AC Blog

As contributing editor/production advisor for AudioCourses I cover a lot of different bases from week to week. Most weeks I’ll be writing tutorials and other content for the site as well as taking part in the weekly workshops.

This week has been slightly different as I’ve been working on an AudioCourses ‘ident’ (essentially a jingle) for broadcast.

Now, I do like to get stuck into composing and production - I do this most weeks both for work and for pleasure (ok, maybe i do need a life outside my studio!)

I am involved with ‘jingles’ in the UK radio market (mostly commercial stations and local BBC stations) so getting a chance to apply my knowledge in this area to AudioCourses was a challenge I was looking forward to.

Unlike the BBC, who provide you with a very strict idea of what they want from an audio ‘ident’ (they even draw you a nice graph to represent the dynamics of the jingle), I was given somewhat of a free reign for this composition. However I had a strict time scale to work to, and obviously we didn’t want to descend into the realms of a BBC style budget (you’d be suprised how expensive jingles are - when you involve several sessions musicians working at up to £300 per hour each, the price can rocket sky high very quickly) so I couldn’t get too self indulgent - this is very easy to do when you have 3 months to create a ‘package’ - in this instance I needed to look at a window of a couple of days at most. Nothing like a bit of pressure to get the creative juices flowing…

Obviously for this kind of work you need some kind of vocal talent, and for this project we decided to use the lovely Beverley Beer who is very experienced in this area and has a proven track record as a V/O artist.. Look out for a feature on Beverley, including some vocal recording tips, on the AudioCourses site in the next week.

Well, tonight I sent the MP3 of the ‘bed’ (the backing track) to Beverley so tomorrow she will record the voice over in her home studio and send the results back to me (mono-192kbps mp3 format) over email. What is great about using a professional like Beverely Beer is that she can reel off several versions of the same script in different voices i.e. sexy, professional, warm etc. This gives the producer lots of choice when it comes to comping the final take. As Beverley has a home studio and broadband access it means we can quickly and easily swap large audio files over the internet depsite living several hundred miles apart.

This weekend will be taken up by choosing the best takes and comping them together to create the perfect voice over. The editing process can be very complex and time consuming - when working to a professional standard you need to really get into the edit, even on a minute level - when doing work for radio stations I will often cut up a word on a syllable level and make a comp from several different takes. This may sound ‘over the top’, but when your work is being played several times a day alongside tunes from Kylie Minogue, U2, Madonna, Coldplay, Norah Jones etc you need to make it sound on a level with these tunes, and at least 2 of the above artists will have been edited to a similiar extent (i’ll let you speculate over the 2 i mean!)

So by the start of next week we’ll have our new AudioCourses jingle - I’ll post a new blog after I’ve finished the ident detailing some of the production techniques used in the piece.

Have a good weekend & ‘jingle’ all the way,

ben m

Hi everyone,

This is my first entry on the Audiocourses blog - I’ll try to post here regularly with my thoughts on music and production as well as other things that are happening in my life which may be vaguely interesting.

I decided today to spend an hour or so creating a tune in a genre that I don’t usually work in - Drum’n'Bass. Every now and then I like to do something like this as it really freshens you up, especially if you only work in a few genres usually.

Now electronic music isn’t new to me at all - I first got into music production about 13 years ago using a Commodore Amiga 512 (later a 1200) and a copy of OctaMed. At the time I was using 8-bit mono samples and had no MIDI keyboard. everything was put together in the most unmusical way possible. OctaMed was certainly very basic in it’s user interface but somehow I created some of the most innovative music I have ever produced - at the time I didn’t even play an instrument so I was just making it up as I went along with no idea of music theory.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time trying to write songs in the style of Westbam and Slipmatt. A lot of the music of this time was what we would later call ‘jungle’ and this in term obviously had a huge influence on the later genres of ‘Breakbeat’ and ‘Drum’n'Bass’. I drifted out of the ‘jungle’ so to speak and became more interested in the slower, funkier sounds of House and the party-friendly, and now dated, rhythms of ‘Big Beat’.

In recent months I’ve felt a yearning to go back to my roots of electronic music production and so hence my decision today to have a crack at drum’n'bass. Firing up Propellerheads Reason I ramped up the tempo to 168bpm(!), at least 35bpm more than I’d use for house, and a tempo twice as fast as the last band project I worked on. I had a quick listen to some tunes from the genre, namely the fantastic Bodyrock by Shimon & Andy C (which inadvertantly started the whole ‘clownstep’ debacle on internet forums) and tunes from the likes of DJ Zinc.

Anyhow I had a great time layering bass sounds, doubling up loops with programmed drums and applying far more effects than I’d usually dream of. Although it’s not quite the standard of Pendulum, the current darlings of D’n'B, I hope to continue working on it just for practice. Have a listen to an 8-bar section here.

Right that’s enough from me, I’m going back into the jungle…

ben m

.. we do create these from time to time in order to gain some really helpful feedback from our readers. Don’t forget to get in contact with us if you had an idea for a great Audiocourses.com survey, in fact have you completed yours yet?Surveys - Sound Engineering