Skip to main content

I'm Making A New Podcast Theme

I'll confess, I haven't been a regular listener of CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast, but I happened to tune in about 2 weeks ago. At that time, I learned about the Buzz Out Loud Remix Contest. It's a pretty exciting opportunity for me, since I ABSOLUTELY LOVE COMPOSING PODCAST THEMES.

As a musician /composer, I have had a really hard time finding a medium that works for me, due to my quirky background and limitations. These include:
  1. My partialness to the underground demoscene sound, which is lo-fi, 8-bitty, and well, sort of unique and special interest (put gently) for the ears of most radio-loving listeners.
  2. A short attention span, causing me to lose interest while writing songs with lyrics...
  3. " "... songs that last more than 30 seconds or so.
My brother's college buddy had a saying: "there's a butt for every seat". Well, if there's a medium for every artist, I think I've found mine. Podcast themes are short, VERY unique (a requirement, in fact), and generally instrumental.

I've tried my hand a composing/producing a handful of podcast themes, including for such podcasts as Dinosaurs: Before They Were Fuels, as well as Fresh Ubuntu (although you'll not find any credit anywhere on their site indicating so... *AHEM*, GUYS). Anyway, they've been pretty good, if I do say so myself. Without going too deeply into what values I believe a podcast theme should have (I'll save that for another post), they succeed in combining interesting elements from the podcast, personified through my background, into a well articulated, contained, and fairly polished theme song.

So I knew I needed to outdo myself. The BOL podcast has a lot of listener-ship. There will be a lot of competition. Over the course of the last week or 2, I have tweaked, scrutinized, polished, and tuned my composition. I've heard it on my studio monitors, headphones, computer speakers, in the car, in the living room... you get my drift. But now it must be "done" - it's time to present my submission to the CNET team. I'm not taking the chance that something stupid will happen, causing my submission to be screwed up or lost by the time the 5/12 deadline hits.

Whether or not mine is selected for the theme, I can say that it's a step up from anything I've done thus far. I think it represents the beginning of a whole new tier of podcast theme production for me. I'm looking forward to seeing it up on the CNET website, and I'm pretty sure it will at least hold it's own with the "heavy hitters".

May the best podcast theme win! (And let's face it, it'll be nice to have something better than the 4 track Acid loop they have been using until now. No offense, BOL team.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Timbaland rips off a Demoscene artist

I knew this day would come. The new Timbaland/Nelly Furtado song "Do It" uses a song made in 2000 by Finnish demoscene artist "Tempest" (Janne Suni). It's a 4 channel .mod (the ripoff is from a playback using the C64 SID soundchip). The song was hosted on scene.org's servers (the main repository for all everyones demos and tracked music, etc.). As you might expect, no permission or royalties were paid to Tempest. Just to clarify, we're not talking about some kind of coincidence here. There is no question that this track was used to create the song "Do It". In an interview, Timbaland tries to downplay it, saying things like "he sampled it from a video game". (This track was not written for a video game- it was actually written for the 2000 demoscene music competition, in which it won 1st place). Regardless, he basically claims he has no legal obligations because it's just like all the other pop artists that sample other m

Reaper, Linux, and the Behringer X-Air - Complete Studio Solution, Part 1

Introduction and Rationale This is part one of a major effort to document my experiences with recreating my home studio, entirely using Linux.  Without getting into too many of the specifics, a few months ago I decided that I was unhappy with Windows' shenanigans - to the point that I was ready to make a serious attempt to leave it behind.  For most in this situation, the obvious choice is to switch to Mac OS.  With its proven track record, support, and options for multimedia production, it is naturally the first alternative to consider if your goal is to simply use something other than Windows. For me the choice was not so simple. I despise Mac OS and, in general, the goals and philosophies put forth by Apple in an effort to ostensibly provide users with an "easy" working environment.  It does not help that I have also failed to find any aspect of the Mac OS UI intuitive, but I realize that this is a subjective matter. With my IT background and user-control* favori

Windows 8 audio clicks and glitches narrowed down to Malwarebytes

Ever since I got my Windows 8 PC, I have been having serious problems with audio.  Basically all sound playback on my system experiences a brief  but frequent click, skip, glitch, stutter, whatever you prefer.  I can reproduce the issue on any sound card or firewire sound interface (devices tested include the onboard Conexant SmartAudio HD, my external Phonic Helix 12, and my Edirol FA-101).  All of them seem to have audio clicks, with the firewire interfaces' clicks seeming more harsh for whatever reason.