Before recording our demo I came into the studio a little earlier to get a feel for the environment and also become familiar with the technical aspects of production. Learning the work that goes behind the sound engineering is not as easy as it looks, but once you get past all the buttons and lights everything seems a little more clear. To begin with I was a bit rusty, but after having a go at fading in and out of songs and changing between voice and music a few times I started to get the hang of it. The transitions became smoother and I begun to understand the workings of the levels and transitions. Although Mia is in charge of the technical work in our group I feel that getting to know all aspects of production is key when trying to work smoothly as a team. I had a little bit of time before recording to gather a little more information on the artists of the songs we had chosen, which added a little more interest in our final demo.
The demo record itself didn’t go smoothly, but that was expected for our first time. We all noticed small details that each of us were overlooking. As we went along I decided to keep time on our run sheet as you would do in television production, but I quickly realised it was not a necessary task for radio production to keep exact timing. The importance of a run sheet is not to use it as a script but rather use it as a guideline. Its about knowing when to let a topic breathe and when to cut a boring topic short. This was just the beginning though.
As it was our first demo the content itself was quite dry, but from this we were able to really get a feel for our group dynamics and also the dynamics of radio production itself.
We did forget many small but key tasks, such as countdowns from songs into talking, which made the transitions seem much more clunky and disconnected. The run sheet was not updated for all group members, which resulted in a mix up for the presenters. The great thing here was that both the girls presenting continued on after the small mistake and were able to go on with the show regardless of the mishap.
As a group we decided that the best way to have a fully updated version of the run sheet was, firstly to have it fully completed in time for each member to go through it and secondly to use google docs, which allows for each member to edit and adjust the run sheet, making sure that the names of songs are correct and the back information on bands and artists are up to date and accurate.
With the role of the producer I will now be going through each run sheet to finalise all changes, check times and information before going through it together as a group before recording.
Although we had our faults in this first demo record I was very happy that we were able to collectively define and discuss them, which in turn means that next time the same issues can be avoided.
https://soundcloud.com/commsinm…/room-with-a-view-rrr-demo