Radio Jingle

A short introduction:
A radio jingle is a short catchy song varying between 5 seconds and 30 seconds, although others have gone over this. They're usually used to promote something such as a radio show, the radio station or a radio DJ, or can include all three in one jingle if they so wish. They can also advertise upcoming films or songs as well. They usually include speech, music and sound effects depending on what is being advertised in the jingle.

The Task:
So, to begin with we had to get ourselves acquainted with the Apple Mac software, and for this project we had to use Logic Pro, this programme allows you to record, edit and produce a new track. Logic Pro is known as a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), other examples of a DAW is GarageBand and Soundbooth. Logic Pro also lets you 'bounce' a track, so you can save it as an MP3 format, MP3 is a compressed file so it can be quickly uploaded and downloaded to and from the internet and sent to someone or something else with ease. However, MP3 has a low quality because of it being compressed and it sounds unclear when compared to for example an AIFF format or WAV format, so if anyone ever wanted to burn music onto a CD the best format to do that in would be AIFF as it is much clearer and better quality. As well as being able to create a new track on Logic Pro, you can add different types of effects to your track, better known as 'plug-ins'. These plug-ins can be used to make your track sound different for example you can make it sound distorted, or change around the equaliser to make your voice sound different, or even use autotune to make your voice sound 'better' shall we say. We also played around with the built in instruments to make our own tunes or beats, or we could get a song from the Internet and use that instead. When having a track we had to make sure we put it on different audio tracks so that each individual audio could be edited in it's own way.

After learning about Logic Pro, we were told to try and create our own radio jingle for the college student radio called SNC Live! This had to be between 5-20 seconds long. It also had to include the radio presenter, the radio station and to make sure we had vocals, music and sound effects. We had to look at other radio jingles to get an idea of what we were trying to create, the one I looked at was the Chris Moyles show on Radio 1, this was an interesting one to listen to as Chris Moyles is usually known for pushing the boundaries a little bit, for example he did it longer than the expected time and actually mentioned in the jingle that he was on a radio jingle, etc. However, it did give me a good insight of how to try and create my own jingle, so I went about figuring out what was going to be said on it and how I should sound on it. After figuring out what I wanted to do I had to get a MP3 recorder and record my sounds on that, I decided to get a group of people to say enthusiastically 'SNC Live!' as a starting point, I then went on to say 'You're listening to DJ Panda on SNC Live!'. After getting all of the recordings I desired, I went back to the Mac and plugged in my MP3 recorder and took my sounds off it and imported them into Logic Pro to begin my editing. I tried out different sounds and tried to edit them together with the recordings and edited my sound recordings by adding distortion effects and what not.

After making the jingle to promote a radio show, we then had to create a jingle promoting a product, so we had to invent our own products up and I came up with the idea of a pair of glasses that could take a picture by pressing a small button on the glasses arm. So again we had to go out and use the MP3 recorders, I aimed my products at teenagers as I thought they would be excited at the concept of being able to take pictures discreetly with just a pair of glasses on, I know I would be. So I decided to try and sound excited on my recordings and I got someone else to record something saying how amazing the glasses were, so it would sound like other people reviewing the product, I went on to explain how they worked and tried to sound happy and upbeat about the product. After happy with my recordings I went back to the Mac's and again began the process I mentioned in the above paragraph.

Finally, we had to make a jingle promoting either a new film or a new song, I decided to take up promoting a new song by N-Dubz, this time I used the Mac's built in microphone to record myself explaining a little bit about N-Dubz and then when the song was to be released. I tried to put parts of the song behind the speech and parts of one of their old songs on in the background as well, this was very hard to put together and this was also unfinished as I struggled using the programme. But after happy with my recordings I again imported them onto the Mac and yet again restarted the same process.

Evaluation:
In this evaluation I will be discussing what I've learnt from using Logic Pro and what I learnt from creating my own jingles, why I found it interesting in some parts but not in others and what problems I faced and what I did to solve them.

To being with, from using Logic Pro I learnt that creating and editing music is a lot more difficult than I first thought. It takes a lot of time and care if you really want to create the best track, at first I thought it was a bit complicated to use but I began to get used to it. I found it interesting to use once I got into it and enjoyed trying out the different plug-ins and using the built in instruments as I've always found the concept of making music quite interesting. I also learnt how to use the different recording devices because at first we had to use a MP3 recorder but for the other jingle we made we had to use the Macs built in microphones which I enjoyed, I then learnt how to import the recorded sounds into Logic Pro. From creating my own jingles I learnt that it's actually quite hard to make a good sounding jingle where everything flows together and I didn't actually manage to finish either of my jingles to the standard I would've liked.

I found this project interesting as I enjoyed trying out different sound effects and making the recordings on Logic Pro and I liked editing it all together to make a new track. I liked learning how to use the Mac's and how to use Logic Pro as it is now a new experience for when we come back to this programme and it is good experience if I ever wanted to use it for other things than just radio jingles. However, unfortunately for us the Mac's weren’t working until the end of the week so everything was a bit rushed and I still feel like I could've learnt much more, this is also why I didn't finish any of my jingles because I had an idea of what sounds I wanted but couldn't find them and I believe I might have been able to if we had more time. But that couldn't be helped so I just got in with it in the time I had and I believe I didn't get bad results considering I didn't finish or the fact we didn't have much time.

In conclusion, I found this project exciting and interesting to do, I would definitely do it again if I got the opportunity to as I would happily want to learn more about Logic Pro and how a finished track may actually sound like. If I were to do this project again I would've tried to get better recordings for all of the jingles I made as some of them weren’t very clear or were too loud and other parts were too quiet. I would take more time when trying to edit the sound effects and the music I added to it as I wasn't really sure how to do it. I would also try to experiment with other sound effects instead of trying to find specific sounds as this wasted time and I could've gone back to that at the end. All in all, I did enjoy this project despite the technical difficulties and would definitely return to it if the opportunity arises.