I found this assignment very entertaining.

I tried to add a subtle country twang to my speech; I did not do the country accent justice. That was the hardest part.

The rest of it was fairly easy. I played banjos while I talked, I wrote out a script, I thought of a name, and a catch phrase. I thought the catch phrase, “kick off your boots and stay awhile,” was perfect for western radio because it incorporates western themes and keeping my station on. I chose the name Wild Wild Western, because I like alliteration in name titles.

You’re listening to the best radio in town, DS106 Radio.

I took audio files from Free Sound to create this 17 second long radio bumper. I also created a computerized voice which would announce the name of the station. I did this to accompany the theme of the song I chose on Free Sound. I then smashed it all together as one file on Audacity. Finally, I created an icon for the audio through the Paint application found on Windows computers, and Pic Monkey, a free photo-editor found online. This is what I ended up creating.

EDIT: I forgot to add that I also had to do some practice tests with Audacity because it got a little confusing at first.

This is my bumper to help keep the Western DS106 station going!

So, after learning the basic of audio editing from audacity, I started this assignment. I searched around on freesound after reading about its existence from a fellow ds106 participant on her radio bumper post. It was a fairly straight forward process after I watched the tutorial. I just found a guitar bit I liked to go behind it on freesound.org. Then, I wrote a short script, puns included. I took a few tries as recording it in a somewhat western accent. Then, I used a few methods I found for noise reduction and to take out a couple of pops and ssss sounds. After that, I stuck the pieces together, created an envelope for my voice over part so that the music would quiet down while I was speaking. I threw on a fade in and fade out, and exported it to mp3 format. Maybe I am just lazy, but I preferred the simplicity here that I employed. I added in a couple other sounds and such, but I don’t think they added anything to it so I took them out.

This assignment was pretty fun! I re-did my recording like 8 times probably because I kept saying something strange or something that didn’t make any sense. I ended up just keeping it pretty simple, but I like the way it turned out. I used a guitar sound from freesound for the background and talked over it to make the bumper. Using Audacity, I uploaded the guitar noise and made my recording and mixed the tracks.

Here is my radio bumper for DS106 Radio, according to the assignment that asks us to put together something that reminds listeners of what they’re listening to.

I am extremely happy with how this little blip turned out. I think the guitar mixed well with the wind background, and my voice sounds pretty clear (thanks to my re-recording it a hundred times). I took the guitar and wind from Freesound and mixed it together with Audacity. Going with a kind of “electric cowboy” mood, I thought the guitar over a quiet breeze fit well into our western theme. The guitar riffs I found flowed well together, I think. I had originally tried to record the speaking part with my phone using the Soundcloud app, but I wasn’t happy with the results. I switched to recording myself with my computer microphone directly into Audacity instead, which worked out much better. The quality and volume were dramatically better. The bumper is a bit longer than I’d wanted it to be, but I couldn’t manage to cut the guitar down without leaving obvious jumps in it.

One of this week’s assignments was to create a bumper for the class radio station. This assignment challenged me in multiple ways but in the end, I feel it was a good exercise for me to complete. I listened to our class radio show for the first time last Monday. By doing so, it gave me a better idea on how the show worked, what type of items were played, and I was able to listen to several bumpers that were being used (very helpful for this task). So for my radio bumper I decided to focus in on the western theme of the course. I used the audio software, audacity, to create my bumper. The first thing I did was I found a piece of music to set as my background. I used the site Freesounds.org to find this piece of music and other sound effects. So, the background piece of music I used was an acoustic guitar song that seemed to have a country twang within it, to tie to the western theme. I then created a voice recording announcing the station, “you’re listening to ds106 radio, the western way.” To further add western theme, I found a sound effect of a horse galloping from freesounds.org. I then imported all of these files into audacity and arranged them in the manner I thought best fit for a radio show bumper. I began with just the country guitar song playing, then added in my voice recording, and ended it with the country song and the sound of the horse galloping away. Overall, I think this was a very good assignment to complete because it allowed me to continue to work with the program audacity and apply my creativity in a different format.