Recording

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Dry Ice Recording Session - Futureworks 07/06/19

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Brrr…I had a really fun (but chilly) recording session yesterday with Alex Larumbe and Adam Whitehead recording a variety of dry ice sounds in the Futureworks dialogue booth.

We recorded a whole bunch of great sounds with the dry ice by manipulating it in differernt ways - e.g. crushing it in our (gloved) hands, scraping it with metal objects, and dropping it into hot water to name just a few. It was quite amazing to hear the range of sounds we could produce just through these simple techniques alone; squeezing and crumbling the ice by hand produced subtle creaking and cracking effects, touching it against metal props made a variety of shrieks and squeals and submerging a whole block in hot water produced quite possibly the best bubbling magic cauldron sound I’ve ever heard! I’m looking forward to playing around with these recordings in Reaper to see how I can manipulate them further…once my hands have warmed up again of course!

Dangling this metal chain onto the dry ice sounded cool, but tightly wrapping and squeezing the chain against the ice block sounded even better!

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School of Video Game Audio - Wwise Demo Reel

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Here's the Wwise demo reel I made after taking the fantastic Wwise course at the School of Video Game Audio. Overall, I’m pleased with the audio assets I produced for my audio re-design of the Wwise Adventure Game, and I feel that I’ve been able to implement them appropriately via the Unity-Wwise integration. However, I also feel that my interactive mixing skills definitely need a lot more attention! My source ambiences such as the windmill and river still feel a bit too loud in the mix in places, and I didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked on getting my SFX objects consistently organised into actor-mixers, which would have allowed me a much finger degree of control at the mixing stage. Still, on the whole, I'm pleased with what I was able to accomplish during my time on the course, and I feel that I now have a decent grasp on the fundamentals of Wwise. Thanks for all your help and guidance Leonard + Viviana!

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School of Video Game Audio - Weapon Sounds + Project Asset List

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Designed the initial projectile shoot sound for the enemy spit plant in the Wwise Adventure Game this week.

To create this sound, I used a combination of monster and gun samples (SoundMoprh's Monster Within, Watson Wu's Battle Rifles and Pistols and Airborne Sound's Free Firearm Library) plus my own vocal recordings to create a punchy yet still organic projectile launch sound.

Inspired by a really cool talk on gun sound design by Barney Oram at last month's Game Audio North meetup, I split my sound design for the spit sound into several layers. These were:

  • Punch Layer - This initial layer contained a combination of bassy sounds to give the spit event a meaty kick. This layer includes a kick drum sample and the first transient from some shotgun blasts to suggest the poison projectiles are exploding out of the plant's mouth after a build-up of pressure.
  • Slime Layer - As a substitute for the traditional mechanical layer of a gun sound, I used several groups of slime/gore samples to emphasise the organic nature of the plant, and to suggest that the enemy generates the spit projectiles is a very messy process!         
  • Vocal/Character Layer - To further add to the disgusting/revolting feeling I wanted to achieve with the slime layer, I also included processed monster vocal sounds to suggest that the poison projectiles the spit plant launches at the player are being regurgitated up from the plant's innards before being projectile vomited at the player. Gross!
  • Tail Layer - This layer contained hissing vocal sounds I recorded to give a natural decrescendo effect to the end of the sound as it decays away.

I then imported these layers into Wwise and arranged them into various SFX objects and random containers within the play actions of the Enemy_EvilSpitPlant_ShootBullet event.

The Enemy_EvilSpitPlant_ShootBullet event in my Wwise project. Randomised pitch and volume offsets were applied to certain layers, and randomised delay offsets to the vocal and tail layers were used to vary the playback speed of the latter sections of the sound.

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School of Video Game Audio - Wwise Effects Processing

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My second assignment on the School of Video Game Audio's Wwise course was to record a selection of dry footstep sounds, and then use effects processing in Wwise to simulate how they would sound when played back in a set of different acoustic environments.

I recorded my concrete and grass footsteps using the Foley pits of the Avid S6 studio in Futureworks. I also recorded some gravel surface steps in my backyard at night, but didn't grab any pictures of that session as it was pretty dark!

Using auxiliary buses in the Master/Mixer hierarchy, I routed a collection of footstep recordings to a variety of effect chains that modeled a corridor/passageway, an open exterior environment and a forest area. Specifically, these environments were a passageway and an outdoor section from the AkCube FPS game, and the opening forest environment from Playdead's Limbo.

Here's how my Wwise footstep events sounded with effects processing:

On reflection, the reverb I chose for the corridor sounds way too extreme, and the forest reverb has a high-end ringing element to it which doesn't sound right for the environment. I also should have tried to get the correct reverb sound using just a single reverb, but at the time using a pair of reverbs seemed to create a less boxy reverberation sound that I quite liked. Still, I'm pleased that I now know how to hook up my sounds to effects using aux sends in Wwise.

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New Recorder - Zoom H2n

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The Zoom H2n recorder. Small but powerful!

The Zoom H2n recorder. Small but powerful!

I picked up a new field recorder, the nifty little Zoom H2n!

I've been getting more into stealth field recording after reading Paul Virostek's Field Recording: From Research to Wrap book, and I wanted to get a recording setup better suited to capturing sounds surreptitiously. After hearing lots of good things about the H2n and seeing several sound designers I follow use the device, I decided to take the plunge and grab one myself.

As it's quite a small recorder, the H2n is really good for capturing sounds in public spaces without people noticing that you're recording them! So far, I've been having a lot of fun recording train ambiences. The recording below is from inside a train carriage where I was able to capture some nice and quiet train walla from people indistinctly chatting. I used the H2n's onboard mics in the X/Y configuration:

This next recording is from a pair of Roland CS-10EMs plugged into the H2n, where I captured the sound of the train pulling into Dewsbury station. Really like how this one turned out, as you can really get the impression of the train going past your ears from left to right!

While it lacks some of the basic features, such as XLR inputs found on my other recorder, the Zoom H4n, the cool thing about the H2n is that it has a lot more mics built into it as preset configurations. The four main recording modes are Mid-side, X/Y, 2-channel surround and 4-channel surround, and each of these can be tweaked further for greater/lesser stereo width. This means that it's a really useful recorder to grab spontaneous recordings with when I'm out and about, without having to lug around a bunch of extra stands, cables and mics with me on the off-chance I find something interesting to record.

The slight drawback I've encountered with the unit so far is that the surround sound recording capabilities are not as good as I was hoping for. The H2n can record to a max sample rate of 96kHz and to 24-bit depth for the mid-side, X/Y and 2-channel blended surround modes, but if you want to make a discrete 4-channel surround recording, the device can only record to 48kHz/24-bit. Though 48kHz is the post-production standard sample rate, it would have been nice to be able to record at max quality to make it easier to pitch-shift your recordings without introducing a load of unwanted artefacts into your sounds.

Still, I'm having a lot of fun using the H2n as my go-to stealth recorder. Time to slink back into the shadows and find more things to record!