Mastering

Hard hat for the win

Mastering sound effects is an essential task for me. Not only does it allow me to keep adding custom material to my library, but it builds discipline during slow periods between projects. I like to think of it like an old kung fu film- You want to become a master, you must master every day!

Gopher Voice Sound Design

Go Go Greta has been released, pick up the app here. Congrats to everyone involved in the development!

A fun character in the story is Greta's gopher sidekick. One of my tasks in designing the soundscape was to give the gopher a voice.

To achieve this I recorded myself doing my best Caddyshack gopher impression. With a little processing, I manipulated my voice into something that the development team liked and from there I made variations for different situations.

Here are a few samples of the gopher voice I created:

Pro Tools Shortcuts

I've been diving back into using Pro Tools daily as opposed to Nuendo. If only there was one DAW to rule them all!

Wanted to quickly share a few links that I find to be really useful.

This is an awesome interactive site for PT10 shortcuts.

This Sound on Sound article from a few years back goes into some of the more obscure shortcuts and has a good step by step guide for creating your own Mac shortcuts for Pro Tools.

A shortcut that I've found to be good to create is one to open the I/O...

The second SOS article dives into setting up custom macros. If you use a ShuttlePRO, one of the many cool things about it is you can assign macro commands to a single button.

Please let me know if there are any other sites out there that you find helpful.

New Opportunities

Little bit of news in my life right now... Soon I'll be moving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.

Of course change sometimes can be a bit bittersweet... I really can't express how awesome everyone at Dog and Pony is. It's been such a pleasure to work along side the DnP team and I could never thank John McClain enough for giving me the opportunity to contribute on so many great projects. I've had lots of fun times at the studio and I wish the best for everyone there.

I'm determined to make the most of this new opportunity and achieve the goals that I have for myself. It's all about perseverance!

And now... how about a little sound design inspiration?

Recording My Trek 7.2 FX

I bike to work in Las Vegas. Yeah I know what you're thinking... isn't it really hot to bike there? Yes indeed it is, and also annoyingly windy most of the time too. But it's only 2.5 miles from my place to the studio, so I choose to bike. I figure the heat is not as bad as a cold rainy ride in Oregon.

The Trek 7.2 FX has been my everyday commuter bike for the past several years and I love it. It's super durable, has great components that are simple to maintain and is really enjoyable to ride.

I wanted to experiment with recording my bike. I taped a contact mic to the flattest part where the down tube and seat tube connect next to the crank. As mentioned in a previous post I'm not working with a Barcus Berry for a contact mic, but hopefully some day! I also set up a Sennheiser MKH 8040 inside of a shock mount and taped that on the down tube aimed at the crank. I hoped to record myself pedaling, shifting gears, coasting and braking.

I was happy with the unique perspective the contact mic picked up. Check it out:

Creating Custom Track Presets in Pro Tools

If you haven't yet, take the time to check out this video showing how easy it is to set up your own custom track presets in Avid Pro Tools:

Although having templates is efficient, I like the ability to have a track specifically for each situation. Steinberg has had a similar feature for a while in their DAWs, and I'm stoked to have found a simple way to do this in Pro Tools as well.

Miko and Cola

I'm stoked that Miko and Cola is nearing completion! This is an interactive story app from Gabuduck.

I've been working away the past several months on many facets of the soundscape including: voice-over, sound effects design and implementation of the dialogue, music and sound effects in FMOD Designer.

I look forward to the release and hopefully I'll post some video footage of Miko in Cola in action. I might even do a postmortem reviewing the design of reverbs in FMOD and the challenges of having your programming team on the opposite side of the country. Stay tuned!

Disc Golf Putt Message Alert Tone

If you didn't already know, I love to disc golf! There are few sounds I enjoy hearing more than the clang of the chains when I sink a putt into a disc golf basket.

I wanted to customize my iPhone with my own unique alert sound for incoming messages. There are probably other disc golf sound effects out on the internet, but I never pass up an opportunity to record my own sounds.

Recorded at Red Ridge Disc Golf course:


The file is free to download. Read this article for an easy step by step guide on how convert the file into a .m4r tone to sync with your iPhone. Cheers!

Omnichord! Excellent!

Omnichord + Sennheiser MKH 8040 + Sound Devices MixPre + Zoom H4n + Sennheiser HD 280s = Today's sound design fun!

I always try to maintain perspective and be thankful to have opportunities to do this type of work.

My First Helicopter Ride

My girlfriend won a pair of tickets for a nighttime helicopter ride over the Las Vegas strip. I honestly don't like heights too much, but I definitely was not going to pass up an opportunity to bring my Zoom H1 recorder along.

The helicopters that Maverick Tours fly are EC-130s. Although it was a bit windy (as it tends to be regularly in Vegas), the views were excellent!

The entire duration of the flight (about 20 minutes) was recorded from an interior perspective behind the pilot. I edited the recording down and used iZotope RX to clean up and attenuate some of the high frequencies. Check it out:

Contact Mic

I remember when I was a child, I had a stethoscope that I think my family picked up at a garage sale. It was a blast to run around with it listening to stuff, especially my family's Siberian Huskies.

Lately I've been going around to every object I can think of & taping a contact mic to it to see what the vibrations sound like.

I've drawn a lot of knowledge and inspiration from Tim Prebble's Music of Sound post on recording the Hiss and Roar contact mic library.

While I haven't been using a preamp designed specifically for use with a contact mic such as the Barcus Berry 4000 (The mic is a simple piezo to XLR), I did record with the excellent Sound Devices MixPre.

Here are a few of the unprocessed recordings:

Granular Synthesis Experimentation

I've spent my fair share of time with instruments in Avid Pro Tools such as Xpand! and Structure. Now that I heavily use Steinberg software on a more frequent basis, I'm finding that there are some truly fantastic instruments right at my fingertips. HALion is amazing, but one instrument in particular that I've been getting familiar with in my free time is Padshop.

The user interface is for this granular synth is great. Padshop has two independent layers that can be individually mixed and edited with effects and filters plus other parameters you can tweak to create unique sound combinations. Also it comes with a ridiculous amount of presets and samples!

What is fun about experimentation is the creative freedom you get when you're not trying to conceptualize a particular sound or bound by deadlines. Padshop has a lot of versatility, and I could definitely see myself turn to this in a situation where I need to create an ambiance or atmospheric effect. Here is a good tutorial video and if you're interested in granular synthesis like me, definitely check out Padshop.

Neumann TLM 103

I work with the Neumann TLM 103 quite a bit, and I'm a big fan of this microphone. It's obvious that Neumann paid careful attention to the details in the mechanical and electrical design of the TLM 103.

For a recent voice-over session I engineered, voice talent was recorded in English, Spanish and French for the audio tour at Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art's Monet exhibit. The TLM 103 picks up the finest details with little to no coloration. The recordings have a nice warmth and fullness to them. What strikes me the most is the exceptional sense of clarity from the TLM 103.

I've also been plugging the TLM 103 directly into the Alesis MasterControl at my workstation and recording my voice at 192 kHz for sound design. Works fantastic and has been the foundation for a lot of stuff before processing and layering.

This is a great mic! Especially considering the cost, but I definitely recommend getting an equally good preamp as well. Here is an in-depth review from Sound On Sound.

Native Instruments Awesomeness

Yesterday I was geeking out with Dave Braxton at Dog and Pony about The Mouth, an amazing sound controlled synth. I love Native Instruments software. Kontakt is one of my favorite tools for processing sounds, and there are more than a few things within Reaktor that easily spark sound generation creativity. However, Dave opened my ears to some new Native Instruments awesomeness that I was not hip to: BATTERY.
I knew of Battery as a drum sampler, but after Dave showed me some of the ways he uses it for sound design, I was blown away by the capabilities! I'm definitely going to try to incorporate Battery into my workflow more now, especially for footsteps when Foley is not an option due to budget or time. Here is a great demo video of some of the possibilities Battery holds for creating sounds:


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Implosion Recording

The old Flamingo parking garage behind O'Sheas on Las Vegas Blvd was scheduled to be demolished at 2:30am on May 1st. I found out about it late in the evening, but of course I was staying up to not miss out on this opportunity. 
I took the Rode NT4 over the matched pair of Line CM3s because the NT4 has a higher max SPL. I knew that there was going to only be one shot at capturing such a loud sound, so I put the limiter on the Sound Devices MixPre and hoped for the best.
On a separate note, it was funny to see puzzled looks and hear drunk comments from people on the strip as I walked along with recording gear. Eventually after talking with security shutting down the area around the site, I was able to get as close as the local media across the Blvd to record the implosion.

This is my raw recording of the implosion:

The amount of dust was crazy!

Here is a cool video of the implosion from a spot above and behind the parking garage. Wish I could have set up to record from this position!

Welcome

Thanks for taking the time to check out my blog. I've been debating for a while about creating a blog and now is better than never to make it happen. There are a lot of great sound focused blogs on the internet. All I hope is to share my perspectives and experiences. In this blog I'll discuss audio post production, software and gear, field recording and hopefully much more. I might even include posts about other things I'm passionate about including disc golf. I'll save my rants about the Portland Trail Blazers for Blazers Edge! 

Cheers!