Jingle Evaluation

Due to this being the first time I used this software, Adobe Soundbooth, I was slow to start as I was attempting to get the hang of the software. The brief described that we had to produce 3 Jingles, one for introducing the News, a show on the radio station (SNC) and an Ident used to advertise the station during a break. However, after I had had a little time to get used to the software I was able to quickly establish what I wanted to do in terms of the Jingles. After going away to think about it for a day we came back to work with the software. However, even though we had time to get used to it, there were still a few problems with the software.

For example, a lot of people experienced problems with not only the software but the Macs themselves, such as the Macs restarting themselves and/or closing the programs for no reason. This was quite annoying and inhibited our ability to produce the work quickly and effectively. However, even though there were problems, progress was made and many of use were able to produce all 3 pieces of work well before the day was over.

I believe that if we had had more time and had gotten to grips with the program move, as some of us were more advanced than others, we would have been able to produce a higher quality piece of work. The hardest part was recording our voices, as there was a lot of background noise from the other students. If we had had portable voice recorders which worked with the Macs we would have been able to avoid the background noise or reduce it at the very least. I found that finding music and sound effects that worked with the voice was hard, mainly because we had to use existing music rather than make our own, which is the norm in regular radio stations.

Most of use used www.Youtube.com to find the music we wanted to use in the Jingles. Once we had found the music we then used another website called www.video2mp3.com where we were able to convert the Youtube videos to mp3 format for use in the Jingles. Personally I thought that the Ident was the easiest of the 3 Jingles to do, as it was not only the shortest but it also required the use of music was board, since we could use any song we wanted, compared to the News Jingle which required a more specialised tune to accompany the voice over.

My Jingles comprised of the use of classic hard Rock, mainly ‘Crazy Train’ by Ozzy Osbourne and ‘Won’t get fooled again’ by The Who. I decided on the genre of music early on so I could base the Jingles around that. The News Jingle was made up of clips taken from an old 1970’s radio station’s Jingle, accompanied by my voice over. The clips had a ‘sing song’ sound to them which I though worked well.

All in all, I enjoyed the exercise, but I believe that if we had more time to prepare and to get used to the software we would have been able to produce a higher quality of work, compared to the relatively short amount of time we had to produce this, as well as our brief understanding of the software which didn’t enable us to use it to its full potential.

Below are links to the Jingles themselves:

SNC Live Indent

Studio Promo

The News