After graduating from the Bill Wade School of Radio & Television in Hollywood, I ran an ad in the “Situations Wanted” section of Broadcasting magazine:
“DJ, good commercials, tight board. Will relocate.”
To my surprise, someone offered me a job. I sold my few belongings and moved from Los Angeles to a tiny town you never heard of.
My first day on the job, the PD gave me the task of “carting up” some commercials.
If you’re too young to know what that means, go read some other blog. No, wait — come back, I’ll explain.
Commercials produced outside the radio station arrived on a 7″ reel of magnetic recording tape. A universal production chore was the transferring of commercials from the tape reels to tape cartridges, or “carts.” The carts are what we played on the air.
Okay?
My PD told me to dub some spots from reel to cart.
To his surprise, that was a problem.
Although during my four months of intense training at the Bill Wade School of Radio & Television I played lots of carts, they never taught us how to record onto an audio cartridge.
I’m sure one of the highlights of my PD’s radio career was the day he learned the new DJ he’d imported from California didn’t know how to hit the “record” button on a cart machine simultaneous with hitting the “play” button on a reel-to-reel machine.
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Ha Ha, We used “carts” until 1999!!!!!!!! We still have the machines too!
i went to a technical school that taught us how to cut commercials on Reel to reel with razor blades and grease pens, graduated in 2003.
Ahhh. Carts.
In my early years as a board op at London’s news/talk station, LBC, in the 1970s I once spent most of a 12-hour night shift ‘carting-up’ a new ID package – 3 sets of each (2 for each of the main on-air studios and a third for Master Control).
In the mid/late-80s I worked at Ocean Sound, a station on the UK’s South Coast, which covered the cities of Southampton and Portsmouth – with separate transmitters for each – so advertisers could buy time on one or both. The result was two banks of cart machines in the studios and colour-coded cart labels. Shortly before I left, in May 1988, we gained a further FM frequency in Winchester – which meant a further ‘split’.
It certainly kept you on your toes – especially having to check that ‘traffic’ had scheduled the same amount of spots on each split, even when they had scheduled some station promos as ‘fillers’.
I still have some old carts containing mainly some personal IDs – I don’t have anything to play them on but I did manage to transfer the original quarter-inch tape masters for them onto .wav files a few years ago.
The magic of carts. Replacing pads, rods popping and fast forwarding for no reason…aahh memories.
The digital switch was a little bitter sweet. In the past, using carts, records, cds and hitting the network at the top of the hour meant you had to be on your toes. It gave you something to keep your mind active during late night board babysitting shifts. Now, all we have is YouTube or online MahJong. Well, that and computer crashes.
I’ve turned most of the cart decks at my station into lamps. Push the cart in…the light comes on. Pull it out…the light goes out. Whoooooo!
Those @#$%^& pressure pads. They would dry up/disintegrate and poof … no more playback. Worked at a station where we “repaired” old carts.
In the late 70’s, I worked at an AM/FM where the FM (“Love FM 95 – Beautiful Music 24 Hours a Day”) was mostly automated using a combination of reel-to-reel for music and carts for spots – AND to announce what time it was. There were two “time” carts that were larger than normal so more tape could fit in them. One cart for even minutes, one for odd. If a recording mistake happened while making the carts, one had to re-do the entire cart. I screwed up at 11:57.
My favorite button these days is “undo”. : )
When I was a college intern at CBS-FM in the 80’s, I came across a pile of carts with bad pressure pads and decided to fix them. Note to future interns: don’t let the engineering union boss catch you with a pile of bad carts, a screw-driver, and a box of pressure pads. Adding that you’re not even on the payroll doesn’t make it much better either.
But at least I knew how to re-pack carts by college.
Yes, but the REALLY fun task was \building\ the cart itself; taking a pancake of tape and creating carts of various durations. Yep some fun! And who can forget discovering that the guy that carted up the new :30 sec stereo store spot loaded it once to a five and a half minute cart because he couldn’t find any forty or sixty sec carts!
AhHa! Brought back memories of the good old days(1968) in Rio Grande (NJ).
We had two “triple decker” cart machines at my first gig…the mechanism that held the carts in one of the slots didn’t work, so we had to use a piece of duct tape to keep it from falling out (and stopping dead in mid-play.) I loved my first radio job, overnights at the now defunct KLKT/Incline Village (Lake Tahoe) Nevada, 1985.
We had one single and one triple cart machine but only three pots we had a toggle switch on the third pot to go between the two machines if you forgot the toggle you were out of luck
Control board build in 1962 had to punch it to keep it on the air
CHTK 1987 Prince Rupert BC Canada
What would radio stations do without duct tape and baling wire?
Ah the Winding Cart Sessions we had!!!….
And the next week you were Production Manager?
@Jim: Actually, I believe that might be true.