The working rule for this week’s posts:

We like to see writing with your media, a story about the story, or the story behind the story.

Tah!Dah! my first ever radio bumper.

I did not even know what that was until this morning. Go figure. I listened to a few examples from past participants and understood what we being asked of us. Not my thing, I told myself. I will have to think about how to do it in a way that makes sense to me. I wondered about the bumper or catch phrase Dr Frasier Crane used to sign off his programme on KACL Radio. It occurred to me that as the DS106 headless shrink I could bring something other than music and special effects to DS106 radio – I know nothing about either. So I did a little search in the Google and found a video clip that would work. Video. John Johnston may say that audio is not something less than video, but in this case it was. How do I take out just the audio from this video? There must be an app for that. There is. 

So, I had the audio from the video and still without a clue. some kind of audio editor must be the next step. Something like Audio Gimp. Ahh! I think that Garageband does that on the Mac. Never opened it. May be now is the time. I went back to the Google to get some tutorials and there are many. Then had the idea for the tag line, synthesising an idea: ‘Talky and the Shrink tackle the big questions’ which is the Radio show I would like to make on DS106 Headless if Talky Tina will join me. After hearing her lovely voice I think we would rock the airwaves. I recorded the audio on Quicktime. Dragged it to Garageband. And now what? Well I had to learn to split a file, fade out, copy paste bits of a sound file. My favourite was discovering that I could get my voice to echo. I considered doing the whole thing myself, Frasier’s scripts are available online. But that would have been too much audio in one day. 

This course is really stretching me. I looked at the plan for the week and I have to say I wanted to go back to last week and do more from there. As I said earlier, in spite of encouragement from Cogdog and John Johnston audio is not my thing. Writing is. 

By jickity, DS106 is challenging my preconceptions. When you get the lovely feedback I have had about this voice of mine I do not like recorded, you had better pay attention and at least have a go. 

So now, I am just waiting for Talky to call and tell me she is in! We have our radio bumper ready, all we need is for me to get a clue about how to do a radio programme…but may be she already knows how to do that.