Tag Archives: room with a view

Room With A View @ 3RRR – Reflection

In this revision, I would like to reflect on my learning curve from week 1 of this semester, to week 12. I’m writing this after hosting our second show on 3RRR, which I would like to think was pretty successful.

What we took away from our first demo show was a killer run-sheet layout. This was easy to customise for each show, containing clock time, show time, track numbers and file sources. The demo also acted as a base for our first show on the 24th of April. We used a convo about penalty rates which was ad-libbed in the demo.

In this show was also my first interview with Thrusher which I reflected upon here.
Though it was marred by the sound quality, I definitely learnt to utilise the studio headphones, making sure they were loud enough to pick up tapping and twisting sounds I was making. I think this learning curve was reflected in our feature, where I interviewed and panelled Prof. Martin Mulligan, a senior lecturer in sustainability from RMIT. I had never panelled before so I was nervous and unsure of what to do. We took the interview in one take and I was thrilled with the outcome. The sound quality is crisp and free of distractions. You can hear the interview below in our feature titled “Fashion Faux Pas” which I narrate and also don’t touch the mic stand in.

I hosted our final show today (May 29th) and as we worked through the hour I felt much more comfortable than I did even in my prerecord with Thrusher. I had briefly met Russell from the ASRC and invited him into talk about his social enterprise on air. I ad-libbed a few questions and tried to throw in a couple of jokes here and there.  When a prerecorded segment crashed on air, we had about 10 seconds of dead air, but luckily Nat is an experienced panelist and quickly threw to a song. We decided it would be best for us to play the recording from the start as it was only two minutes in. We cut some songs to run back on time and it was smooth again. Here is a link to the show.

I would love to continue with radio. 3RRR has a great atmosphere and is a Melbourne institution I admire and respect. I would love to be further involved in the station, and I will be signing up for SYN Radio training this week!

RWAV chickas

 

 

Room With A View – April 24th

We presented our first show on 3RRR today. The show ran reasonably smoothly, and I am proud of how we managed as a group of first timers. It certainly was daunting before we went live. We all arrived an hour before the show just to be prepared. We had the runsheets printed and highlighted, the files on a usb, the tracks lined up and everything timed. We all felt pretty prepared.

Our first little hiccup was the empty gap between my interview and the recording. There was a quiet intro that might not have picked up on a low fader. I probably should have alerted the panel about that. Next was a bit of dead air as a sponsorship announcement played. I was standing in the greenroom frantically waving my hands for the hosts to talk because nothing was playing. They covered it really well and in the grand scheme of things, I feel as if the 3RRR listeners would be sympathetic to a student group.

an emo amid a group of smiling babes

A few transitions were a little clunky but that comes with practice from the whole team. I was tested when our guest arrived 20 minutes late and 10 minutes before he was live. I had to call a couple of times but he faithfully arrived and apologised. I got him water and chatted with him, told him about the show and the presenters. I wanted it to be a friendly and relaxed atmosphere and I think we did well at creating that.

Room With A View – THRUSHER

I was lucky enough to interview Stass and Alana from the female-focused skate crew Thrusher, who skate around Melbourne encouraging women to jump on board of a skateboard lol. This was my first experience in a radio studio and it’s certainly reflected through the quality of my interview. Something was banging about the studio table, hitting the mic stands, squeaking the chairs, tapping the table and I’m starting to think it was me. It makes an otherwise interesting interview sound super amateur. I got a bit of a spray by a staff member about it. This made listening back definitely the hardest part of the whole process.

Other than the final product, I’m proud of the lead-up to the interview. I managed to keep a consistent dialogue with Thrusher, giving information about the show, setting up times to meet and even organising a time to skate with them. They were enthusiastic and excited guests, and I wish the sound quality of the show had of done them some more justice.

Listen to Thrusher for Room With A View here:

Room With A View – demo recording reflection

Our group (3) began our demo recording process at RRR this Thursday, and I am proud of our final product which I have linked below to SoundCloud. It’s not seamless, but our time management and run-sheet organisation gave us a cohesive piece of work in the end.

My role in the recording was Producer. This involved keeping the segments tight and on schedule, especially the interviews and pre-recorded content. I managed this by tuning a timer on my phone and keeping an eye on the clock. I learnt in the studio that each mic session is shown on a timer on the panel. This saved me when I lost track of the time during an 7 minute interview, as the clock on the panel showed that the mics had been on for 5 minutes.

The brief dead air moment as we loaded the final recorded piece was the only hiccup that was quite noticeable to me. Corey and Jess managed to fill in this time well by repeating the station name and having a brief discussion about the topic. During this we managed to find that the fader was too low to hear the quiet opening of the recorded piece. There was a moment of panic but in actually it was a mere 8 seconds. When we go live we will be more familiar with the levels of the pre-record (if we have any). Hopefully all of our interviews and features will be live-to-air and we can avoid this. Finally, we have discerned that CDs are much easier to manage than an iTunes playlist. The songs stop at the end of play so we don’t manually have to pause the playlist. As a producer, I will take on the responsibility of sourcing our music onto a CD.

Overall I am happy with the professionalism of our group. Everyone was confident  going into the studio and with time and practice, we hope it will flow seamlessly.