Okay so for starters if you don’t get the title of this post you need to hear this back and forth from Shrek right away but replace “ogres” with “bumpers”. Seriously. Even if you know what I am talking about, do it. The princess commands it. I certainly at times felt the frustration that Shrek feels in that clip while doing this, but I was surprised with how simple it actually seemed. So here is the story of how all of this went down, straight from you to me. But first, a short interruption brought to you by my bumper.

Once upon a time…just kidding! So I knew right away that I wanted to do something sports oriented, I am such a sports lover it’s not even possible. After playing collegiate volleyball for four years and working for the athletics department for four years I pretty much know everything about almost every common sport (I still need to figure out curling…). Looking at some of my fellow noble steeds works I was quite impressed, they were doing great work! But most of them seemed to be a song they like with a voice over which were very well done. I am a bit different (if you haven’t figured that out yet) and decided that I wanted to do a song that almost everyone knows (at least in the sports community), the charge song! Believe it or not, the charge song was NO WHERE to be found on freesound.org. Seriously, try to look it up on there, it’s missing. So I went to good old reliable YouTube and found a lovely version of it right here. While now that I am looking back at it, I probably could have used the Fastest YouTube Downloader, but I just used a website which turns YouTubes to mp3 players called Listen to YouTube. So I now had that mp3, but I wanted to record my voice first and then add the sound later.

So thanks to the help of  a noble steed’s blog, I found that there was a tutorial video done by the magical wizard that is Professor Levine on how to work Audacity, which was the program I worked with to create this lovely masterpiece. Well, being the adventurous princess I am, I decided to only watch the first minute or two and then play around. I’m glad that I challenged myself! So I recorded different ways of me talking just to see what I liked best. I had “You’re listening to ds106, stay tuned” and I thought it was too boring, then I had a great take but I said ds106 instead of ds106 radio!! But it’s okay because I liked my last one best anyway (so I used it). I LOVED the feature to cut and paste because I added some dead air in at times. I think I was a bit too nervous so I spoke very quickly and didn’t have any room for dramatic effect. Silly me, I’m a princess, I’m all about the drama. So I added the pause between “You’re listening to ds106 radio, where every one’s a winner” and “stayed tuned for more action coming your way” because I knew I wanted the charge part in between those two. I lowered my voice, but only by a little bit (apparently I have a low voice already) just to seem more like a dramatic tone.

I had the voice, and I knew the song, but now I had to combine the two. So I watched a little bit more tutorial and imported in my file, and next thing you knew I was doing some pretty awesome stuff! I played around with figuring out when I should start my talking and was happy with where I ended up putting it, and I wanted the dramatic part of the charge song to be just that. So I listened to the whole thing, but found that something was missing. The song was over by the time that my “coming your way” part was being said, so it was just dead air. What was I going to do? Sadly all my princes were busy at the time, so I had to figure this one out on my own. GIRL POWER! What do you think? Take a listen to what I had at this point:

Realistically, if this was a sporting event, there would be people there (unless it was a volleyball game at Mary Washington, not like I’m bitter or anything). So there needed to be a background noise of fans cheering. Lucky for me, freesound had plenty of cheering for me to choose from and I finally ended up selecting this one, but only the first 19 seconds or so. But wowza the sound was so loud. I lowered the whole volume, but I wanted it to be louder at the end when the music stopped, but couldn’t find a way. So back to the video I went and sure enough the envelope tool was then introduced, and that right there was my prince. I loved how I was able to control when it got louder and quieter. Finally, I added a fade in and fade out and played it til I was content!

So thanks to the help of noble steeds, and wizard tutorials I was able to slay this audio dragon and make for a smashing hit!

Princess Karissa