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BBC Sounds Podcast is Live

January can be quite a busy month for most people. New goals, new mindsets, new plans. I have always loved January as it is my birthday month, as well as many of my friends’ birthdays. The month has already flown by! I celebrated NYE in Newcastle with a uni friend then returned to work in London. Despite being known to be a “slower month” in the industry, I managed to stay busy! I have taken a week to continue my birthday celebrations, a few days in York with my mum and a trip to Lisbon with a friend. I don’t want the fun to end!

In more exciting and relevant news, my BBC Sounds audio piece is live! It went up on 16th January and started to gain traction on Instagram on 22nd January. I am yet to post about it on my personal social channels and may not get round to that until February, so stay tuned! I have mentioned the piece before, but for anyone who doesn’t know, this is how the BBC have described it:

I have flown the family nest for the bright lights of London. I usually don’t realise I miss home until I hear the Geordie accent in an unexpected place. A park, a coffee shop, the tube. My parents are polar opposites. Mum is the life and soul of the party, usually connected to a telephone, but as for Dad… He’s a poet. Some artists appear out of the blue. My 58-year-old Scottish father deals with the passing of a friend, his wife’s endless diets and his children’s travels abroad by putting pen to paper. His spelling is awful and the rhyming can be questionable but it definitely brings a laugh to anyone that has the pleasure of hearing them!. And he uses his autobiographical poetic content to communicate with the rest of the family. Through family conversation and anecdotal comedic poems, this piece will remind you that some of the best moments can happen in the home. My Dad is a poet and he really didn’t know it. New Creatives is supported by Arts Council England and BBC Arts.

This has been about a year in the making, with my initial application to the programme occurring when I was working in Seville between January and April 2019. I am so happy with the progress I made completing the BBC New Creatives scheme, learning about how to distribute and market my own audio work. This has been difficult to carry out when applying for many different jobs and then once more after moving to London for a full-time job. I hope that this audio piece can lead to more increasingly exciting opportunities in the near future! I know my Dad would love for his work to be picked up and published! I had always suggested he make a book with all his poems, but a podcast is another fun alternative!

You can find a link to my work here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0801sr8

Best of luck to everyone’s 2020 endeavours!

Getting To Know A New Audio Device

Through the BBC New Creatives scheme, I was kindly sent some audio equipment to create my audio piece. As a recent graduate of student radio, my only technical knowledge was an old Alice Board, Adobe Audition for editing, Myriad software for song selection, and the microphones that have been in the studio for many years. I used to record out of studio interviews on my phone using a random voice record app.

Now I have a PCM-D100 device to record with and some DTx – 910 Stereo-Headphones. Plus, an accessory kit with a handle and a windjammer. I feel quite the part! I have the basics down. Getting to know how to use the equipment was a lot of trial and error. The most challenging thing is not picking up the noise of me holding the audio device, whether that was holding the handle or the device itself. I think I prefer using the handle. The device is also quite tricky to transport; it is bigger than the other on-the-go equipment I have used before.

I have used it around the house a lot; in the garden, kitchen, and garage picking up sound bites including family conversations as well as sounds of nature such as birds in the garden, natural suburban sounds such as lawnmower noises, cars passing, and planes overhead. I have also been recording household sounds, including dripping taps, doors opening, and closing and footsteps.

These experimental sound recordings have helped me best learn how to use the device; what settings to have it on, how far away or close to hold it to certain people and objects. I have then transferred the audio track into Reaper – another new aspect to my sound learning. I was very set in my ways with Adobe Audition and struggled to find my way around Reaper at first. I am getting better each time I edit and quicker, which I guess is natural with this trial and error method of sound recording.

 

I am yet to conduct any formal interviews or go into public with the device, mainly because I know it was quite expensive! But also, because I know, it would draw attention and I’m not quite sure what my long-term aims with the device are. In the short term, I am making a short audio piece for BBC New Creatives, which could lead to being developed further, but at the moment is very much in the experimental pitching, trial, and error, change and development stages.

I would love to know if anyone else has this device? Do you like using it? Are there any tips and tricks I should know about? There are probably so many features on it I haven’t even discovered yet. My preferred recording and editing style at the moment is very natural, authentic, and organic with no music added over, just people’s voices and natural background noises. I like podcasts that are only voices and not lots of editing with music overlaid, and many sound effects are thrown in. I find I listen longer, relate more, and feel more engaged and engrossed in the content when it is voice only.

I am spending the rest of today recording with friends and housemates, so for the first time may have more of an interview set-up, but again I want it to be very relaxed and casual so that the conversation remains natural and unforced. Overall, this device has been a significant step in the right direction for becoming a more proficient audio producer, I think. It is very different from my knowledge of student radio technology and more complicated than an iPhone, but it is easy enough to grasp that I don’t feel overwhelmed or confused by it. I hope to use it for many more years in the future to produce whatever content I choose to explore and experiment with!

WHERE ELSE TO FIND ME:

Tri-lingual radio show (Sobremesa)

Sobremesa Facebook

YouTube and Geography blog

LinkedIn

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