AC Blog

So how are you vocal harmonies then?

Browsing around this morning we found some footage from NAMM 08 which features a cool performance showing off a vocal harmoniser box.

Don’t you just love technology?

We have a new concept which we are experimenting with which we are certain will be of value to our pro-audio news publishers. The new service is offering custom-made podcasts of the product mentioned in the press release itself.

As most of you readers are aware we publish pro-audio news almost on a daily basis, and in a fairly significant quantity at times. The press release information comes from many major pro-audio companies, and we are delighted to continually be of service to them.

The press releases are typically sorted into niche categories along with a specific topic home. This has obvious benefits for information organisation. Once published, typically with an image of the product, the latest releases appear on the main home page of the site, enabling our audience to immediately check out what is hot, as well as having a dedicated page on the AC site.

The press releases section also has its own unique rss feed which enables anyone to syndicate the news. The rss feed can be ported into any number of thousands and thousands of additional sites.

Being a company firmly wrapped-up in audio technologies it seems a very natural progression for us to offer our clients a specific podcasting service, where the product in question gets “air-time”, and provide a further medium for consumer engagement, something which is becoming more and more vital in the market place. We are currently offering three levels of service, all of which provide incredibly good value, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

The levels of service are:

Standard Podcast - $100

These podcasts are 4-5 minute interviews carried out over the telephone with our AC staff, and edited by our professional PodIdent team. We recommend scheduling the podcast interview to take place at least a day or two before the press releases release date. Once completed, the podcast will be found on your press release page and be able to be streamed on the site. The podcast will also be listed in the main AC Pro Audio News feed, adding a substantial audience. The podcast will also be distributed in iTunes and other podcast directories.

Extended Podcast - $200

This package takes the Podcast up a couple of levels - an extended telephone conversation of between 10-20 minutes for a more in-depth interview.

Full Service Audio Promo + Extended Podcast - $1000

This package gives you a 30 sec professional audio jingle/ident/promo royality-free to use on your extended podcast interview and anywhere else you would like. This package is amazing value as you get a professionally composed audio ident, constructed by our PodIdent team, included in the advertising package which is re-useable multiple times, anywhere you wish! Your ident will be played on the main AC Podcast along with your interview.

The completed file(s) are licensed under the Creative Commons License.

I’m personally really excited to see how this initiative works out, as I know some of our clients are.

For more information including purchasing options visit here:
Pro-Audio Podcasts

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