Radio Aircheck, whaat?

That's right, readers, I had to do an aircheck. Let me tell you this for free: It was not that fun.

First of all, my station that I was reporting from was a Love station. I know! You're thinking 'are you serious?' Well, sadly, yes, I am very serious. I had to play songs by Celine Dion and such. That was not my idea of good music, but hey, I'll bring it to the people if that's what they want.

And before you ask, no, I wasn't really on the air. I was safely tucked away in the DMT studio all aloney on my owny. But unfortunately, every mistake I made was recorded onto a CD that I get to keep forever. For the rest of my life. Hopefully it doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

Second, I should have practiced more. When I went to cue the second song (Love Is All You Need - The Beatles) I accidentally pushed the On Air button. The correct term escapes me right now (unless that is really what it is called). Anyway, I hit the on air button and The Beatles song started to play over Angel Eyes (an easy listening song. No words. You catch my drift.) and that was just a disaster in itself.

Third and last, I paused way too often. I just wasn't prepared at all, which is a shame really. It could have turned out really nicely if I didn't stutter and say 'um' all the gosh darn time. The cues were all messed up because I was trying to focus on something else. Actually, I don't know why there are such long pauses in between the songs because I mixed and it sounded perfect when I was in the studio). Perhaps something weird happened while it was recording, I have no idea. I do, however, know that when I was talking or when I was about to talk, I could have fixed that easily by not freaking out.

I used to be interested in a job like this, but I think I've changed my mind. It's so much work to have to mix and push all these buttons and talk at the same time without an assistant, or something. I didn't like the experience and I don't think I want to ever do this again.

Now Announcing A PSA

Before Holiday break my DMT class was told to make a public service announcement for the upcoming open house that St Clair County Tec is holding in February. We were allowed to have one partner to help with the project. My partner happened to be my good friend, Jenette.

At the very beginning, I address parents and students in the eighth through tenth grades, I only addressed students because sometimes they can't help but to listen to older radio stations (like the one this will be broadcasted on if I win the contest) when their parents are in the car. Next, after the introduction, Jenette and I explain that Tec classes are three hours long and the students will be given three credits to make up from the loss of time from their Home Schools. (which is great, because Tec is fun. Sometimes.) We gave the date of the open house, February 3rd, and the time of the function, 5:30 to 8 pm. Just in case some people were unfamiliar with the Tec center, we gave the address as well as the date and time.

We joke that the experience looks good on college applications, because that seems to be all that parents are interested in after you hit high school. (It helps that it's true.)

I wish we had had enough time to talk about what kinds of programs were at Tec, and such.

The only thing I can complain about is recording. It was very difficult trying to record these sections to have as little as mistakes as we could. It seems like I always whine about recording, but I just don't like it.

Fun with Audio

A little project called the Audio Drama was posed upon the AM DMT class. For this project we had to seperate into groups of three or four and then come up with some kind of story that might have been played on the radio back when storytelling was one of those "cool things to do". You know, when there wasn't any TV or anything. So, in order to do this, we all had to write a script and then come up with who would act which parts and then record them with the Zoom recorder. That part wasn't as hard as the actual editing was. So many mistakes were made, and some things (called not saving and then the program killing itself) happened that we wished wouldn't.

My group, with my friends Eva and Mike, came up with the idea of three kids traveling across the United States to see Santa Claus. It gets interesting, with name calling and false injuries along the way. (Not to mention traveling in a wagon with a vacuum cleaner attached to the back).

I think the only thing I really liked about this whole thing was recording. It didn't matter how stupid we looked reading the parts that we ourselves wrote. I had fun up until we had to laugh into the recorder. You can't fake a laugh and have it still sound normal, can you? No, not really. So, we had to wait with the recorder on until there was something funny to laugh about. And even then we kept leaning away from the recorder because that's just how we laugh. That went on for a long time, actually.

Even though I'm really creative, I didn't like brainstorming for an idea to write a script on, nor did I like writing the script either. I guess we know that I'm just not cut out to be a screenwriter or anything like that. I didn't have that much fun doing the script. Every time we stopped writing it was like, "wait....I just lost my idea, where was I going with this?" And that's kind of a downer when you're typing against the clock.

This experience taught me to SAVE EARLY AND SAVE OFTEN, otherwise you will lose everything and have to start alllllll over again. It kind of fails. Especially when you lose everything there is a darn good chance that your project is just to be late, or, you're almost finished. Not my favorite thing.

It's really silly to say, but, everything more or less went right except the part where we, uh, lost EVERYTHING. Yeah, that's...it. Everything was nice except that part.

Hola, Mis Amigos.

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