I did some jingles for the World’s Smallest Pirate Radio Station the other day: here they are…
I’d promised to do these a couple of weeks ago. The night before the broadcast, the DJ, Director, Helmsman and Cleaner Neil Watson emailed me saying “I suppose you ran out of time to do anything; no problem.”
I spent an hour lashing these together and sent them to him later that night… and he used them!
Sadly, I didn’t manage to get the nautical phrase “Avast behind” into any of them…
For radio jingles, I compress, compress, and compress again. They are heard in an environment with high ambient noise, so the louder I can get them the better. I also don’t want the radio station’s compressors to work hard because they are usually cheap and crap; no offence to the manufacturer concerned but I know one radio station in London whose entire output goes through a Behringer stereo compressor! I figure I’d rather compress with my higher-quality gear, leaving the radio station’s output compressors nothing to compress.
The story of radio and compression is interesting: broadcasters started compressing the hell out of their outputs because it made them sound “louder” than the next station on the dial… who then of course compressed their outputs more, requiring the station that started the war to compress even more … and so on.
However, this became self-defeating. The ear is a muscle, and if you clench a muscle hard and don’t release it for ten minutes (which is effectively what heavy compression does to your ears as it denies the ear any release time) it starts to hurt, and so people turned the radio off after 10-15 minutes.
If you’re in any doubt as to the effects of heavy compression on music, listen to Absolute Radio… it hurts.
For the full story of how the World’s Smallest Pirate Radio Station came into being, go here.
I particularly like his description of Wivenhoe as
a small drinking village with a fishing problem
and I particularly like Wivenhoe and its people.
I’ll be doing a live set one of these nights for Neil: watch this space!
