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About Our Production Department
Production Department
KUNM's Production Department staff is made up of Production Director Tristan Clum and a crew of dedicated UNM students and community volunteers who work behind the scenes to help make sure the station serves the listeners well AND sounds as good as possible.
See some of the production facilities in our online tour
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About Our Production Director
Tristan returns to Albuquerque from Flagstaff where he was a Morning Edition/All Things Considered host and reporter.
He was the Capitol Bureau reporter for KUNM from 1997 until 1999. He has won numerous awards for reporting and anchoring from both the Arizona and the New Mexico Associated Press.
Tristan began his career in public radio in 1988 as a Reggae show host and Programming Assistant at KNMS-FM in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In the decade that followed, he worked as a public television Producer and as an Assignment Editor for the Albuquerque NBC affiliate. Tristan graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1992 with a degree in political science.
When he’s not working in one of KUNM’s studios, he likes to ride his mountain bike across the hills of New Mexico.
production@kunm.org
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What We Do
Here's a short list of the things the Production Department is responsible for. You can read on for more detail on each.
Recording Programs Via Satellite
Producing Recorded Announcements
Training Volunteers
Engineering Studio and Remote Broadcasts
Participating in Program Production
Recording Programs Via Satellite
Those of you who have visited us may have seen the big satellite dish near our building. It's aimed at the Public Radio Satellite System units that orbit the earth. The system gives KUNM access to many channels and many programs. Some of what you hear on KUNM is broadcast live and some is broadcast on a tape-delay basis. NPR's Morning Edition, for example, is broadcast live from Washington, D.C. via satellite. Some programs, like Democracy Now are also broadcast live, via satellite, but when Democracy Now is being broadcast from New York at 7 a.m. MT, KUNM is airing Morning Edition live. So we have to have a system to record Democracy Now at 7 so it can air at its KUNM scheduled airtime, 4 p.m. Production Department personnel load little digital tapes into automatically timed recorders that roll on the Democracy Now channel at 7 each weekday morning. Later, one of our staff members pulls the tape, makes sure it sounds good, times it, cues it and puts it in its "slot" in our Control Room, ready for air at 4 p.m.
This routine happens from 5 to 10 times a day as many of the programs you enjoy on KUNM are sent to us via satellite at times other than when they air. Whenever you hear one of these programs come on successfully, it's the result of the work of several people and reliable equipment.
Producing Recorded Announcements
KUNM's Production Department is also responsible for creating the short announcements that you hear occasionally on the air acknowledging a business contributor, announcing a community event, or promoting another KUNM program. These announcements are usually created in one of our editing studios and involve recording an announcer's voice, along with some music and perhaps a few other elements. The elements are edited and mixed using computers equipped with digital editing software. Although the computers have greatly decreased the amount of time that each of these announcements takes to produce, it still takes more time than you might think. A 30 second announcement will take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to produce, depending on its complexity. And some are real works of radio art!
Training Volunteers
At KUNM, once you learn to do something, you can pretty well count on us asking you to train someone else who wants to learn. That's how we keep a lot of community members involved in the creation of the daily miracle that is KUNM. So our staff is deeply involved with not only our regularly scheduled Broadcast Training Class for students and community members, but also informally with all the others who get involved at KUNM.
Engineering Studio and Remote Broadcasts
Whenever you hear a KUNM Call-In show or a live broadcast of a political forum, you can bet that a team from the Production Department is on hand making sure the sound gets to you. One or two engineers from our staff are typically responsible for showing up an hour before any live call-in program to set up microphones and prepare our auxiliary Studio A for the show. That way, our host and guests can just sit around our talk table and focus on the topic, rather than the technical details of the transmission.
Remote broadcasts involve even more work as a crew needs to make a site inspection weeks before a broadcast to make sure it's logistically possible to get the needed equipment in and functioning and that we can successfully transmit the audio back to the station so it can get to you. Typically 3 or 4 Production Department members are involved with a live or tape delay remote broadcast.
Participating in Program Production
When a Production Assistant has some of the above tools under his or her belt, they are then ready to put them all to work to create original programming. Many from our department, for example, are part of the Ear To The Ground crew that records local bands live in our Studio A or heads out into our community and nearby venues to capture both local and touring musicians. It's a load of work and you can hear the fruits of all this labor by tuning into Ear To The Ground Saturday nights at 7.
Other folks are regularly involved in producing other shows like The Best of KUNM, University Showcase, Wild Things, Friday Forum and more.
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