Interview with Rob of Gamma Radio – TNP006
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Pruébalo GratisiVoox Podcast & Radio
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Pruébalo Gratis
So Cyrus couldn’t make it because he is attending a Brony conference somewhere in the Mid-West somewhere, I don’t know. (I was on VACATION WITH MY FATHER!)
Priorities, alright, priorities?
I know, My Little Pony is pretty high up on Cyrus’s priority list. No, no judgements to anybody who is a brony out there.
We love all of you.
Maybe a little, actually. So anyway as I said in the first episode we sorta wanted to eventually get into interviewing makers in our community and the sorta spotlight episodes.The first of hopefully many we have with us the host of Gamma Radio, Rob. Um, Gamma Radio is a Fallout 4 Radio mod that also gets pushed out as a Podcast on all your favorite podcatchers (whats a podcatcher?) and the Nexus page for the mod describes Gamma Radio as “A comedy radio show set in a Post-War UK”. Um, Rob I wanna thank you for being here on the show tonight, how are you man?
Good thanks, how are you?
I’m doin good; doin good. So I guess the first thing that I wanna ask is is Gamma Radio a podcast turned mod or mod turned podcast? Like how’d that work?
Well it was weird actually we actually started doing it as a Youtube video without any moving pictures. Um cause we didn’t know what else to do, we just had this uh we just had this idea and uh we just started recording it and making it and thought “What should we do with it now?” and just shoved it out on Youtube really. Then uh after awhile I thought we could actually probably look at into how to make a mod. We can stick it in actual Fallout where lots of people hopefully like it coz It was inspired by Fallout in the first place. And then after that we thought “This could work as a podcast as well!” so we just decided to stick it up as uh, stick up as a podcast. So yeah we basically doin it, making it up as we go along really, we don’t really know what we are doing. But uh, it’s pretty fun so yeah, just carrying it on.(let me just say I like Rob’s voice. Rob, if you’re reading this, Cyrus likes your voice.)
Yeah well I mean I gotta say the production value in uh in that is pretty excellent. Its definitely better than some of the attempts I’ve seen on Fallout over the years.
Oh, thanks very much.
Yeah its uh, I found it thoroughly entertaining. At least from what I have listen to so far, you’ve definitely got a new listener I can tell you that.
Oh brilliant (They actually say that in the UK? I thought it was just a stereotype.). Thanks.
I mean, I love it! I love the improve that y’all do to it and especially the characters that just pop up there. I love em.
Thanks, they are a lot of them.
Uh, so I know you guys just um finished up um Season 1. Any idea when Season 2 is coming?
Yeah! So uh Season 1 we released at the beginning of the year and we have been working really hard since March basically taking seven to eight months to write Season 2 and uh, we recorded about six episodes but i’ve edited about three and a half episodes so far out of the lot so I am hoping Episode 1 will drop the end of this month. But I am usually a bit over optimistic with these things.
I know how it is man I am the editing guy over here.
And we love him for it.
You better.
Like since we do a lot of phoney(?) work as well there is very few sound effects we will download from the Internet. We have don a couple but um. Most of them we try and make ourselves. And so add in all of that and blend in all the noise I love doing it so much but, and I spend all of my spare time doing it. But it’s a lot of work. For each episode we put in 50+ hours maybe? Its yeah, its a bit mad. Its eatin my life a little bit. But the Miserable Elba(?) ones, they were a bit different because they, my goal as a personal goal to myself was to write a release one song a week. Which was a big challenge but I managed to do it for fifteen weeks before I just thought “I can’t do this anymore and stay alive”.
So you’re are the mastermind behind all of the songs on Gamma Radio right?
Yeah, yeah I do cause Paul isn’t particularly musical, he’s gotta hilarious mind though, but I play lots of instruments and I love experimenting and it gave me a opportunity to try out different genres I never would’ve done before so there’s a few like jazzy little numbers in there and the rap song and also some stuff I wouldn’t have normally thought about making because I normally do like, psychedelic rock I mean thats my thing. So, which has gotten in there to be fair. Yeah I do all the musical output work episodes uh, thats all we really do for the music. Its just really fun. Some of them aren’t as good as others, some of them I’m really proud of. So yeah, its good.
I think i’ve listened to most of the songs on their and by far my favorite one is ‘Raider Rap’ like, that one is just its a well put together song but on top of that its hilarious.
Yeah, well first of all I wrote um, I wrote a really basic version of it and I thought “Is this doing the music justice?” cause I don’t listen to rap music very much I just never have. So then I did a load of research and thought “This is sh*it” and I-oh excuse me, excuse the language.
Oh trust me, a lot of the rap that’s coming out so im sure your rap is just fine.
Its a real complicated how the rhyme schemes were and how they blend rhymes from the end of one line to the beginning of the next and I thought “Im gonna give that a go”. So it was fun, I did enjoy it. And it was very difficult to rap in five different British accents.
I gotta think though even though your sorta doin these songs for Gamma Radio as a hobby or whatever, ya know for the game and whatnot. As a musician outside of that project its gotta make you at least a little better because your stepping outside your comfort zone and trying things you would never normally try.
Yeah absolutely I’ve learned so much doing them. Cause I like, I really love music and the history of music and the way its constructed is really interesting to me anyway. So I have an excuse to go delve into it and learn all sorts of things. Its been brilliant and I definitely improve my composition skills and I’ve uh done other music for other podcasts as well coz my confidence has grown with that. Yeah it’s been really good especially I really enjoyed doing the rap one but I also really liked doing the psychedelic rock ones as well. They were really fun to do. Yeah but I have learned quite a lot and its been a good experience. I do want to do some more in the future but I am probably gonna have a break before I do another load.
Yeah well you know you can definitely tell there is a lot of talent comin out of Gamma Radio like even though it’s you know a Fallout 4 radio mod.
Yeah, thanks very much!
What got y’all what sparked your interest, of course other than having a mod in Fallout for potentially other people to listen to, but like what made you want to start doing this mod for this particular Fallout?
This particular one? Well em, you know in New Vegas and they have uh, you put Black Mountain radio where you got Tabitha and Rhonda on top of the mountain. Just listening to that I just loved that whole quest, that whole line. It was just so funny I loved that whole thing and just sort of thought “Hang on a minuet. Instead of the music radios why don’t they have more things like this?”. Then I was thinking “What would the apocalypse be like if it happened in the UK?” and that was that was basically where it start from. I just thought, so we started doing this before Fallout 4 came out is when we started making the uh the show. It was when we finished Episode Six I thought “Right lets stick them all together, put them in a mod and put them in Fallout 4.” but yeah the idea was directly from Fallout and Black Mountain Radio cause I thought it was just so, that whole quest line was hilarious. And yes so that was it.
Nice.
So how is the UK fairing in this post-apocalyptic wasteland?
Not very well. Stiff upper lip and all. Everyone is keeping their heads down and carrying on. Cause it’s set during the time of the modern Fallouts, 200 years later after the after the War. We are not entirely lore-friendly cause we have taken liberties to put in jokes basically. To make it more funny we would break the lore a little bit which im sure a few people aren’t to happy about but I think we can get past that really. Yeah, its horrible. Everyone’s eating things they shouldn’t, fish leg pie and all sorts of things. Everyone is hideously mutated and irradiated, thats the difference in our world there are a lot more messed up people with extra arms growing out their heads.
Did they reinstall a new monarchy or did they finally do away with it.
No but interestingly we um a lot of the societal things we think about we uh, we think about it way more than we probably should. Britain is split up into barondoms (Baronies Rob, you should know this) and fiefdoms and like back to medieval society. People live in a kind of medieval way. There are lots of like kangaroo courts and hanging and guards and militias and barons and wars. We fret more than we need to but yeah there is not a monarchy as such but there are like warring factions based on medieval feudal systems essentially. Which you probably don’t think about when you listen to it.
I mean it’s cool even for somethin that for somethin thats supposed to be comedic you put that much thought into the stories you create. Thats a whole other level of just, like, for me how professionally done your mod is.
Oh thanks. Yeah we try and put as much interesting things as possible without taking away from the humor so if something’s funnier we’ll put that in instead. Yeah but its, we are both interested in stories and writing. Paul is a massive film buff and I’m a writer I read alot so I love my sci-fi and things like that so all of that gets put into that as well really.
Yeah that’s pretty awesome. So any chance we can get a little spoilage of Season 2 or not?
Ooo, I uh-
No, you tell him to wait like everybody else. Your not some dog that does tricks.
That is true I’m not going to perform for you but uh-
No you have to tell me the spoiler in Albert’s voice.
(In Alberts voice)Oh alright. Bloody spoiler thats what they want now-a-days. (Normal voice) Yeah its uh, at the end of our last Miserable Alba(?) episode uh, if anyone has listened to it this is a spoiler so please close your ears, they do come back from their eventual demise, they had a horrible death…sortof. They didn’t die. They do come back. I’m really excited about the first episode because the whole thing is a court case. So that is the spoiler and I can’t give away more than that really.
Thats fair. Thats fair. Oh man, yeah I can’t wait but I have been playing a lot of Fallout: Shelter (like a normie) so I haven’t been on 4 lately but the mod is installed so when I get back to the Commonwealth I will definitely be listening to Gamma Radio.
Excellent. I havent put any of the Alba(?) stuff in the mod yet coz I was waiting for us to finish this and I was going to put it all in together basically. So Series 1 is in the mod at the moment and we will be out in all of the rest of it in the future as well. Hopefully just after Christmas.
Awesome. Awesome. I cannot wait for that. Since you are a fellow audio producer whats your setup, what are you recording with over there? (oh god)
The D-A-W I use is Q base 8 which I bought to make music. I have been in bands and I have made music for most of my life and thats when I bought all my audio equipment so a lot of it was geared around music. I’ve got acouple of SM-58’s and I got a, uh, I do not even know what this one is. What is it? It says its an SE-2000 I don’t know what it is thought we got one of those. They go in through a focus and we record everything in two audio channels and cut them all up and mush them all together and overlap them so I sounds like its more than one person. Its quite a basic setup you just got the two mikes and the standard pop shields and a big sock we put over the other one because we haven’t managed to buy a second popshield yet (I almost did that myself but my popshield came early.). That’s it really but yeah SM-58’s I swear buy them they are good for anything, their brilliant.
Yeah I think Bobby was rocking a SM-58 before we all picked up the AT-2005.
That is right actually. I completely forgot about that actually. I actually borrowed that from another friend of mine same as you just he was really into music and had to take a break for awhile. I asked about it and he said “yeah I got this mike right here” and to this day I had no idea what mike it was until yall just mentioned it.
Well I remembered because I remember looking it up to see what the specs were like and how close in quality it was going to be compared to the mic I had at the time.
Then there is a good chance you told me and I completely forgot.
Yeah, mikes they are very good at…yeah they can take a beating on stage like falling over on mic stands and stuff and they still work. You can do anything to them.
There are definitely a few dents in this one I can tell you that.
Yeah, and they still work absolutely fine. We got a couple of them ya know, as a backup. I see a lot of people using a lot of USB mikes. I always thought you had to go through an interface like focus or something like that. But uh, a lot of people seem to be using ‘Blue Yetis’ are that what they are called?
Oh, uh dont my friend just got one of those and I don’t know a lot of people say their good but me personally-
They aren’t very forgiving. Like, they arent bad for recording podcasts but you have to record properly with it. Like, the mikes we use, they are pretty forgiving and there’s not a huge-
Just plug em in.
Yeah um because ours are USB mikes to but they also have an XLR output on them as well. So on the rare occasion we might do a podcast in person together we can still make it happen, the mixer and stuff.
Well one of the things for me is looking at that thing, I don’t know It doesn’t give me that feel. You got this big device on your desk and you just take up space. I don’t know for me it just doesnt give me a good feel. Thats my complaints about it.
Don’t like the aesthetic?
Yeah. Theres a giant blue bullet sitting on your desk.
Like I said we are using AT-2005 right now but I actually plan on upgrading to an Electro-Voice RE-20. Which is a pretty higher end broadcast microphone.
Right.
Hopefully next year. Next year I’m looking at cause of that $500 price tag.
The other one we’ve got which I said is a SE-2000, whatever that is I don’t know who makes it, the problem we have with that is that it picks up from all angles. So we get a lot of bleed through on the mic. We don’t have any sound booths or anything like that im just sitting at my desk basically in my room.
Yeah, cause that microphone is a condenser mic. Where as the ones we use are dynamic microphones so thats why that’s happening. I mean its not a bad mic you just gotta put it to use the right way or you really gotta be in an isolated room.
Yeah, its alright because we get two audio tracks and I just cut out the opposite and surgically remove all the stuff from the first track and overlap it all so it sounds natural. Its just when we talk over each other that you can just hear a twinge of an echo in the background or something like that. I think it kinda works cause they are in an empty studio and don’t know what they are doing anyway.
Yeah your just making it work for the show that’s awesome. So to move into a more general, sortof talk about the franchise in general, what drew you to Fallout to begin with. (Did any of you get any of that cause my eyes kinda glazed over a bit there)
Well basically I got a student loan and bought an Xbox 360 when I was at university just as Fallout 3 came out. I hadn’t been playing games for a while just hadn’t hand anything to play it on basically. I asked my friend who is a gamer “Alright I bought this 360 what game should I buy?” and he was like “Well Fallout 3 just came out and its gonna be quite good.” and so not knowing anything about the Fallout series I bought it, played it, kept playing it and was still playing it two weeks later and now. Its been a long time since Fallout came out in 2008 thats 9 years I’ve been playing it. Since then I have come back and played, the only game I haven’t got into was Fallout Tactics but have gone through 1, 2, New Vegas, Fallout 4. Tactics I couldn’t get into because it was a different sort of game really. I like the universe I just couldn’t…to be fair I was just crap at it. Just kept dying and didn’t like it.
Yeah I have that game and I haven’t even installed it yet.
Some people think its good I think but it wasn’t for me. But 1 and 3 were brilliant and 3 was the first one I played. The thing I love about the series is that they just let you go don’t they. You get the Vault thing, you get out, and then you can just go anywhere and see anything and you never know whats around the corner as you go and discovering the new creatures as you went, I just thought it was brilliant. The exploration thing was what really drew me to it and the atmosphere was spot on. The story was a bit, well everyone knows what the story was like, but some of the quests were great like the Greygarden quest, I really enjoyed that. The Mechanist and the Ant Queen (Antagonizer Rob. Its a pun.) I absolutely loved. Harold the Tree (yaay Harold!!!) which is the thing that made me want to play Fallout 1 and 2 because I knew he was in that one two; that whole quest at the top of the Oasis, like those quests were brilliant. But yeah, that was the first one I played was 3.
Yeah that was my, well I take that back, I wont say that was my introduction to the game franchise. I think my dad dabbled in Fallout 1 awhile ago so I knew of Fallout but hadn’t played any of them. Three was the first one I actually played and thats probably one of my top five favorite video games ever.
Yeah, yeah the Fallout franchise as a whole for me is my favorite video game series ever. Im quite picky as well. New Vegas, that was my favorite by far like I could see what everyone was complaining about Fallout 3 when I was playing New Vegas. I still love Fallout 3 but the depth of the story in New Vegas and the choices you can make and the factional element where you can choose who to side with at the end, you can just be your own character and that was absolutely fantastic I thought. It was brilliant.
Which is what i was hoping for in Fallout 4.
Yeah I’m upset they totally did away with the Karma system.
And the skills. I loved skill points, they were great.
Well yeah that to. I dont necessarily mind the way they revamped that but the karma system coming out was by far the-
It just made it to linear. Like ugh.
Yeah, oh yea.They pigeonhole you into you can say what you want to anybody but it has zero effect on anything. (which is why NV is the best in the series and while I want another like it from Obsidian, a lot of NV devs have left so we probably not getting one like it, especially from Bethesda)
It means the dickens.
Well yeah, they don’t even give you the option to be real mean (let gamers be a******s!). The worst thing you can do is be sarcastic to someone (and that soooo effective).
Yeah, thats pretty much it. What I used to do is in Fallout 3 and New Vegas was do a Paragon of Virtue sort of character and also a sort of nasty, evil character who solves everything by just shooting everything. Its real fun isnt it? In Fallout 4 I found myself being channeled into the character they wanted me to be and everytime I tried to do something it just felt like it didn’t fit with how this was progressing. Then I found in Nuka-World where you can become a Raider Boss so your forced to be this Paragon of Virtue with no other option all the way through and then you enter Nuka-World and are all like “All right i’ll just be a raider then that’ll be lovely.” Ill just stop being nice and start stabbing people. Its bullocks (Yes, I have been waiting for that.). So I have never done any of the raider taking over settlements, taking over your OWN settlements, it just doesn’t make any sense. I really missed that in Fallout 4. The thing I think 3 and 4 do better than New Vegas is atmosphere though. Like, the atmosphere in New Vegas was kinda empty and dull in terms of walking around the environment. In 3 and 4 I think they captured the essence of something that was really good and I think thats something Bethesda did really really well.(I’ll give ya that, NV was a bit empty outside the cities)
Oh yeah sure, definatly in 3 or 4 when your walking around from location to location you kinda get anxious like “I don’t know what may or may not be coming up here.”
Yeah there may be a deathclaw around the corner whereas in New Vegas you knew where all the Deathclaws were, they were out in the Quarry by the trains and you just don’t go there.
Oh that’s not where you go as a new player to get lots of caps and armor and stuff?
What, the quarry and- no. Absolutely not.
So you can only pick one Fallout game to play and all the rest go away, which one is it? Which one stays?
Oh my god um.
One Fallout game for the rest of forever and the rest go away. Whats Rob pick?
What does Rob Choose?
Gotta be New Vegas. Im torn between 2 and New Vegas because 2 is one of the funniest games I’ve ever played and thats one of the things I loved about the series was was in New Vegas, if you put Wild Wasteland on, there was more funny bits. The humor is lacking the Bethesda games so I knocked those two off straight away to be honest. I think I would have to go with New Vegas because 2 is kinda a pain in the ass to play. Always clicking about. I can’t get it to run my PC anymore I have to run in on console it just crashes a bunch I don’t know what I have done to it. I may have broken it trying to mod it I don’t know what I’m doing it. I can make a mod I can’t use it. So yeah, it’d be New Vegas.
Yeah I did have fun with New Veags. I don’t think I finished any of the DLC but I still need to go back and finish a lot of stuff. I didn’t finish any of the DLC for 3 so I still got a lot of Fallout to play man.
Who are you telling I got to go back through all of them. I started on 4.
You started on 4? Your going backwards. Doing it in a backwards order, thats probably a fun way to do it.
Me personally I never played games like Fallout, I was more Call of Duty and all that good stuff (Im not surprised). Which I still am. Fallout never appealed to me until I sat down and watched a commercial for Fallout 4 and I was like “You know what? Ill give it a shot”.I love 4 its great!
It is, it is. The DLC as well, for 4 it was alright. For New Vegas yeah a couple of them were a bit dodgy but Deady Money was scary like its a real horror sort of story. (I found it more emotional than scary. Kinda never wanted to leave.) Old World Blues as absolutely hilarious the whole way through, its just so funny. I recommend playing those through if you havent. The DLC for 3, the PItt I quite enjoyed but wasn’t so passed on the rest. Thats my recommendations for the DLC. Not that you asked for that.
Now you mentioned Harold was the reason you wanted to play through 1 and 2 so Ill ask this as a question to sort of rap this up. Which character from any of the games, it doesnt have to be your favorite, which one has left the greatest impression on you and why.
It was probably Veronica (I adore Veronica. She is so naive and cute I love her.) the companion, the Power Fist wielding Brotherhood of Steel companion from New Vegas because her story. I just really liked her story how she grew up in the Brotherhood of Steel them all being kinda hard nosed and bigoted and the whole relationship you have with Elijah who you discover in one of the DLCs (Spoiler Alert:Dead Money) and that whole story. I just felt a connection with her and I don’t know why so she’s probably the one thats had a lasting impression. Then its a tossup between her a Lily, the other companion, the supermutant grandmother. You remember her?
Oh yeah!
She’s amazing with the split personality. Yeah she was just to funny and I loved having her around. Just charging in with a sledgehammer and calling me sweetie. Yeah probably those two. In fact Lily was the direct inspiration in out show for…there is a character who we never say his real name and nobody knows his real name except from him. He does say it a couple times but its variations on Hoodle Sprunk and Hidle Sprink and things like that. And he is basically a super mutant and is directly inspired by her and her way of speaking and sort of (pretty good supermutant expression) talking like this all of the time. It just makes me laugh so we just shoved a character in like that. So she is probably the one who had a lasting impression actually.
Awesome, thats awesome. Well Rob its been a real pleasure having you on the show and I think you have set the bar pretty high for people we have on the show moving forward. It’s definitely a pleasure talking to ya.
Oh thanks very much its been a pleasure as well.
We are going to be like “Hey you remember Rob? You need to be more like Rob. We know you’re from America but we need you to have a British accent, sorry.”
Just send them my way Ill teach them (Its LevioSAH not LevioSUH!) But thank you for having me on as well its been a pleasure.
So how can our listeners keep up with Gamma Radio? Where should we send them?
Links Gamma Radio on Podbean
Gamma Radio on Fallout 4 Nexus
Gamma Radio for Xbone
Gamma Radio on twitter
(that took all night. I hope your happy.)
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