Today we recorded our demo at RRR, building towards our first show live on air next month.

[Click here to read my annotations for the demo on Soundcloud]

I’m very happy with the group mates I was assigned in Group 4. Though we all have varying levels of familiarity and experience with radio, each of the members in our group is keen and enthusiastic about our ability to produce a high-quality show. Our roles were easily assigned, as Bec and Chloe were particularly keen to present and I was keen to do panel operation, leaving Georgia and Hannah to act as producers and social media content creators. We all agreed that we should all be actively involved in the production and logistics for the show, which we also made sure was true for the demo.

We booked a couple of practice sessions at RRR in the lead up to our demo. This was particularly important for me as I was overseas during the studio’s initial introduction to the station, and hadn’t stepped foot in the studio until just a couple of weeks before our demo was due to be submitted. Our practice sessions went well — with Bec and Chloe building up their on-air chemistry and me slowly getting my head around the desk — but I have to admit I was pretty nervous going into the demo.

For content we had planned to do at least two live interviews (which would give us extra practice dealing with in-studio guests) but we were only able to find one guest who was available at the time required. Fi Wright ended up being an incredible guest, with an interesting topic to talk about, a natural on-air manner and a very generous and helpful attitude. She even ended up giving me some helpful tips for operating the panel, which is definitely above and beyond for a guest! To fill out the rest of the show we used a couple of pre-recorded pieces — an atmospheric narrative documentary piece that Georgia created for an RMIT studio last year, and an interview with Violent Soho that Bec recorded for SYN FM. Though ideally we would have found more suitable content for our demo, at least we didn’t have to fill all our entire show with conversations between our hosts. I’m sure Bec and Chloe could have chatted to each other for the hour easily, but that wouldn’t have given us much practice for our real show.

As panel operator I was responsible for getting our pre-records and music tracks onto a CD for playback in the studio, but as I don’t own a CD burner I had to do it in the RRR green room minutes before we went into the studio to start recording. Unfortunately, when I loaded the CDs into the studio I found that some of the tracks only had audio in the right channel. I’m not sure what actually caused this issue (I verified that the original files were stereo), but I’ve made a note to ensure I burn the CDs with much more notice next time so I can pick up any issues with enough time to fix them.

For some reason the Violent Soho interview cut off about three minutes before it was supposed to. We were welcoming our guest into the studio at the time so I was distracted from what was going to air, and the momentary shock led to a few seconds of dead air (a crime!) while I quickly jumped on the panel and played a sponsorship announcement I’d already cued up to be played next. It ended up not being as bad as I originally feared, but it’s still a lesson in making sure audio is checked before being played in the studio (and making sure you have the next thing cued up at all times so you can quickly throw to it when needed).

I’ve annotated our demo with some more mistakes and opportunities for improvement we identified — click the link above to read our annotations on Soundcloud.

Our demo was basically exactly what we needed at this stage of our experience with live radio — generally a success, giving us valuable experience with the studio and working collaboratively, and some very specific areas that could be improved before our first on-air show.

Learnings:

• Practice makes perfect, the more time you spend in the studio the more comfortable you will be
• Always plan more content than you actually need, because people will inevitably pull out or become unavailable
• Normalise and check the volume of any audio you expect to go to air
• Double check burnt CDs for audio glitches before going into the studio
• Always cue audio one or two steps ahead, in case of disaster