Having an easily recognizable brand ultimately helps your business stay relevant. Therefore, it’s crucial for audiences to be able to identify a company just from the mention of a product or service it provides. For example, if Hollywood comes to mind when you hear the word ‘movie,’ that means Los Angeles’ filmmakers got a lot right. Even something as simple as a website’s colors can be memorable. Therefore, it’s important to have a clear, consistent, and distinctive brand voice. This broad term covers the company’s overall values, style, phrasing, and even the sounds used in video content. When we at clovio decided to record a jingle of our own, we had this exact thought: to have our own unique voice through music.
The Sound of Content
The human brain has a great capacity to remember sounds and associate them with specific things. As such, jingles should be memorable and fit for all kinds of videos. Without them, content creators have to rely on royalty-free tracks or pay for the rights, which are reliable but overused methods. In contrast, a short, catchy song goes far in building a brand voice.
We have to admit that our jingle kicked off as a joke. During one of our monthly team meetings, someone started a conversation about music and a few remarked that they played instruments. At this point, Kevin, one of our Partnership Account Managers, lightheartedly suggested we form a clovio band. The joke stuck, and the band was born. This shows how small talk can give way to great thoughts and proves the importance of constant team contact.
clovio Jingle All the Way
After a short recruitment process orchestrated by our CEO, we ended up with a three-piece band. At the helm was Kevin, our guitarist and main songwriter. He was joined by Sharmaine on the ukulele, who’s one of our Native English Editors, while Richard, a Content Writer, played the lower grooves on bass. Our SEM Specialist Sérgio was the fourth honorable member, who was in charge of mixing and mastering.
Since we neither had a drummer nor the means to record acoustic drums – and we didn’t exactly want to enrage our neighbors either – we relied on a midi keyboard, which Kevin also played. Our goal was simple: record a short and upbeat piece, preferably with a repeating pattern.
Writing, Recording, and Everything in Between
As a remote and international company, band practice had its fair share of challenges. Fortunately, a few of us happened to be around the clovio Studio at the time, so we organized a jam session. Later, Kevin and Sharmaine also shared a few thoughts on a Microsoft Teams meeting. We had so many ideas that we ended up writing two jingles: one for our main clovio clips, such as our Meet the clovions series, and another for our Best Reviews content videos.
The recording itself happened at home, each in front of their computer. We created a small home studio comprising hardware, such as preamps, and recording software. Kevin linked his guitar to his computer with an audio interface, used a midi keyboard for drums, and added some spice with a shaker he recorded with a microphone. His recording software of choice was Ableton. Richárd plugged his trusty 5-string bass into a PreSonus audio box and used the same company’s recording software, Studio One. In contrast, Sharmaine chose the classic route by recording her ukulele acoustically through a microphone with the help of Audacity, which is among the many apps we regularly use for our work. During the process, we created screen recordings and snippets of ourselves playing, which later became a video clip.
Once the recording stage was finished, Sérgio worked his magic editing everything together, using the programs Adobe Audition and iZotope Ozone. While doing so, he had a brainwave: since the band created more than one take for a single track, he decided to cut pieces from one to replace them with part of the other.
A jingle (or two) shows how creativity can go wild when everyone’s dedicated to what they’re doing. Moreover, the recording process cements the bonds between team members. The moral of the story is to celebrate regular small talk among your team. Without these casual conversations, you may never stumble across people’s special talents. In our case, we would have missed out on making our jingle entirely and our brand voice wouldn’t be as strong as it is now. It’s worth checking to see which of your team members have a musical flair and may even want to give a new sound to your brand image. After all, we’re a small team, and if we were able to do it, you can too.
Leave a Reply