Chad Michael Snavely, Morning Show/Imaging Producer, Family Life Network, Bath, New York
By Jerry Vigil
After several fascinating stops around the globe, this month’s RAP Interview brings it home for the holidays, and what better place to stop at Christmastime than at Family Life Ministries, where Chad Michael Snavely is the Morning Show/Imaging Producer for the FLM network of Christian formatted stations. Chad is also the VP/Senior Producer for Christian Concert Spots, and is the Imaging Producer for Spoken Word Images, a Christian voiceover and production company headed up by VO artist Pete Bunch. Chad shares some insights into imaging Christian radio and lots more in this month’s interview. Be sure and check out his sampler on this month’s RAP CD for an earful of great production!
JV: Checking your bio online, I see at 2 years old you were holding up McDonald’s French fries using them as microphones. You had kind of a special introduction to the business. Tell us a little bit about it.
Chad: I started when I was young. I loved music while growing up, everything associated with music, and my father was heavily involved in radio. He managed, at that point, some radio stations that eventually turned into a network of radio stations across New York and Pennsylvania. So growing up, I knew what a microphone was. I knew what speakers were. I knew at that point what tape was and such, and I loved everything related to audio. I loved everything related to music, to bands. I’d always joke and say I feel bad for my friends that would come over and play with me when I was young because I always made them grab an instrument. We’d always have to put on a concert. I always enjoyed doing that kind of thing. I was around it when I was growing up, and I think that’s really where my love of music and audio really began, right there at home.
JV: You also did some training at the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences out in Tempe, Arizona where you graduated at the top of your class. Tell us a bit about that.
Chad: That was a bit of schooling that I had before I came back to work fulltime at FLM. It was a major bit of education for me musically, but especially on the technical side, the production side. We were out there working with Neve and SSL, Pro Tools HD and all kinds of high-end equipment. We were saturated in it every day for seven or eight months, learning from some of the best in the biz that are doing it day in and day out. It was pretty intense. I went in there with a pretty good understanding of audio and signal flow and even how to splice a tape. I was able to do that before tape went away and computers took over. It was quite the learning experience, and I came away with quite a lot from that whole experience. And it was a blast. When I went out there, I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen. I went out there and didn’t know anybody. My plan was to graduate and move to LA or New York City and produce records. God obviously had something different in mind and brought me back here to New York to work. But I love doing what I’m doing. I wouldn’t change it, but that time in Arizona was definitely cool.
JV: Your dad was a manager at one of the stations that is now part of the Family Life Ministries. How many stations are there in the network now?
Chad: There are over 12, maybe 15 stations now, I believe, and there are quite a few translators to go along with that. It’s hard to keep up. It continues to expand. There’s Family Life Ministries, which was the parent organization, and we’re getting ready to celebrate our 50th anniversary of that; and then there’s the radio ministry, which started in the early ‘80s, and that has grown over the years.
JV: What are your responsibilities there?
Chad: Morning show producer is what I was initially hired to do, and along with that I was doing spots for concerts and whatnot that would be coming along in the area. Over the last couple years I’ve really done more just the station imaging. That’s really been my primary focus.
I still do a lot of work with the morning show. They did a lot of parody songs here over the last five years, and I would do all the instrumentation and all the production on those songs. I produced their show intros and outros as well as their liners and their imaging in the morning. But really, a lot of what I do here is just the overall station imaging — the promos, the sweepers and such — and I still do a lot of concert promos and things like that as well.
JV: Are all the stations in the network broadcasting the same programming?
Chad: Yes. All of the stations on the network all broadcast from this one location here in Bath, New York. Everything is the same on all the stations.
JV: It’s a busy time of year for radio in general with the holidays here, but I’d bet it is especially crazy this time of year in the Christian format.
Chad: It is. We do a lot of special Christmas programming here. We think that that’s a really good time to try and draw in some listeners that might not listen throughout the regular year. Most people like Christmas music, and most radio stations don’t do very much in the form of Christmas music at this time of the year. So we do a lot of Christmas programming. For me and a production standpoint, yeah, we are very busy come Thanksgiving and Christmastime.
Last year we unveiled a brand-new Christmas imaging package which took many weeks to come up with, getting some actors in the studio and producing the whole thing. It turned out great and we’re going to use some of that again this year along with some new stuff that we’re starting to get in the works now. But yeah, things are starting to crank up around here. There’s never really a dull time, but there are certain seasons that are busier than others, and Christmas would definitely be one of them.
JV: What are the goals of imaging in the Christian format? Is it the same as it is in secular radio — get the brand across, get a slogan out, lots of ear candy?
Chad: Sure. It is to an extent. Like I said, I do imaging with Family Life here, but I also do imaging with Pete Bunch and Spoken Word Images, and we’re doing imaging for Christian radio stations all across the country right now. So you really get a pretty good grasp of what Christian radio is trying to do with that.
To an extent, yeah, there is a lot of “we’ve got to get our name out there, we’ve got to brand our station. We’ve got to get the slogan out there,” whatever that might be. But for us here, a lot of what we try and do as well is not hammer people over the head with religious jargon or Christian-ese, if you will. We don’t want it to sound like we’re preaching to people in between every song. So we are going to run quick little imaging pieces that are just going to say, “The Family Life Network, your Christian companion…”, which is our slogan here, just to get that out there, to get that in people’s heads.
But as well, we’re going to do things that are going to have subtle, spiritual Christian undertones or overtones, if you will. But we’re not going to come out and just slam you over the head. We’re trying to do that in a creative way. We do a lot of radio vignettes and things like that. We do a lot of creative radio production to try and tell a story. At Christmastime, we might do some little bit longer liners to try and get people to think about the real reason for the season.
So you try and find that balance between trying to make yourself out to be hey, this is us, this is us, this is us, and just hammering that into people’s minds; and at the same point you want them to know who we are, why we do what we do, and what is really the reason behind this radio station that they might be listening to.
JV: Where do you go or what do you do when you need some inspiration for your creative work?
Chad: I drink coffee. I get out of the studio. We have a phrase around here we use: “studio head.” You walk out of the studio and you can just see it on somebody’s face. They’re just zoned out. We’ve just got to get out of this place.
I like to take my laptop and work at home a lot, if I can. I like to just go to the coffee shop and sit down and do that. I like to write and read a lot, and I find that that tends to clear my mind. I listen to music all the time. When I’m driving or whatever, my iPod is always on. It’s always playing new music, which helps me in trying to get some fresh ideas.
I listen to a lot of other people’s work, too — find demos on the Internet or whatnot — just to try and stay creative. I’ll hear something and go, okay, what is this person doing? How are they getting that sound or how are they getting their station’s slogan across in a creative way?
So there are a lot of different things that I do to try and crank the creativity up a little, but it normally involves getting away in some sort from the computer and the speakers and just the whole studio and just trying to clear my mind a little bit.
JV: I read in your bio you’re the leader of the Five Seven Band? What’s that?
Chad: Well, I used to be the leader of that band. We played for about three years together. We were a worship band that would go out across New York and Pennsylvania, kind of in the Family Life Network’s listening area, and just hook up with churches and youth groups and teen groups, and play concerts and lead worship and things of that sort. I was the leader of that as far as playing guitar and keyboards and singing. Here in the last year, we’ve kind of disbanded due to the fact that members are getting married and moving across the country. It’s really hard to try and keep that up now, but there for about three years, that was something that I was very heavily involved in, the Five Seven Band.
JV: You mentioned your love of music as a kid. Did you start with some formal education when you were young?
Chad: I did. I started taking piano lessons when I was pretty young. I did that for about eight years, up until around my junior year in high school. I took formal classical piano training, and I kind of got bored with that and decided it was much cooler in high school at that time to play the guitar than the keyboard. So I taught myself how to play the guitar, and kind of threw the piano away for a little bit. But I came back to the piano a few years after picking up the guitar.
So I play a lot of guitar, and I play a lot of piano and keyboards. I love synthesizers. I do a lot of synth stuff. I do a lot of drum programming and computerized electronic-based music. And that, in a way, is also an outlet for me to get my creativity going.
What I really wanted to do when I really got into music was I wanted to either be in a band or I wanted to produce bands in the studio. That always gets frowned upon when you’re in high school and people ask you what you want to do with your life and you tell them, “oh, I want to be in a band or I want to be a producer.” They kind of look at you and say, “So, what are you going to do that’s going to make money?” I got so sick of hearing that that I kind of tuned that dream out for awhile. It wasn’t until my sophomore or junior year when I was in college that I said, you know what, I’m going to go for this. This is something that I love. I can’t deny this, and I’m going to go for it. I don’t want to get to the end of my life one day and look back and think, oh, man, I never went for that dream. What could have happened?
So I really started pursuing that a lot more intensely and really wanted to produce bands. That was really what I kind of wanted to do, but the radio thing sort of fell in my lap and I really grew to love that. And you know, it’s a little easier to get a gig producing radio, especially when your father manages the station, than it is to get out there and try and get into a major studio in LA or in New York and work with bands. But my love for music has always dominated pretty much everything that I do.
JV: When you decided to learn to play the guitar, did you go for lessons or just pick it up on your own?
Chad: I pretty much just picked it up on my own. I grabbed a book, and one of my buddies was also learning how to play the guitar on his own, and we just kind of sat down and drew out some chord charts and figured out how to play some songs and took it from there. I’ve never once had a guitar lesson in my life, and maybe if people heard me play they would understand that. [Laughs]
JV: How much, if at all, did the formal education on the piano influence learning to play the guitar?
Chad: It was unbelievable. I tell people this all the time. I say, I would not have been able to pick up the guitar as fast as I did if I did not understand the theory behind the piano and having that training. I started playing the guitar and went away from the piano because everything that I did was classical-based, and I grew to not really like that so much. I just wanted to be able to just sit down and play by ear and do some chording and stuff like that. And the funny thing is that when I went away from the piano and played the guitar, I realized, hey, the piano’s helping me here with the guitar. And when I went back to play the piano again and wanted to pick that up again, my knowledge of the guitar kind of helped me go back a little bit and relearn some of the piano stuff that I was forced to learn but never really truly understood why I did what I did. It gave me a greater understanding of chording, of improvisation, and it really helped me pick up the piano a lot more. So it’s amazing the way those two instruments kind of worked off each other for me.
JV: I’d guess you probably use your musical skills quite often in the studio.
Chad: I do, yeah. I go in to produce, whether it’s a concert spot, an imaging piece or whatever, and I really view it as a 10-second song, a 30second song, or maybe a 60second song. Everything’s got to have a beat to it, a certain rhythmic structure. I find that having that in my mind and in my ear really helps my production pieces flow a lot better, whether it’s music changes or whatever it might be — you know, finding downbeats and things like that. Everything that I do in the studio really wraps around that musician mindset that I have.
JV: I think a lot of people, even those that don’t have the musical education that you have, a lot of producers will try and hit the music on the beats when they’re changing a bed, for example, but I would think you would take that a step further because of your musical abilities. When you’re constructing a spot or an imaging piece, it’s more than just matching beats, right?
Chad: Oh, yeah, definitely. It’s letting everything have its place in the mix. If I was going to sit down and mix a band, the drums are going to sit in a certain spot. The base is going to sit in the mix in a certain spot. Your vocals are going to sit in there, and so on. It’s definitely the same thing. The effects that you use, how you use compression or how you use EQ in your mix, whether it’s a 15track imaging piece that I’m putting together or whatever, everything kind of has its place and it all comes together to form this 10second masterpiece, if you will. And it’s not going to catch anyone’s ear to win a Grammy or anything like that, but for that 10 seconds, I want people to be completely wowed by that piece. When they hear that — and they’re going to have no idea the work that went into that piece — I want it to stand out to them. I want it to stick in their mind.
So yeah, when constructing everything that I do -- whether it’s a musical piece or imaging or a concert spot, whatever it might be -- it’s got to work together. It’s got to have a reason for being in the mix. It’s got to have a purpose for being there, and that’s really the way that I approach all of my mixes.
JV: You’re making a lot of your own production elements. Are you collecting them? Are you thinking about perhaps one day putting those out on the market?
Chad: Yeah, I’ve thought about it. It’s crossed my mind. I do like to do a lot of custom elements, whether it’s beds or effects — zappers and zingers and stingers and those kinds of things. I like to create noise and then turn it into something that can be used in a piece.
I don’t know. I guess for me it’s something that I think about, and I think, okay, that’s maybe something I’ll get to one of these days, as far as compiling all that stuff and seeing if any of it’s any good and if anybody would ever want to use any of it.
A lot of times I’m on a pretty tight deadline with a lot of stuff, and a lot of times I need elements really quick. So I tend to pull from a production library that I might already have. But if I do need something specific, it’s nice to know that I’ve got a couple or keyboards, I’ve got a guitar and whatever, and I can go in there and record something. I can lay it down and then I can tweak it just for my mix at that time.
JV: What outside imaging and production library services do you like to use?
Chad: I really like the Digital Juice stuff. I just picked up their library and I really like a lot of their sound effects, their stingers and their whooshes and different things like that. I’ve got some stuff from Bomb Tracks that I really like as well. Here at the network, we use Firstcom with EVO and Velocity. I really love that stuff. I think the music is outstanding in that library. I’m a big Apple Mac guy and I really like the loop stuff from Garage Band and Soundtrack Pro and things like that. I’ve found those to be really fun to just tweak out. I’ve also got a bunch of ACID loops and different things like that that I can tweak and throw into a mix wherever I need it.
JV: Your production studio, tell us about it. Obviously it has a Mac.
Chad: Yes. I have two Macs in here. I’ve got a 17-inch PowerBook, and mostly that is more for the music side. I run ProTools off an MBox and have Propeller Head’s “Reason”. I love that program. I think that program is the coolest thing out there. I do a lot of tweaking in that.
I have one of the 20-inch iMac G5s as well. Right before they switched over to the Intel chip, I got one of those. That’s actually more of a video editing computer, with Final Cut Studio. This last year I actually learned how to use all that stuff and put together a whole promotional DVD for Family Life Ministries and the whole ministry. I did the soundtrack and did the video shooting and did all the graphics and stuff for that. I do some audio on that one as well.
Most of our studios in this building here are PC-based, and we run Adobe Audition for our main production stuff. And I’ve got to tell you, for as simple and as inexpensive as that program is, I completely swear by it. I think it is the greatest radio producing software out there. It’s quick. It’s got a great user interface. It’s easy to pick up. It’s fast. It just great, and I use that all the time for my mixes and all that stuff. I can’t say enough good things about what Adobe has done with that Audition program.
JV: Do you also have a studio at home? You mentioned the laptop.
Chad: Yes. That is something that I’m in the process of working on. My laptop right now kind of serves as my home studio. My wife and I just bought a house here a couple of months ago, and there’s an unfinished basement down there that I’m working on turning into what will be my home studio.
I haven’t gone out and purchased all the gear yet because I’m waiting to see how the room’s going to turn out. I revise my wish list every week or so. I keep updating what I’m going to need and how much money I’m going to need and whatnot.
But pretty much everything I do right now, whether it be for Family Life Network or for Christian Concert Spots or Spoken Word Images with Pete Bunch, I do all that stuff here at the studios at Family Life Network.
JV: Christian Concert Spots is a company that you’re the VP and Senior Producer for. How did you become involved with that?
Chad: Well, I got involved with that with Pete Bunch, an amazing voiceover talent with Spoken Word Images. Pete is our voice here at Family Life Network, and so Pete and I had developed a relationship over the years. I was working with his voiceover tracks every day here at the station, and I would send him some of my work from time to time. He contacted me almost two years ago now and said, “I’d love for you to join up with me at Spoken Word Images. We can offer full production to radio stations and clients all across the country.” I said, “Let’s give it a shot. Let’s go for it.” We’ve seen some really, really good stuff happen through that.
A few months ago he came to me and said, “Dude, I’ve got this idea for Christian Concert Spots.” We found that we’ve gotten the ear of a lot of bands and tour managers and record labels as far as putting concert spots together, and it was Pete’s idea to tailor the company specifically to doing spots for Christian tours and bands and whatnot. We started brainstorming on that, and then the web site came together. And really, just in this last month, we launched Christian Concert Spots. We just put together a whole new demo for that and we’re really trying to get the ear of these record label producers and promoters and tour managers and bands. We’re just dropping demos in their hands and saying, “Hey, when your band goes out on tour, we want to be able to do all the spots for your tour.” So it’s totally different from what Spoken Word Images is doing. That is more radio-based imaging and whatnot. But it’s Pete and I that are teaming up together on Christian Concert Spots, and we’re really excited for what’s going to happen with it.
JV: You’re doing plenty for the Family Life Ministries, Christian Concert Spots is in the mix now, plus there’s the work you are doing with Spoken Word Images. Do you ever feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over and over again?
Chad: Sometimes, yeah, I do. My wife reminds me of that. I brought home some work the other night and let her hear it and she just goes, “How do you just sit there and do this over and over and over again?” Sometimes it does feel like that, but it never really feels like that in a sense where I don’t enjoy it anymore. I love what I get to do. I’ll never forget a professor that I had in college. He said, “You know what? It’s the easiest thing. You just go out there and you find what you love to do, and then you just figure out how to get paid to do it.” That’s always stuck with me, and I love the fact that every morning I get to get up and love what I get to do. And every Friday there’s a paycheck waiting for me. It couldn’t get any better than that.
But yeah, some days it does get very monotonous. You get sick of cutting up dry VO tracks and finding the right take to use, and listening through music tracks trying to find the right one that’s going to fit the feel of the spot. But those are the days that you just kind of push through it. You make your coffee a little stronger. But I never really get bored with this. There’s always some sense of creative juice that’s flowing, and I always love it. I always leave the studio every day and feel very fulfilled knowing what I’ve gotten to do during the day.
JV: You mentioned the video, the DVD that you did, and I’ve noticed that that’s starting to creep into radio production studios more and more of late, people doing some video for the web site or whatever. How did you learn video production? Was that self-taught?
Chad: Pretty much. When I was in college I took a video production class where I learned Adobe Premiere and just messed with that. I had a great professor. He showed me a lot of stuff. I thought, “hey, this is really cool.” It’s creative. It’s another side of the creative juice of mine, you know? But I really didn’t do anything with it.
About a year ago, my dad came to me. They’d been trying to get a promotional DVD put together for the ministry here. They had outsourced a couple of things, and what was coming back wasn’t looking too good. It wasn’t looking fresh. It didn’t have the feel that he was looking for. So he asked me one day, “is that something that you might want to try your hand at?” He knows me. He knows my feel for things and my vibe on things, and I said, “You know what? It might be a fun creative challenge for me to tackle.” So he told me to do some research. “Get some equipment together and see what you need.” Being an Apple fan, I instantly wanted to go with the Final Cut stuff. I had seen some work that some of my friends had done with that and Apple Motion, and Soundtrack Pro and the integration between those.
So we bought the equipment and I spent a couple months with stacks of manuals, just kind of learning the specifics of how to use that program and learning shortcuts and spending time with the computer and the software. There were lots of headaches, lots of doing it wrong the first time. But we started working on it and we shot the video. We shot some different listener clips and things like that. We rented a camera for a week or two, and I learned how to do all the graphic motion stuff and put it together.
The whole thing, from the time we got the equipment until the time the DVD went out, was about six months. I look back on it and I just think, what was I thinking? How did all that come together? But that was a fun experience. That was a fun challenge. But I don’t know if I’d want to do video all the time. I think doing video kind of helped me remember my love for audio and how much easier audio is to work with than video. But it was definitely a fun challenge.
JV: Over the past couple of decades, Christianity’s been taking quite a hit. No prayer in schools. It’s “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Does Christian radio take a stance against this type thing?
Chad: We definitely do. We want to be light in a dark world, in a dark society where there is a lot of junk out there. It’s very frustrating sometimes — to be honest with you — when you do what you do and you try and do a good job at it, and you put your Lord and Savior’s name on it, and then you turn on the news and you find out that this guy in Colorado has been sleeping with a dude and lying to his congregation about it. And bam, there’s a slap against Christianity. That’s very difficult to deal with. It’s very hard to watch some of that unfold in the media, and you think, what is the world thinking of us now?
I alluded to this before, but we don’t want to beat people over the head with the Bible or with our religious stance or whatever. We want people to make their own decisions on who they’re going to vote for. We want people to make their own decisions on whether or not they’re going to go celebrate Halloween or something like that. But on certain moral things, we are going to take a stance — things that we believe to be right and true, good values and morals. That is going to come through our programming. That’s going to come through our music. That’s going to come through the production pieces that we put together, whether it’s a radio drama or a vignette, or just a liner or a jingle or something along those lines.
It’s something that we do take a stand on because we feel that it is our responsibility. We feel like God has put us in this place, and he’s put us at this radio station to have a voice. We want to let our voice be heard, but we don’t want to be negative, and we don’t want to push people away at the same time.
JV: Any parting thoughts for your fellow producers out there in radio land during the holidays?
Chad: During the holidays? I’d just say spend just as much time with your friends and loved ones as you do in the studio making your mixes, because I find that, for me, at holiday time, I draw my inspiration from family, from home, from fireplaces and Christmas trees and eggnog and things like that. Those warm memories that I have of Christmastime are what I try to get across in my production work during holiday time, and those things are very important to me. I love this time of the year, and it’s a great time to be a producer.