When I was tasked with making a bumper for ds106radio, I was straight up terrified. Before this week, I had never done any real audio work and had no idea what to do. Thankfully, I have realized that I am good at teaching myself technology so once I got a feel for what a radio bumper was and started playing around with Audacity, I realized it would not be as hard of a task as I originally thought.

I started off the process of making my radio bumper by writing out a quick, easy to read script that got what I wanted to across. I spelled out all symbols that I would be reading as part of the radio station’s web address so that I would not gloss over them and forget to read them.

You are listening to ds106 radio. Online all the time at ds106 r a d dot i o backslash listen

stay tuned for more media. who knows what will happen?

I recorded this on my iPod Touch using the Voice Memos app and soon remembered that I should mention the twitter hashtag that is used by listeners of the station. I rerecorded my script, ad-libbing a line at the end about #ds106radio on Twitter and once satisfied with how I sounded, emailed myself the memo. I imported the memo along with Green Day’s Last Ride In into Audacity and trimmed the song down to about 30 seconds as well as changed the gain of it to -16db so that it would not overpower my speaking. I trimmed the vocal track that I recorded down to what I wanted and moved it so that it started after the song had played for five seconds and once I was satisfied with how it sounded, I saved it as an mp3 and uploaded it to soundcloud.

I chose Last Ride In for the background music since it is a purely instrumental track and it has a unique almost 60′s surf song sound to it. I thought it would fit perfectly with the uniqueness of some of the music that I’ve heard on ds106radio so far.

The process of making my bumper was easier than expected and I am quite pleased with the result.