Bay Bryan - The Meadow Album

I'm contributing field recordings to Bay Bryan's upcoming concept album 'The Meadow'!

This has been a really lovely & special project to be involved with.

Capturing outdoor ambiences of wind, water, leaves and birds (plus generating a few cheeky granular synth textures here and there) to go with Bay's music and lyrics was a fun creative process. I'm really looking forward to hearing the final mixes once they're ready.

Bay's first single 'Sticky Shadows' drops on 16th July - you can pre-save the track here: https://kycker.ffm.to/stickyshadows

For more info on the album, here’s a blog post from Bay: http://baybryan.co.uk/blog/2021/6/29/an-invitation-into-the-meadow⠀

Found Sounds - A Field Recording Bitsy Game

I’m currently in the early stages of making a Bitsy game!

I recently got introduced to Bitsy through the works of Cecile Richard, and found them to be really cool and moving experiences. I was particularly impressed by how evocative and immersive Bitsy games can be; the limited mechanical and technical restrictions of the Bitsy editor are positive creative constraints for a game designer wanting to make really unique narrative experiences.

After my initial exposure to this exciting new world of Bitsy games, I felt inspired to start making one myself…and so I did! While having a mess around in the Bitsy editor to get a feel for making basic tile and sprite assets, my mind wandered back to the announcement trailer for the upcoming game Season, which has this really cool opening sequence of the player character recording the sounds of a nearby dragonfly.

Although the use of microphones as a gameplay mechanic is not particularly new, they’re often used as a means of boosting the player’s auditory percepttion or awareness (the directional mic in Metal Gear Solid 2 + 3 is a good example of this), rather than as a means of capturing or cataloguing the environmental sounds happening around the player. With these thoughts in mind and taking a hefty dose of inspiration from Season, I thought that making a small game based around field recording could lend itself well to making for a short, fun and personal Bitsy game experience.

So, here’s what I’ve got planned out so far. The rough structure I have in mind is to have the player start by checking in with their game dev team to see what sounds they need for their project, before collecting their equipment and heading outdoors to start recording. I’m thinking of having the player go to visit three different locations, where they have to record a sound from the environment. Once all the required sounds have been captured, the player then heads back to their studio computer in order to upload their sounds into the game. Here’s the opening scene of the player’s room/studio:

The player’s humble abode, complete with field recorder, headphones, microphone and batteries on the right. I need to change the field recorder sprite (top) to look more distinct from the batteries (bottom).

I want to make this a highly-idealised and rose-tinted view of a typical day of freelance game audio, so there’s no software crashes to worry about, or pesky version control software issues to wrestle with. Instead, it’s all about trying to capture that joy and excitement of exploring the outdoors with a recorder in-hand and having lots fun and Bob Ross' style happy accidents along the way!

I’m still learning the tools and editor workflow (and crucially, the audio implementation) as I go, so progress will likely be a bit on the slow side for the time being, but I’ll aim to post (hopefully timely) updates on Twitter/Instagram every now and then once I’ve completed a new section of the game or made a decent chunk of new progress. The aim is to keep this as small and tightly hemmed in scope-wise as possible so that I can actually complete it!

Sound Design Showreel - April 2021

I’ve made a new sound design showreel! The featured projects include:

Space Plague VR - SIGTRAP Games + SMASHfestUK (Sound Designer)

https://www.smashfestuk.com/

To Miss The Ending - idontloveyouanymore (Sound Designer with We Make Audio)

http://film-directory.britishcouncil.org/to-miss-the-ending

Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty - Oddworld Inhabitants (Sound Re-Design)

https://youtu.be/PjmqrdhI220

Doom Eternal - id Software (Sound Re-Design)

https://youtu.be/fWA31xtC6Xg

Crossbow Weapon - AD Graphics (Sound Re-Design)

https://youtu.be/rENeewFHbEg

Doom Eternal - Archville Glory Kill Sound Re-Design

I played through Doom Eternal's Ancient Gods Part 2 DLC recently, and had a smashing time - that sentinel hammer is such a satisfying weapon to bonk demons on the head with! Firing the game up again inspired me to go back and add some more details to an Archville glory kill re-design I made towards the end of last year.

Here’s the re-designed clip itself, and a video breakdown of the different sound layers that went into it:

I’m fairly happy with how this clip turned out, but I did struggle a bit with managing the mix. As there's so many big and hyperrealistic elements all fighting for the listener's attention at once (creature roar, fire magic, combat impacts, gore etc.) I found it tricky to get the balance right between these exciting but competing parts of the soundscape.⠀
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In the end, I decided to downplay the Archville's flame sounds in favour of focusing on its roar, as that felt like the most visually important element of the clip. I'm not 100% happy with the roar sound, as I don’t think I quite managed to get the individual parts (metal scrapes, alligator growls, tiger, lion & elephant roars) working together as one singular & cohesive voice as I'd intended. Nonetheless, I think the roar sound I ended up with still works with the visuals, and it was an enjoyable part of the design to iterate upon.⠀
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I then used Waves Factory’s Trackspacer plug-in to duck down the volume of the Archville layers when Doomguy performs the grab and stab moves, which helped keep those impacts feeling beefy and punchy on top of a loud and dense soundscape.⠀
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Overall though, I'm pleased with the end result of this re-design. I had a lot of daft fun chipping away at it, and the process of putting it together has been helpful in identifying areas in my mixing workflow that I need to continue to work on.⠀
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KAR EN TUK!

Zoom H1n Recorder

I picked up a Zoom H1n recorder recently earlier this month as a way of encouraging myself to do more impromptu field recording.

While I like the Zoom H4n + H2n recorders I already own, I wanted to get something smaller and less bulky for use as convenient everyday recorder that I can always have on me to capture any interesting sounds I find whenever I’m out and about. The Zoom H4n is quite a big unit which makes carrying it around all the time not that practical for everyday use, and while the Zoom H2n is smaller in size, I find it picks up an awful lot of excessive handling noise, which isn’t that useful when it comes to making on-the-fly dynamic recordings.

I haven’t had the Zoom H1n that long to get a proper feel for its strengths and weaknesses yet, but I’m already really enjoying using it. Here’s some field recordings I made of some small babbling brook streams at a local park:

ZoomH1n_Stream_001

ZoomH1n_Stream_002

ZoomH1n_Stream_003

I’m quite pleased (and surprised) with how these recordings sound, especially considering I was recording outdoors without a windshield, without a grip or stand, and also in close proximity to splashing water!