noticed that as soon as I started sharing the eggs in my basket, others were much more willing to share their eggs with me, and I automatically grew as a producer. I was learning so much more, and I was sharing more. And not necessarily sharing sound bites and music beds, but just basically sharing philosophies, a lot of times just sharing what I felt was really important. I’ll get on the phone and brainstorm with a lot of my production buddies only because, in my world, that’s sharing eggs in your basket. If I share eggs, my basket becomes bigger and so does yours, and we all prosper from that. No one loses when you share. That’s really when my growth spurt started, when I started to share my own discoveries with others.