Create and schedule a good jingle for your radio station

As you probably know, Jingles are a must for your radio. Having a good music selection is great, but having a dynamic radio station is even better!

If you’re just starting your radio adventure, you may not be able to afford to buy your own jingles to match your content. Rest assured, we’re here to show you that creating your own jingle can be child’s play!

The first steps to creating your jingle

Before plugging in your microphone, it’s important to think about how you want your listeners to feel. The best way to do this is to use the theme of your radio as a basis.

Let’s say that you host a rock radio station. It would make sense to opt for a hoarse voice, with amplifier sounds and instruments that are associated to this musical style (electric guitars, drums, bass etc…).

Once you have several ideas for sound effects, go to a royalty-free sound effect bank like FreeSound. Search for the sounds you want in the search bar and download the ones that inspire you!

Record your jingle

Now that you’ve downloaded your favorite sounds, it’s time to record your jingle. If you’re wondering which software to use, Audacity will do the trick. Also make sure you use a good quality microphone for a more professional sound.

As mentioned earlier, it is important to adapt your voice to the style of your radio. So if your voice doesn’t sound the way you want it to, don’t hesitate to ask friends or family for help!

We’ve decided to show you a practical case by designing a jingle for Chill Radio, the station to listen to with your morning coffee.

Here is what the voice sounds like with no modifications:

To match the identity of the radio station, we decided to:

• Add a coffee machine and spoon noise at the beginning of the jingle
• Put an FM radio search noise as a transition, just before the voice
• Apply a fade out so that we can hear the voice properly from the beginning (Effect > Fade out in Audacity):

To energize the whole thing:

• A “vinyl” effect has been added as background noise on the voice and its gain has been lowered to -14 db so that it doesn’t take the upper hand
• We’ve inserted a cathode-ray tube (CRT) sound that goes out as an extro to the jingle. Its tempo has been lowered to -36% (Effect > Change tempo… in Audacity) so that it is not too strident and its gain to has been adjusted to -6db

And finally, for the voice to have a real “radio” effect:

• We added a low-pass filter and a high-pass filter at 12 db (Effect > Low-pass filter and Effect > High-pass filter in Audacity)
• As the voice volume was too low, we doubled the track and then increased the gain of both tracks to 14 db for the first and 16 db for the second.

Here’s the final result!

Schedule your jingle

Now that your jingle is ready, all you have to do is schedule it to play in your Radio Manager!

There are several different ways to schedule your jingle: between each song, every X minutes, but also at the beginning and end of a program.

Between each song:

1. Head over to Scheduling > Programs in your Radio Manager
2. You will need to create a program with two elements: a playlist of songs and a playlist with only the jingle
3. Put the “Jingle” playlist first in the program and then the second playlist afterwards
4. Finally, all you have to do is schedule the program to play in the Planning tab

Every X minutes:

1. Head over to Scheduling > Breaks in your Radio Manager
2. Create a break with your jingle as the content
3. Don’t forget to set the interval between jingles in the Repeat tab

At the beginning and end of a program:

1. Head over to Scheduling > Programs in your Radio Manager
2. If you have already created your program, just edit it and add your jingle as the intro & extro
3. Otherwise, add it directly when creating your program

Don’t forget to regenerate the days that have already been generated in the Daily Generation tab in order for your changes to be taken into account!

If you prefer to contact professionals for the creation of your jingle, we advise you to use an online service such as Fiverr.

How about you, do you prefer homemade jingles or pro jingles? Let us know in the comments!