By Roadkill Creative
If you’ve been at production for more than a few weeks, you’ve probably noticed the most time consuming task in the studio (or at your desk with Adobe Audition or Pro Tools) isn’t putting the pieces together for a great promo — it’s taking the time to find the pieces to produce that great promo.
A few years ago, I remember my PD coming into my studio asking me to cook up a promo that featured some caller audio. I had the voice tracks from the voice guy, picked out some music and effects for the promo, but I was at a loss for having just the right mix of callers to pull it off. What’s next? The daunting task of blindly listening to old talk shows for the just the right byte from a caller. There has to be a better way, right? Yes, there is and here are two suggestions.
1 – If you’re lucky enough to have a local talk show, ask your engineer if they can set up a “phone only” feed from the talk studio. No annoying talk show host to step over the caller or music to make the call unusable…just the caller. If you’re able to set this up in a logger, aircheck machine, or even a DRR in NexGen to automatically record this audio, you’re golden. At the end of the day, pop open your DAW, look for the pieces in the waveform that are not silence, and go fishing for some callers.
2 – Now let’s say you don’t have a local show at your station or you’re not able to get the “phone only” feed from engineering, there is another option. Listen while you work. No, I’m not talking about some trite positioning statement from the AC station across town. While you’re producing spots, writing copy, or working on the next Mercury Award winner, listen to your station. If you want to be hi-tech, create a task in Outlook with the day’s date and give it a title of something like “Promo Notes”. Yes, you can be old-school and write it down on a piece of paper. But if you’re like me, you can be left with scraps of meaningless notes at the end of the week if left unchecked. When you hear an audial gem, write down the time and a description of what you heard (this works for clips from local and syndicated talk show hosts too). When it’s time to produce your next promo or when you just want to switch things up a little, go fishing for some great caller or talk show clips…and know where the fish are.
0 reacties