Week 1-4:
When the role of station sound producer was introduced to me, I’ve got to say I was quite curious as to what my actual role is. However with the great communication in our group through our WhatsApp chat I’ve always been kept up to date in terms of what the whole group thinks of the certain ideas that I came up with for the various idents and jingles.
When I started mixing and playing with different sounds I came to the conclusion that the most important bit to me was having a voice that can actually portray what the station sounds like. What I fully mean by that is, making sure that the voice itself within the jingles and idents fits with the station’s music. Hence why all of the jingles apart from one were voiced by one person. That person is a fellow Total Rock member, Nik Alexander. He was kind enough to help me out because I was told by my editor that having my voice in one advert and then hearing me again on the branding wouldn’t sound professional. Which I agreed with.
Beforementioned I was also tasked with recording one advert. This advert happened to be an advert of flowers which can be ordered online. Callum Reeve wrote the advert and I produced the audio. The advert itself was (in my opinion) good enough for radio and for the demographic we were aiming at in the first place. However, I came across an issue when all of us including Tom Whalley listened to it. I ended up pronouncing the word “florist” as if I was saying “floorist”. Got that sorted in the end. I’ll blame that one on the fact English isn’t my first language…
Week 5-8:
After the stressful research of how to put radio branding together and how to actually mix it I’ve finally learnt how to make station branding. Bear in mind that I’ve never created any sort of jingles or idents before this module. Which is crazy considering I present on a radio station, but this was my first time doing so and I feel happy with what I achieved in terms of the quality of all the branding that was played on the show.
When I finally got to editing bits and pieces of the voiceovers and the different sounds I had to mix, I started getting the gist of it. The ideas started springing to my mind and it was easier for me to create them. Audition also helped with the ease of mixing down all the audio. The group situation was mostly good, we had some issues as every group would but I think we’ve all laid our differences aside and did the best we could on each pilot and the live show. I can honestly say that as a person who likes to have their stuff sorted, the people in my group who I call friends haven’t let anyone down. We could’ve always made some things better but that’s always the case in life.
On our second pilot we started figuring out more and more improvements by the minute and thanks to the very constructive feedback from Matthew and Tom we managed to make sure that every bit of our actual show was polished.
On Friday the 30th of November, we had recorded our show. I’ve got to say it was a helluva show, the amazing presenting from Claire, great sense of audio by Callum who was producing and driving the desk, outstanding producing and managing by Chloe. I could go all day talking about how fantastic we were on the day of the actual production. Of course, it just happened that at one point when we were doing our Elvis food tasting feature there was an issue with the headphones so we didn’t realise that a bed was playing too loud while Claire was presenting the feature.