Howard Stern Show Audio Demo – Sirius Satellite Radio

I submitted an application to work for the new Howard Stern Show on Sirius Satellite Radio. The job opening said they wanted someone who could make “a fart sound like a symphony”. Ironically, I had just finished producing my dog and fart Christmas CD’s so felt I might be a good match for the job.

The demo was specifically created for the show and I had an open space of about 8 hours total to work on it. The hardest part for me was trying to guess what they were looking for because the job opening description was very short and general. I tried to put myself in the screeners chair and imagine what they would want to hear. My best guess was to make my demo sound like it was already part of Howard’s show. Because of time constraints, I didn’t have the luxury of creating lots of new music from scratch. So somehow I had to incorporate my existing audio library into this demo. Fortunately I had backed up most of my audio archives the month before so I had everything in one location to pull from.

To make the demo feel like it was actually part of Howard’s show, I found audio samples of the show online and incorporated them into the demo. As I went along, the audio samples were inserted with sometimes opposing music to give a totally different connotation to what the radio sample was expressing. Some of these I think turned out to be pretty humorous, others, well….I tried.

Note: Audio samples from the Howard Stern show used in this tutorial fall under the Fair Use copyright act.

I created a ProTools file and imported all the different audio samples from my own library that I thought might work with the demo. I laid them all out in a single track and did a quick run through to edit down the parts I thought most appropriate. Then I imported all of Howard’s audio samples into another single track side-by-side, and started listening through to parts I thought I could use for the demo. I didn’t have a lot to work with from Howard’s show, just snippets from different bits.

Overall I thought the approach seemed effective, and I really liked the interaction of Howard actually being on my demo. I FedEx’d everything to New York and had the package submitted within about 5 days of the job opening, but I never heard anything back. I can only take guesses as to why I didn’t get it and will probably never know exactly why.

Some feedback I got from friends: One said there were places it didn’t rock enough, one said it was too music orientated and should have focused more on spoken word effects and radio style promos, another said the demo was too long.

All the music clips on the demo are my own songs or projects from my studio, but I don’t think that is realized well on this demo. I tried to show diversity, and instead showed a mish-mash.

I agree with those three assessments. Maybe the demo wasn’t good enough, I’m not sure. You decide.

FAIR WARNNG: This was an audio producer demo for the Howard Stern Show. Mr. Stern is an infamous “shock jock” so there is some profanity on this demo.

Howard Stern Demo by Conrad Askland MP3

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