charlie o'brien voice imaging - voiceovers imaging narration

Site overview

Welcome to the new Charlie O'Brien Radio / Voice website. The site is really split into two main sections: Voice and Imaging work and commercial demos in one section, and the CKLW/CHUM Radio Archives and Big 8 Reunion in the other.

For the longest time our "Charlie O'Brien Radio Page" sat on the free Tripod.com pages and just grew and grew - and finally ran out of space. We built the voicework.ca site to take some of the commercial demo audio load.

The radio page on Tripod was left untended.

So, now they are back together on a larger server with plenty of storage.

Designing the landscape

The radio pages have CKLW airchecks and photos from the Big 8 Detroit/Windsor - one of the all-time great radio stations where I've had the pleasure to work for quite some time. Not to be outdone, my time at CHUM has been very satisfying.

Now that CHUM Ltd. owns both stations and I'm still kickin' - some of the great history from both stations is parked here.

You'll find audio from the Big 8 CKLW Radio Reunion Show as well. Three big hours of memories featuring some true broadcasting legends were aired on CKLW in October 2002. Michael MacNamara was filming the "Radio Revolution:Rise and Fall of The Big 8" documentary at the same time and some of the Radio Reunion show is in the film. A big congratulations to Mike and Judy Holm for the film and the well deserved Gemini Award as best historical documentary. There are plenty of photos here on the site from the reunion and the local movie premiere.

1050 CHUM is also one of Canada's great radio stations. It became Canada's first rock and roll radio station on May 24, 1957. We mourn the recent passing of it's visionary founder: Mr. Alan Waters.

They have an excellent new website at 1050chum.com. We're not trying to duplicate their efforts - so to get ALL the CHUM Charts, current promotion and contest info visit 1050chum.com.

Here on our page, you'll find many audio remembrances from the "CHUM Remembers" series of broadcasts when they were switching to sports. We've included some CHUM jock photos as well as chart views. To get the real background read Allen Farrell's excellent book: The CHUM Story (published by Stoddart.)

Preparation and construction

It's pretty much a one man wrecking crew. The Charlie O'Brien Radio / Voice site is designed and programmed by yours truly. The basic design is a snappy template from Project Seven (I love their stuff.) The tools we use to throw it together include Dreamweaver, PhotoShop and Soundforge.
The photos on the site are from the CKLW Radio Archives as well as the CHUM Radio Archives (used by permission.) The audio clips are public domain - please don't hot link to audio clips. Link to html files on our site - NOT audio.

"makin' it fresh"

Welcome to the newly redesigned site. Every couple years, it's time to blow up an old site (just like a radio format) and jump into something fresher. Come to think of it, somewhere out there the very first pages I designed about 10 years ago are still out there on the web sitting on a server - "somewhere..."