The video is a guided tour of CBC Radio 3 for the Inside the CBC blog, led by director Steve Pratt. He introduces the office layout, the passionate staff, and the various functions that keep the service running. Key points include: the discontinued countdown clock marking the Sirius launch; the roles of hosts like Grant Lawrence and Lisa Christiansen; live‑music producer Don Pennington explaining the exclusive studio‑session recordings and how independent Canadian bands can submit music via New Music Canada; John Palazzi’s blogging and audience‑engagement work; designer Ahmed’s web and graphic design responsibilities; Nicole’s senior web editing and podcast publishing tool development; the technical team (Scott, etc.) who built the website and servers; James’s music director duties, including daily listening, programming the podcast, and the Content Factory’s “Pick of the Week” syndication; Marianne’s oversight of New Music Canada, the nation‑wide database that now integrates music, videos, photos, and artist blogs; the on‑air studio dedicated to Alexis Mazurin, with Lisa Christiansen demonstrating the automated broadcast console; and the overall culture of enthusiastic, knowledgeable staff dedicated to promoting independent Canadian music across the web, satellite radio (Sirius channel 94), and the Radio 3 podcast. The tour ends with a call to explore CBC Radio 3’s online content.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Steve Pratt. I'm the director of CBC Radio 3, and we're here for the Inside the CBC blog to take a tour of Radio 3 and show you how we do all the weird and wonderful things with Canadian music that we do here. So I hope it's exciting. It's funny, I think when everybody comes to our office, they expect some weird punk rock hideout or treehouse or something like that. If you look over here, it's a fairly standard layout, but the secret is all the people that are working here are all insanely passionate and knowledgeable fans of independent Canadian music. So I'll give you a quick tour around here.
Before we get— actually, can I just ask, what is this clock? Why is it stopped?
That was the clock about 13 months ago that was counting down for about 6 months for our launch on Sirius. The clock hit zero. Ah! And we feel there's no use for it anymore. Except as a nice memento.
That is a nice memento.
I think maybe someday if we have a launch of something else coming out, we may replace this portion of it with another milestone and count it down.
And you've got some music magazines in behind there.
Yep. Cool.
Very important to have the hosts up on all aspects of music and culture. Right. Here comes Grant Lawrence.
Look at that timing. It's almost as if we planned that.
Yes.
Host of the Radio 3 podcast, the Saturday night show on Radio 2, Sirius Drive Time.
Were you even here for the briefing? Do you know at all what's going on?
No, I was just printing out a complaint.
Uh-oh.
Yeah.
Want to read it? Is it laced with profanities?
Listen, Grant, I really wish CBC would replace you with the robot they once had on the show. It was such a blessing not to listen to your excruciating enunciation of every 'god damn syllable.' In fact, 'it is the voice of Grant Lawrence that may cause me to unsubscribe. To CBC, please fire that over-pretentious music nerd with actual fire.
Please bring back the robot.' It's quite rare that we actually get bad stuff. Out of all the different places that I've worked, the passionate evangelical email that we get here about people loving Canadian music and very happy that the public broadcaster is doing something to promote it is ridiculous. Odd timing that that's the one that should happen on the video game set. Well, just over here, this is Don Pennington.
Hi, Don.
Live music producer extraordinaire. Does all of our exclusive CBC Radio 3 studio sessions.
Stacks, oh stacks, oh stacks, oh stacks of Sessions.
So these are recordings that the CBC has done of artists?
Yeah, this is what CBC Radio 3 spends a lot of money in stock and trade on sessions from bands all across the country. Here's one here, the Bloodlines, a great little band from Saskatoon. And the Phonograph, another great little band from Vancouver. There's Toronto's Golden Dogs, Julie Black.
So if I have a band that I think is great, I'm a Canadian artist, —can I call CBC Radio and say, "Hey, come and record my concert"? How does that process work?
Well, you can surely get into the, shall we say, the train of events. You have to be a playing band, you have to be doing things within the community from wherever you come, and then we start to take notice, have a listen, see if it's appropriate for us. And so that's one way of just getting in contact is a good thing. New Music Canada is a great thing to get in contact with.
And if CBC records one of these live sessions, the artists get paid too?
Indeed, for our particular Studio Sessions series, they are American Federation of Musicians sessions, so the money's good and the exposure is even better. Awesome.
And the great thing is all of them are online on demand 24/7, so if you go to CBCRadio3.com, there's hundreds of awesome concerts you can pick and choose at will. Great stuff. Uh, this is John Palazzi over here. He's our, uh, our chief blogging, uh, producer.
Sorry to hear that.
He's the John of John on the Blog.
Excellent. That's me. Right on. Yeah. I figured you had something to do with the internet with the lovely dual screen. Not that I'm jealous, bastard.
So, yeah, you know, it's pretty handy, I gotta say. Cool. Mm. But, uh, yeah, the blog has been, uh, and I guess it's a little over a year old for us, and it's been a huge way to connect with our audience and have them be able to participate in the communication, uh, give us music tips, all that sort of stuff. So, yeah. Thank you. Ahmed here is our designer. This is our web area here where all the amazing web work goes on. But Ahmed's the man who designed the website, also the guy who designs all of our ads and the little graphics in the podcast every week if you get the enhanced podcast with chapters. Oh yeah, chaptering, yeah. All the weird things that Grant is doing are courtesy of Ahmed. Ahmed's magic.
I've also noticed that as you move further— what direction we're going? North. The number of screens per person increases. So all these people have 2, all these people have 3. All right. So I need to get an office over here at some point.
And this actually is our web team here. Nicole's our senior web editor. Hi, Nicole. Our web producer.
And Nicole also produced the podcast publishing tool, was the lead designer that we use internally.
Yes. Scott, there are the headphones, the man who programmed the entire site. And then back over here is kind of our music corner for our music programming.
And are they kept isolated from the rest of the staff for any sort of safety reasons, or is there like this big huge barrier between—
These are all the stacks of CDs in here. There's walls of CDs of independent Canadian music here. And if you look, one of the neat things under James's desk is there's mountains of other CDs all in around here. Good grief. James is the music director for CBC Radio 3. Hi, James. Hello. The grand poobah of all music that goes on any one of our properties, from the web to the podcast to the satellite radio station. He's the man.
You're the guy to know if someone's got a band.
I'm— yes, and I'm the guy that sits and listens to music all day long, goes through all the New Music Canada bands.
How many hours a day do you think you're listening to music?
Uh, I don't know. A lot.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I go home and listen to music as well. So, and you know, with all the bands that sign up to New Music Canada, you've got to go through those, then programming the podcast, selecting music for on-air on satellite radio and Radio 2, and we actually send music out to the Content Factory. So I listen to music, it seems like 7 days a week, almost, I don't know, 12 hours a day.
And the Content Factory, can you just explain what that is?
Well, the Content Factory actually sends out little items and different things to shows. We're now, we now have the CBC Radio 3 pick Pick of the Week, so we send them a hot new track that basically all of CBC Radio should be playing, and they're definitely up-and-coming bands and stuff that would appeal to everybody. Cool.
So it's like an in-house syndication service of a kind?
Yes. This is Paolo and Chris, lovely producers of the station. Hey, hey, hey. Marianne here. Marianne here. Hello. In charge of all the music in Canada. All of New Music Canada rests with her. Every artist that signs up, any problem people have—
So what is New Music Canada?
It's the online, well, the biggest online database of new music in Canada. Ever. Wow. Really? Yeah. Well, next to MySpace, of course.
Right, yeah. But I mean, so—
It's Canadian only.
So if you, let's say you've got a band, can you upload your music to it?
Of course. Very easily. Right through the site and, you know, 50,000, 60,000 tracks later and 10,000 bands. Amazing.
How long did that take to build?
5 and a half, 6 years.
Cool. And very important, there's actually a brand new version of New Music Canada that just got launched like a month and a half ago. And before it used to be something that wasn't really integrated with the rest of CBCRadio3.com. Now you can go in, you can listen to anything on the whole site in kind of the same player we've got. Bands, instead of just being able to upload a photo and a bio and tunes, they can upload music videos, unlimited photo galleries, they can have their own artist blogs, all that sort of stuff. It's turned into quite a powerful integrated little website for independent Canadian musicians. Thank you. You're very welcome. This is where Grant records the podcast every week. We do a lot of voiceover work in here. As you can see, it's very acoustically set up with glass walls. Yes, it's good that way. Yeah, it's kind of a makeshift studio.
You want that highly reflective surface for good quality recording, I think.
Yeah, exactly. It's funny because I think if any audio engineer really came in here with any standards for CBC, they'd be appalled at this. But we recorded every episode of the podcast in here and no one's complained once yet. Right. So we're going to be moving very soon. I'll take you down to where our actual studio is, have a look there. It's right next to a giant construction zone that will be the brand new Radio 3 offices. So it's kind of nice that we're doing this. This will be the one for the ages because we won't be here very long. It'll be nice to look back and be like, that's the dump where Where we used to live. I don't know what the official name for it is, but this is where all of our web servers are. So if you look at all these wires, this is how you connect to the interweb. Apparently. And get all the good music.
That's a lot of servers.
This is not all of Radio 3, I think this is all of CBC Creative Columbia here. So this is the Radio 3 on-air studio. This is where all the satellite radio station comes from and everything we do on Radio 2 on Saturday night. It's the Alexis Mazurin studio. Alexis was just a real bigger-than-life guy who worked at Radio 3 who passed away about a year and a half ago and hit our unit pretty hard. But he symbolized a lot of what Radio 3 does in terms of looking forward and doing a lot of innovative programming. The most passionate guy you'll ever meet and a huge music fan. And so we have dedicated our studio to the memory of of Alexis and pimped out the door. Yes, as Alexis would have liked it. So it keeps us remembering Alexis and also remembering our passion for music. Right. And here's Lisa Christiansen live on the air to North America at Sirius.
Who again was not briefed that this would be happening. Yes.
This is for the Inside the CBC blog, a tour behind the scenes of Radio 3.
Hello. Hello.
So give us the lowdown on the studio.
The green is the song that's playing, the yellow is what's coming up. And the gray is just there. So it's pretty— it's just highly computerized. Very, very, a very complicated system. Took me years to learn. So don't think this is easy, that anyone can do this.
You know what my favorite thing about the studio here is? It reminds me a lot of like a game show, like the Press Your Luck. Remember the big— oh yes, right. Oh yes, when you're talking, when you're ready to— like when Lisa finished talking Whack the big green button and the song starts. Look at that, the next, the next button, the next button, which is—
it was a huge, uh, progress because we used to have to start the songs with the mouse. And believe me, many— oh really? Something would go wrong.
And so what's, what's over here behind—
this is the, uh, another recording booth where we use for pre-taping or doing interviews. Um, and this is the TV News. Never anything but news.
Never hockey games. Never.
This is the computer where I check out news only.
But the other neat thing about here is that whenever independent musicians come into Vancouver, if they're on tour doing shows here, they got a new album, whatever, then we bring them in here and it's just really nice to finally have a home for them. You know, anytime during the week, you know, between 8 AM and 10 PM Pacific, they can come in here and do a live interview to North America. Take questions from audiences, all that sort of stuff.
And so just to be clear, this is the service that goes out on Sirius, uh, what is it, 1?
All within North America, 24/7.
What channel number is it? Channel 94.
Sirius 94. Sirius 94, yeah. The Kickers there with "Way to Go," and that comes from an EP, and that's just a duo. Amazing sound from just two people there. Coming to you live from Vancouver, Sirius and Jinx.
So in here is our voice booth and production booth. We have Tarek, one of our up-air hosts, Mark McArthur, producer and music programmer, and Andrea Jin, the mastermind behind Radio 3's editorial strategy. That's right. Our senior editorial producer. What are you guys doing in here now? Actually, we're getting Andrea to record a sting for us, the opening to a new segment that Tarek and I are doing called Gearheads. So that wraps up our brief tour of Radio 3. Please feel free to go check out cbcradio3.com if you want to sample anything we do. We got tons of stuff online there. If you haven't subscribed to the Radio 3 podcast, it's Canada's number one music podcast, one of the top music podcasts in the world. Go check it out, it's in iTunes, or if you're lucky enough to be a Sirius subscriber, channel 94. Thanks! Thanks, Steve.
