Tommy Kramer Tip #181 – Catch and Release

The whole concept of subtlety seems to have died out in the back yard, because no one heard it scratching against the door.

Go to “Catch and Release”, like in fishing. You catch a Moment, then you let it go. Trying to reach a second Moment is too far a “reach” for most air talents. We’re not standup comedians, who work tirelessly on “constructs” where each step leads to another one. Louis C. K. talks often about George Carlin’s process of writing for a special, then tossing that material out, which shocked Louis. He felt like “I’ve worked for 14 years to get this one hour of good stuff. How do you just throw that away?!”

Over time (and mustering up all his courage), he learned that you have to clear the slate to open up the mental space to create more.

Radio’s not really the medium for that “Construct” formula anyway. Quick hits, then movement, define great radio.

I hear so many shows that sound like the people in the studio are having a good time, but like kids at recess, they don’t want to come back into the classroom and settle down.

Catch, then Release. Stop hanging onto a falling satellite. Your listeners will really appreciate it.

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Tommy Kramer Tip #162 – The Two Rules about ONE

In the last tip, I talked about Repetition and Redundancy, two things that can wreck a show.
(It also hurts Imaging and commercials, by the way. Imaging doesn’t need to say “Magic 102.9/102.9” with that second time repeated or slightly overlapped. Ugh. And I’m sure we’ve all wanted to unload a double-barreled shotgun at the TV when we heard a phone number given for the thirteenth time in one of those “Call right now!” spots.)

Anyway, the last tip ended with this:

Repetition HURTS breaks. Redundancy KILLS them.
Radio — at least GREAT radio — is always about how concisely you can get things said. A good rule of thumb is “say things ONCE.” What you leave UNSAID is just as important as what you say.

Now let’s add two more rules to that:

1. Make ONE point.
2. Give ONE example.
When you do more, it’s tedious, and makes breaks SOUND longer than they actually are. And remember, trying to be thorough is the enemy of editing.

There’s a LOT more to this…but as John Lennon said when a reporter shouted out “Sing something for us!” during the Beatles’ first U. S. press conference, “We have to have money first.”

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Tommy Kramer Tip #161 – The Difference between Repetition and Redundancy

Repetition is defined as “the act of doing or saying something again.” Flip on the radio and you’ll hear this constantly; this almost compulsive-sounding need to say something, then repeat it, like the listener is an idiot. (For a while, people were being COACHED to do this. Remember those double time checks? “Seven-fifteen, fifteen minutes after seven o’clock.” Ugh.)

Redundancy is defined, for our purposes, as “the inclusion of more information than is necessary for communication.”

An example of this is “82 degrees and raining outside.”
“Outside?” Well thank goodness. If it were raining INSIDE, that could lead to some pretty expensive roof work.

Recently, I heard a talent start a break with, “This is maybe the best example of ‘for better or worse’ that I’ve ever seen…” and then tell about a man who had been the President of a university in South Carolina, and how his wife of more than forty years, a woman named Muriel, had contracted Alzheimer’s.

Then, instead of going directly to the audio clip of the man making his announcement, he added, “This is his announcement to the university that he was resigning so that he could take care of Muriel…”

Then he played the audio clip of the announcement, which basically was just the man repeating everything the host had already said!

This break should have come with a “spoiler alert”. In the mind of the listener, it’s “been there; heard that.”

Here’s the lesson:
Repetition HURTS breaks. Redundancy KILLS them.

Radio — at least GREAT radio — is always about how concisely you can get things said. A good rule of thumb is “say things ONCE.” What you leave UNSAID is just as important as what you say.

– – – – – – –
Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Tommy Kramer Tip #157 — An Additional Liability of Constantly Teasing

In the last tip, I dealt with the latest radio “incomplete thought” – constantly teasing something at the end of each break.

If you go back and read my tip on “The First Exit” (it’s #3 on my website), you’ll see that the most effective momentum device EVER is to get out at the first place a break “resolves”. You always leave ‘em wanting more, and you have great – and unpredictable – forward momentum.

Over the years (and I first wrote about this over 20 years ago), I’ve heard this misinterpreted in a lot of different ways, like…

“Get out at the first punch line.” (Not everything is funny. Sometimes there ISN”T a punch line.)

“Get out at the First Exit—but then say our names, or the name of the station, into the break.” (Really? You WANT your name or the station’s name right next to commercials? What do you think the listener associates you with then? The “First In, Last Out’ thing never worked, and it doesn’t work now, either.)

And then there’s our newest incarnation: “Take the First ‘out’, but then do a tease of what’s coming up.”
NO! This completely DESTROYS the First Exit. Taylor Swift doesn’t end a song by playing a few notes of the next song she’s going to do.

A show without SURPRISES is a show that’s not worth listening to. I don’t WANT to know everything you’re going to do ahead of time. In the last tip, I listed the four or five categories of things that are worth “promoting ahead” (not “teasing”—I can’t stand that word. When someone calls you a “tease”, that’s NOT a compliment).

I have to go away now. The large vein in my neck is really starting to throb.

– – – – – – –
Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Tommy Kramer Tip #150 – One Word

Just one word can change the listener’s perception of you. Indeed, in the moment, one word can change anything.

“The woman screamed when she saw a moose” is very different from “The woman screamed when she saw a mouse.”

“I took my daughter Angela…” tells me who this person is. “I took Angela…” doesn’t.

“We have Taylor Swift tickets to give away” is about you. “You can win Taylor Swift tickets!” is about me, the listener.

Choose your words carefully. Craft what you do on the air. Stop thinking of what you do as a shift, and think of it as a show. You’re here to be good company, to catch me up on things, and to entertain. Don’t just be “radio” good; be “down to earth, but definitely the life of the party” good.

It’s all about the performance.
And every word matters…both said and unsaid.

– – – – – – –
Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Tommy Kramer Tip #138 – John Cleese on Editing

Obviously, being able to edit yourself is a crucial ingredient in whether or not anyone wants to listen to you.

Rather than give you the standard radio clichés, or quoting statistics from some study, let’s go to an outside source, John Cleese, former Monty Python member and the writer of “A Fish Called Wanda”. (He also wrote and starred in maybe the best sitcom of all time, Fawlty Towers.)

In his book “So, Anyway…” Cleese is talking about a show he had co-written in college that he later took to Australia, New Zealand, and eventually, New York. As you can see, he’s very modest about it, but what he learned FROM it is important:

“Our show had definitely gotten better since its Cambridge incarnation. It was now only sixty minutes long (down from two hours), teaching us that if you have an average show, and you can dump half of it, it doesn’t get a bit better – it gets a lot better. In fact, there seems to be a basic, rather brutal rule of comedy: ‘The shorter, the funnier.’ I began to discover that whenever you could cut a speech, a sentence, a phrase, or even a couple of words, it makes a greater difference than you would ever expect.”

Every word counts. Most disc jockeys spend them like pennies. (And Talk show hosts seem to think that the more words you throw at something, the more effective it is. They’re wrong, of course.)
Spend words like twenty-dollar bills instead. The fewer words you can use to tell a story, explain something, or make a point, the better…and the bigger the impact.

NEVER WASTE THE LISTENER’S TIME.

– – – – – – –
Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Tommy Kramer Tip #136 – The Door is Open

A concept that gets bandied about a lot these days is being “transparent” on the air. I understand what that’s intended to mean, but “transparent” is not a term I use.

Rather than telling air talent to be “transparent”, I tell them to simply be Open and Revealing. Being TOTALLY transparent is not always a good idea, actually. Some things shouldn’t be shown. Some things about you might be too revealing. Some might be negatives. Some might be boring.

Even the so-called “reality” shows on TV are highly edited. (Indeed, to me, “Survivor” is the best-edited show in television history. An editor’s clinic, really. Think about it: they shoot 24/7 to get one hour—and that’s with commercials.)

I’d sum it up this way: Anytime you’re on the air, the door is open, but remember, it’s a door to an entertainer’s life; not a door to an accountant’s life. I’ll bet nobody’s ever asked to come over to your house and watch you fill out your tax returns.

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Tommy Kramer Tip #127 – I was gonna say…

Bet you’ve heard this a hundred times…one person says something, then the other person says “I was gonna say…” and tacks on another thought. If you’re that second person, this may seem innocuous to you, but it carries several liabilities:

First, it’s not in the “now”, so, of course, it stops the momentum. (Or even makes it go backward.)

Second, what “I was gonna say…” REALLY says is “I’m determined to get this thought in, even though the moment has passed, come hell or high water.”

Third, it gives the impression that you have to get in the last word—or even worse, like you’re trying to “top” the other person’s thought.

So the solution for “I was gonna say” is…don’t say it.
Remember, every single thing said by each person (and that can be a caller or guest) should move the subject FORWARD, like the game “leapfrog” that we played as kids.

When you stop wasting words and embrace the discipline of just letting it go instead of forcing a thought in, you’ll have taken a step forward in being perceived as not wasting the listener’s time. With all the ‘buzz’ about PPM indicating that breaks should be short, it’s important to realize that it’s not really always about length as measured by a stopwatch; it’s also about how long it FEELS.

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Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2015 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Tommy Kramer Tip #71 – Radio Tourette Syndrome

Thoroughness—a valuable quality in almost every job—is actually not the best thing for radio. Trying to do every thing every time is almost a disease. Let’s call it radio Tourette Syndrome.

For example, the giving of three surrounding cities’ temperatures, then “and in downtown Candyland, it’s 82” to close the weather forecast. As a listener, I only care about MY area. You’d be better off with one satellite city mention, then the main one. Rotate the surrounding cities one at a time, and you get rid of the “laundry list” thing that other stations do. It doesn’t take long for the listener to at least subconsciously notice that you’re not still rattling out more numbers.
It’s the same with everything, really…
Giving the Artist and Title every time gets old. We’re friends and entertainers, not musicologists.
Giving every possible facet of a contest every time you talk about it just makes you sound like either (1) you can’t shut up, or (2) someone is holding a gun to your head making you do it.
Oh, and that ‘deejay thing’ of purposely “hitting the post” (talking right up to the start of the vocal) every time just makes people want to duct tape your mouth shut after a while. (And it makes Pandora look really good.)

The real point is that trying to be too “thorough” is the enemy of editing. What you gain in Information you lose in Momentum. Take that thought and run with it in every phase of your station possible.

– – – – – – –
Tommy Kramer
Radio Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2014 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Tommy Kramer Tip #60 – Know when to stop (Version 2)

After you’ve become a successful talent, one of the most significant challenges with your show’s Content is knowing when to stop doing something.

People listen for 10 minutes—20 if you’re lucky. Huge fans of the show will listen longer, unless they feel that it’s just rehash. Then, even they will go find something else.

So try this on for size:
[A] Whatever you do, treat it as a “one-off” break, meaning that it could stand alone. Plan to move on to something else the next break.

[B] But IF you get a decent reaction—a phone caller, for instance, or if you have a teammate on the show that might have a different “take” on it, okay, air that.

[C] Everything else on that subject now has to EARN being on. This means it has to cover NEW ground, not just repeat a point that’s already been made or give a second example of something we already heard.

Think of it like movies with sequels. Almost every time, the sequels get worse. The 4th Indiana Jones movie, the 4th Lethal Weapon movie, the additional 3 Star Wars movies, or any Jennifer Aniston movie.

– – – – – – –
Tommy Kramer
Radio Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2014 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.