This is v1.0 of the theme song for Eastside and “Jerry”. It is only version 1.0. I still need to find some sounds to add to the music.
I didn’t have a character or person to focus on the unit right before this one. Others who are on the #noir106 journey established their characters in unit 1. The idea of the character or theme from the beginning makes a lot of sense in traveling this ds106 path.
I began with lots of analyzing where in the time of the life of my Dad the story will take place. I have been lost in 1953-56 high school year books, photo albums and memories. The other wall I kept hitting was whether this is an intro bumper, a theme song, or a promo. Because I am not really doing a radio show I get caught up in radio show focus instead of how I will use these. I will probably still use this theme for part of his story. It has brought to light that what I really need is an intro bumper to tell who the story is about. A next audio assignment will be to do something as an intro bumper.
I could have chosen to do something that was from the late 50’s – but that reminded me of Happy Days (the TV Show) and didn’t seem to fit. My Dad loved music – all kinds. His records and CDS and the music channels on cable, the radio he would set up when we would go on vacation in northern Wisconsin each year.
A mix of all his favorites would probably sound like a strange mix. I decided to stay focused on the Eastside story and him as a handsome young man navigating new adulthood in the late 50’s. Determining what that sound would be had me listening to all sorts of things – and boy can you go on a tangents and find some neat things you weren’t looking for – but they eat up your time!
One of his favorites in music was Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. I decided to take one of their songs and remix it.
Taste of Honey was the song I chose. I remember it playing on the record player when I was a kid . It was way too peppy and dance like for a theme. I worked with the speed of the clips and slowed them down to get a different sound. I also cut portions out to keep it under 1.5 minutes. In trying to get it to sound like it was one song and not something chopped up, I used WAH WAH to blend sounds, the envelope and lots of adjusting, and fade in and fade out.
Other tools I used were normalize and noise reduction. After the noise reduction, I had to go back and increase the sound decibel. Normalize got rid of the clipping. Noise reduction softened the recording sounds. Increasing the decibel meant I could hear the product without cranking my sound up all the way.
The UNDO command became my best friend but still turned on me at times! The part I haven’t done is add some other sounds yet. That will be version 1.x-2.
After a good 5 hours of tweaking – I called it version one.
As for ds106/noir106 I don’t think this hits the targets others are going towards. But for my learning plan, it did keep me in Audacity, in audio editing, and in building that skill and understanding so I am going to call it a success.
