One of the sound clips I’m working on has footsteps on boardwalk and ladders. There aren’t any good environments to record nearby, so I’ve taken it upon myself to build a temporary foley stage in my living room using some leftover wood from my college dorm-room loft and a sheet of scrap plywood.
I’ve been able to get different sounds by changing the configuration (plywood above or below the boards, etc.).
Recording some gulls, turns, pelicans, and other seabirds at the Florida Keys Wild Bird Center.
Applying tension to some different types of ropes and strings to sweeten a longbow.
Junk and debris crashes for the elevator scene.
I’ve replaced the soundtrack from a game cinematic in Batman: Arkham Asylum. Harley’s voice here is by Ashley Banas, I did the other two myself.
In this clip from the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I’ve replaced all of the sounds with elements that I’ve either recorded myself or created from library sources.
Play-by-play breakdown posts:
Oblivion Gate
Flame Atronach vocals
Bow and armor foley
Some recording projects I’ve been messing with for PVK II and other projects.
To get some ice cracking and crunching sounds, I froze a bag of water to make a larger, pillow-shaped ice brick. It turned out to be less impressive of a crack than I was imagining but I was able to break it by hand and get some nice ice friction stuff out of it, at least.
For PVK II, I needed to create some desert winds for the map Sandstorm. I already had some library recordings of wind that I liked but I needed some “sand” to add in, so I experimented with recording grainy items around the house including rice and oatmeal to try and get the right feel.
Some veggies awaiting destruction in the name of flesh rips, stabs, and other gooshy gore noises.
Here I am capturing some field recordings of the Key Largo shore. I usually record ambiences with the stereo mics from my Zoom H4 or H2. They also pick up a lot of background car traffic and distant boats and such so I thought I’d try track some wave crashes with a shotgun mic.
Here are some sound effects that I’ve made for various game projects including No More Room In Hell and Pirates, Vikings and Knights II.
Howdy, folks. I’ve been too busy writing, making music, and otherwise carrying on to give this site regular updates lately. Here’s my late 2013-to-present update of affairs.
On the writing front, I finished a very rough draft of my first novel Casey Stripe: Discount Necromancer. While I was trying to sort it out and turn it into something more readable, November came around again and I started on another NaNoWriMo attempt, which turned into Further Complications, my second novel. As it stands now, my second book might be ready before my first one, since it was less of a tangled mess and didn’t require nearly as much research into the arcane and occult.
My radio show The Eleventh Hour continues on in podcast form. The updates are more sporadic than I’d like, but you can subscribe to the RSS or just like the Facebook page to be notified when new shows are available.
I’m continuing to work on two Source-engine mods: No More Room in Hell, which made the finals for the ModDB awards for 2013, and Pirates, Vikings, and Knights II. Both are available on Steam, though you may need an Orange-box game already installed to get PVKII running.
There have been some lineup changes with my group Identity Collapse but we’ve recently started recording again. Instead of the electronic drum triggers that we used on the demo, we’ve been able to set up microphones around my real drumset at the IC corporate headquarters.
My first two Caustic Reverie albums have had a strong element of the improvisational rather than the tightly structured, step sequencer-based compositions that I have done as TheForgotton. Caustic Reverie has been a chance for me to break out of my writing ruts, and this album was to be an experiment in generative music.
For Stochastic Resonance, I used a program called FMusic as a skeleton for the tracks. It is a composition tool that uses fractals and cellular automata to pick the notes, durations, etc. for a song. I messed around with some scales and key changes until it gave me something I liked. FMusic spits out a midi file which I then imported into FL studio. For example, here is the midi used as a basis for In Vacuo.
I made some synth patches using vsts like the Cameleon 5000, Crystal, and a couple of Krakli synths including Karnage and Etequet. I put some fairly wild sounds for each patch and when I went to play it back, it was compete chaos. See below for what this part of the process sounded like.
I then dragged the tempo down and dumped each track individually, doing some additional time stretching using paulstretch with different edge-case settings for each to get some nice artifacts and glitches throughout.
The tracks were reassembled in Cubase and I started to mix it down. The mixing phase was interesting, as I was working with it more like a sculpture than a song, muting tracks here, and fading them and out there. I added some ambiance recorded at night on the dock near my place, some pitch shifted cymbals, and even a couple of household appliances here and there.
