TY Radio Transmission Workshop

On Monday the 18th of October I attended a Radio Transmission Workshop with 29 other TY students. Frank, who was the guest speaker, began the workshop by getting to know us and some of our interests to begin to get the class engaged. He told us about his childhood and where his radio career began, as well as some funny lighthearted jokes. He told us about the radio stations he listened to growing up, that there were only thirty minutes of ‘young peoples’ music in the day. And so Frank began his career with pirated music stations at sixteen years old. Pirated means a product or piece of artwork reproduced without permission. Post leaving-cert, Frank said he made a few mistakes when it came to choices in his career, but ended up majoring in Media a bit later in his life, he taught us that it's never too late to do what you really want to do in life.

Frank spoke to us about advertising on radio and the importance of good communication. He talked about how having good communication would really benefit us in the future with job interviews and public speaking. Then he assigned us the task of creating our own radio advertisement. He told us to keep it under thirty seconds and to not bombard the listener with too much information before playing a few examples of advertisements. We then in groups of 2-6 began brainstorming our own radio advertisement, which we will be later recording in the ‘Vocal Coach’ which was a recording studio in a van. My group and I decided to do ours on soundproof headphones, we thought this was a good place to start, something we would be able to create short and sweet ads with, while it still seeming like something you would hear on the radio. With the use of a variety of different audios from Youtube and Pete, who did all the controls in the van, we created our ad. It was a cool experience being in the portable studio and talking into the microphone as well as listening to our ads after.
We then worked on our next task which was creating a short podcast episode, which we found to be much harder thinking of something to talk about, as well as something everyone could engage in while staying under two minutes. We then as a group set on Micheal Jackson’s death conspiracy theories. This was not only an interesting topic to research but a fun one to talk about. Although I found it hard to talk freely without losing my train of thought, I relied on the bullet points I had written down to keep me on track. But overall it was a great way of practising our communication skills.

This workshop gave us a great taster into radio production and another career we could go into. And a great introduction for anyone there who is interested in doing radio as a career. Not only was creating our advertisements and podcasts good fun but engaging with the equipment was a great learning experience. We loved to hear about Frank’s career path and how he got to where he is today as well as working with Pete in the recording studio. I personally would love to take part in something like this again. It was a great workshop for improving people’s communication skills as well as getting to know people in our year group.

Caitlin O’Dea 4E


In Image- Ana-Mai Whelan, Sarah Shortall, Sophie Monks, Caitlin O’Dea and Meadhbh Monks.