Here are the answers to the questions you made to Charles Deenen. Even if you don’t made any question to him, you could find really great infromation related to different topics.

(some questions are combined and/or edited down)

Designing Sound Readers: 1a. Every single company I look at, and every website I go to always says the same thing; “Applicants must have at least 3 years experience in the field of Sound Design” and leads me to my question: How are you meant to “start” a career in Sound Design when every single place you look tells you that 3 years experience is needed. How did the people who work for these companies get their first job without the 3 years? I mean you can’t have 3 years experience. . . if every job (even your first) needs 3 years experience to actually get into!
Any advice for someone like me who is seemingly staring into a black hole of nothingness.

1b. I understand I could do freelance work. How would I go about becoming a recognized freelancer though? How do you become freelance? Is there an organisation that you become a member of that allows people looking for small Sound Design jobs to select you from a catalogue?

1c. I’m very intensely serious about becoming a sound designer, I’m working with an indie dev. team, and am paying a very healthy sum of money to attend an audio production school. When I get out of this school, how do you suggest I start looking for my first professional gig? doing sound design for commercials, or even cell phone GUIs, or just any gig that will pay me to make sound. Are there any like, job boards just for sound designers?

Charles Deenen: You’re asking the holy grail of questions :) The first question I think is “how is my work going to get noticed and liked enough for me to get hired”. My advice stems from how I hire new freelancers. This might be very different from other people though.

Often I’ll look for videos on youtube, vimeo and other places for new and exciting ways that people have used sound. Usually they’re easy to find, especially if people have commented about the use of sound. Then I’ll contact them and see if they’re open for a test or some small freelance work.

Another way I hire freelancers is when they send me some work to look at it, without being pushy. After several times, something might catch my eye and will keep it in the back of my mind for a future project. Don’t be pushed off though by the “3 year experience” phrase. The work will speak for yourself. If your work rocks, the developer or post-house would be crazy not to hire you. Tools and processes can be taught, but talent is hard to brew.

Sadly, human resources will indeed filter your resume by the experience, so find new and creative ways to get the Audio Director/Lead to look at your work. Maybe even have them give you a specific task to do, so you can show off your work when given direction. This will show how you interpret direction. If time is critical, I have to admit I usually will go back to proven sources and/or word of mouth recommendations.

A catalog of sound-designers? I don’t know of any website or book that would be a catalog of sound designers. There are some organizations like the MPSE and unions that could maybe assist with this. Sounds like a great idea for somebody to make a site with demo-reels from sound designers. Would save a lot of hassle trying to find the right person.

DSR: 2a. Congratulations for your work on the NFS franchise, Shift is one of my favorite games! How you record those cars and all the noises of them? 
2b. Last week I recorded some engines and general cars sounds. I was satisfied with the work done on some recordings, but I had problems with other sounds. I can’t get the “heart” of the engine, maybe I’m missing something… So my question is: can you share some techniques you use on cars/engine audio recording? Is there a way to position the microphones to get better sounding engines?

2c. What mics you use for cars recording?

CD: Howdy, and thanks for the support on the NFS games. NFS Shift and all the other NFS games are the work of a team of people, but I’ll try to answer this for the team; Most of this is captured in the two “Need for Speed” articles that we just did on this site. We record cars in various ways, but we get some of the best results when doing it on the road vs. clinical environments with dynos etc. We also look for cars that have a lot more “bite” and pressure level vs. stock cars, Skids are done in a similar way, except we use the opposite car; a very quiet car with various tires, various surfaces in hopes to get the perfect artifacty squeel. Beyond that we got turbos, transmission whine, wind-noise, air-movement. All these get recorded in the traditional way, with lav & condenser mics near the sources. Most gets recorded onto Sound Devices 744T’s. We usually hire some of the best recordists to ensure the process runs smooth, and that owners leave happy. Hopefully the NFS articles answer most of your questions. If not, feel free to shoot me an email.

Regarding positioning mics; Without knowing what car, what mics, and what locations you tried already, this is hard to answer. I know this sounds cheezy, but use your ears, and learn what the characteristics are for each mic you use. Take your wind-shielded lav (MKE2’s and/or Audio Technica’s are common due to their ability to withstand high pressure level), and place it in several spots on the car, repeating the same movement. You’ll quickly learn what location that mic works best. When listening to the engine, you’ll notice there are locations with build-ups of “noise” (bad), and build-ups of tonality (good). Watch out for hot parts though! On the exhaust, we’ve noticed that placing it too close to the exhaust will get you a lot of air-movement, but little tone. Again, it’s critical that you find the location that will extrude the most amount of “tone”, and the least amount of “noise”. Practice, test, experiment, and learn.

Besides the aforementioned lav mics we use a plethora of other mics (neuman 191, SM57, 421, D112, Sennheiser MK’s etc.). But often its much more important on where to place it, then what mic to use. Placement for getting that aforementioned tonality, and resistance to wind is the most critical issue. Placement of mics comes from experience in regards to acoustics and aerodynamics, and having made many mistakes. If it makes you feel better, I still not happy with my results either.

DSR: 3a: Hey charles good job on the soundminer video, really great to see how you can get a great sound effect so fast. I see you use a lot of plugins there… Could you share more information about some of the best plugins you use for your projects (not the video)?

3b: Your video on sound design with soundminer is superb! You have a lot of effects there. I wonder how you know what effect has to be there? Any method to identify what could be the best plugin or the best structure to use in a chain? I already have some experience on that, but watching that video I get a little confused seeing some effects I don’t use and could help me a lot in the future.

CD: I’m going to try to answer these both at once. You got a few hours? There’s a HUGE list of plugs I use and love, but I’m still not the king of plugins. But I’m close to becoming the kings’ servant though :) Honestly, all kidding aside, I use whatever solves the problem. I naturally have a few “reach for” plugins like:

• Waves L1, Ren-compressor, Rbass, Z-noise & Mondomod
• Soundtoys Filterfreak, Soundblender & Phasemistriss
• Digidesign Lo-fi, recti-fi and d-verb (yes, d-verb for it nasty bad reverbs)
• A ton of the McDSP plugs like ML4000, Filterbank and Analog channel

Other plugins I reach for are the full GRM set, Eventide set (love their H3000 factory), Alitiverb, various granulators (KT granulator etc.), Avox warming plugin, PSP plugs etc.

The process usually is to reach for what I know, and if that doesn’t solve the problem, I reach for others. On the VST side, I try out at least 1-2 new ones every week or so, and sometimes run into some great gems. I visit some websites like KVRaudio.com, and find some new gems there occasionally.

However, plugins are tools. Tools to manipulate sounds which become part of a soundscape. All the plugins in the world won’t help you build a soundscape, but that’s quite obvious. Treat your plugins as your tools, learn what the tools do, so you can spend more time being creative with your sound editing. Knowing what effects to use stems from knowing your tools. You wouldn’t reach for a hammer when a saw is needed right? Often its also about experimenting, doing things you normally wouldn’t do. The answer to your question is not a straightforward one, but please read the section in my first interview on this site about the 3-day test I did to myself. Try to recreate somebody else’s sound with only a handful of sounds. You’re going to have to rely heavily on processing, and you’ll find a thousand ways of how -not- to achieve the result. But at the same time you’ll learn a thousand ways on how to get a different sound than expected. That experience will carry forward in you knowing what to use, when and where.

DSR: 4. I’m studying sound some time ago, everything by myself, with books, websites and practice (There are no sound schools in my country). Lately I’ve been working on some projects (redesigning videos) and feel I have already a good material to show. Now what worries me is how to get hired on a company without having “official” study. What you could advise me? What do you think would be the best way to get into the industry?

CD: We seem to be in the same boat, I haven’t had any formal study either, so never let that block your way. Just like question #1’s answer, the key to it all is to have will-power, and find ways to show your talent. In the early days it was much harder to reach everybody, but now with the internet you can show your talents to everybody, and send out links easily. Before you try to send your video to companies, audio directors and sound supervisors, get feedback, lots of feedback. There are several groups (like the yahoo sound_design group) where people are very open to share their feedback on your work. Learn from that feedback (especially the ones which request improvement), and resubmit. You learn from the mistakes, and mistakes will make you grow. Often you have to go through a hundred mistakes before you reach the solution.

2nd, before sending it out, really do a gut-check and question if your work can compete against the majority of productions out there in a commercial world. If not, maybe time to go back to the table, and research what you can improve. In my time I’ve met a fair number of sound designers who became “cocky”. They thought their work was amazing, simply due to the sheer amount of time they had put into their work, or the sophisticated differentiation they provided with their work. They forgot to check however if the work stood up against the “expected” norm for a commercial release. Their work might have been awesome in terms of an art-school project, but maybe too strange.

Also, the accompanying note can tell a lot about the person. During the 90‘s somebody send me a piece of sound design done solely on a violin. He plucked it, scraped it, banged on it etc. and in the end it simply wasn’t fun to listen to and plainly annoying. His letter stated it was the best work he’d ever done. If he had stated it was an experiment showing off what he can do with manipulation (which was awesome), we probably would have asked for a 2nd demo.

To better answer this, I forwarded the question to Tristan Beulah (one of EA’s new young sound designers) about how he got into the industry and give a different spin on an answer; “Even within the sound industry there are niches. As with any industry, the trick is to find out what makes you stand out and leverage that to your advantage. Work on your primary skills and demonstrate them in the best light possible. You obviously don’t want to end up as a one-trick-pony, so improve wherever you can. The idea is just to figure out what makes you you, and find out where you can slot in, then go for it.

Cut down on the clutter: select your best works and put those in an easy to navigate portfolio. Don’t make it a chore for prospective employers and clients to find you and decide you are exactly what they are looking for. A web address is a lot easier to distribute than DVDs, too, so if you don’t have a website, you might want to start there.

Also, like any industry, you need to meet the people you’re trying to work with. That means directors, sound designers, studio managers, whoever. The majority of my peers just getting into the industry are making strides through acquaintances, not cold calling. Find sound related events, film related events, projects you can contribute to, anything that puts you in front of the people you want to work with. There’s no risk in putting yourself out there and making an impression. Don’t be a nuisance, just be a passionate sound designer and try to find projects you want to work on. Make friends in the industry. With experience, and time, you’ll work your way into the industry.”

DSR: 5. I can see you work with proprietary software at EA. Do you use middleware solutions such as Wwise and FMOD? What are the advantages you find to work with your own software?

CD: I personally don’t really use any 3rd party middleware for commercial projects, but several projects at EA do. I’ve experimented with them during my free time to see what the buzz is about. Usually the manufacturers have to make the 3rd party software super user-friendly, and fill the common feature-set. They usually can’t get to the specialized tasks that certain games require. The advantages of our own software is within that boundary. We can write it in a way it’s optimized for the game, does specialized processing techniques, and in general is more CPU friendly than “general” packages.

DSR: 6a. Hello Charles, thanks for the articles. Loving your special a lot. I was wondering if you can share some mixing tips to get great sound on cinematics.

6b. NFS trailers/teasers have really crazy cuts between different scenes. Do you know about a technique or tips to deal with that kind of videos?

CD: Great questions. Apologies that my answer won’t be great and probably something you’ve heard before. What you’re asking has to stem from doing; analyzing other people’s work, acquire (honest) feedback from people who’s work you respect, and improve. The basic tips on doing fast cut cinematics and trailers would be:

• Work with your picture editor to have him/her edit the picture to a pace. Regardless if that pace is music and/or soundeffects, they get inspired by the pacing of the sound, just like you’ll get inspired by the pacing of the picture. Without a picture editor who really knows how to use sound, sound intensity and pacing, you’ll always be stuck playing second fiddle trying to make something out of nothing.
• Work with your picture editor to build up trust. We often get the video, and will re-edit it a bit in protools to match pacing of a crescendo, breathing room, beat-cut or similar. Then we give the OMF or edit-list back to the editor to conform picture to.
• Don’t cut every sound that you see. When you watch the video the fist time, quickly speak out, or write-down what you were focusing on, and only highlight that sound. Those are the main sounds to work on.
• Then on pass 2, figure out where sound can provide enhancement; can it enhance the story, the pacing, the contra-feel etc. Any way to enhance the music? Are the hits big enough, are there holes which require FX support? are the drums sharp enough? etc.
• Pass 3: figure out which soundeffects can be tied together. It’s easy to edit a sound in for a car-by, followed by a wipe, but can you find a way to combine the 2 into a seamless sound so it won’t feel so choppy? Never edit exactly “on the cut”. You’ll find it often plays much better if you don’t attach to picture too closely, but instead ramp in and out. Move the sound out of the picture, don’t just stop it (unless it’s for an “effect”)
• Pass 4: figure out where you get bored. Are you providing enough intensity build-ups, does the video leave you wanting more? Is your heart beating just a tad bit faster? (this means that intensity build-ups were working) Do you find yourself breathing different while watching it? (if so, you probably provided enough gaps, valley and peaks)
• Pass 5: toss out anything not needed, especially sounds which are just noise. Less is more.

That’ll get you started with the general stuff. As always, listen and learn from other people’s work, then clearly figure out what sets your work apart, and how you can sell your skills.

DSR: 7. What could you recommend me to improve my sound design skills? Any practice or method to analyze or remake the sound?

CD: For this, lets go back to the first interview where I mentioned the 3 day test I put myself through. The best way I’ve improved on my sound design is by constant practice and tryouts, learning from peers and mentors and pushing myself:

• Know and learn your sounds/library, and what they represent in real life
• Go out and record new material. This will not only get you new source, but also exposes you to the real world. You’ll get to appreciate what happens to sound when it travels; air distortion, pitch-bending, phasing etc.
• Pick one of your most favorite sounds. Now pick 5 sounds from your library in random, 1 from each category (i.e. kitchen, gun, ambience, vehicle etc.). Then try to make that favorite sound from ONLY the picked 5 sounds. This will make you learn how to do processing. Don’t give up. Do this at least for 3 days. Again, it’s not important if you get the perfect result, but what is important is all the ways you found how to apply processing, and get to your learn what your plugins do.
• Now learn how to create movement. Listen carefully to real world movement (car by’s, jet by’s etc.). Then try to create that movement using your plugs, and bit of other sounds on your own sounds.
• Last but not least, and this is the harder one. Grab a video from somewhere that inspires you. Redo the sound, but give it your personal twist, and get feedback. Honest feedback. Find your harshest critic who you admire. The feedback might be painful, but improve, redo, and continue.

DSR: 8. I made some sound remakes to trailers and animations. I realized that the hardest thing is to evaluate yourself and see what are your mistakes… Could you list some of the most important things to analyze from a sound design reel or example?

CD: When I listen to somebody’s sound design reel I watch for a few things:

• Originality. Does it sound new, refreshing, or is it the same old stuff
• Clarity; does the sound designer understand the difference between simply placing a sound to picture, and placing it to picture for a reason.
• Does the sound designer really understand how to make a clear, clean sound-bed, without creating a wall of noise, or elements which “stick out” as improper.
• What are the mixing-skills, and musical skills of the sound designer. Do they understand musical timing, valleys, peak and musical tonality.

When evaluating yourself, compare your work to others’ who you admire, back to back. You’ll always find ways to improve. Sooner or later you’ll find that you don’t have to compare anymore, or can’t find anything really wrong anymore. That’s when you know you’re getting better (I’ve yet to come to that stage :)

Your work is never better or worse than somebody else’s, just different. It’s up to you to find out what the consumers click with. That’s what you’re really learning, and for all we know, you’ll come up with the next new sound-scape for others to learn from.

DSR: 9. Sometimes a sound completely stumps me and I have no idea how to make it, or even what to start with. When this happens to you, what do you do?

CD: AHA! Great to hear I’m not the only one. Welcome to the club of reality :) If I don’t have any ideas, I jump out of windows, take a dive of the empire state building, and swim on the bottom of the ocean… kidding aside, it happens to all of us. But I do have some methods to help me get ideas.

• If you have an example file you’re trying to emulate, Dissect. Dissect. Focus in on each frequency band, and try to figure out what’s happening there. Play the sound back at half-speed or even quarter speed. This will tell you a lot of info.
• When starting on a new sound, I often start randomly playing sounds in a library program like soundminer, and toss in some plugs, move the pitch, activate reversinator plugin etc. You’re looking for inspiration of a sound that moves you. You’ll hear it when you hear it. When I’m completely out of ideas, I’ll simply start putting random things to picture, and sometimes you bump upon something that really works well. Once that happens, your inspiration will take you further, and you’ll shape it. It usually is that first hump you have to get around. Most of the time that original sound that inspired you to begin with doesn’t even survive the cut.
• Hum/sing it a sound into a microphone, and then process that. Sometimes you can make the sound better with your mouth than you can find it in a lib, especially if they are surreal sounds.
• Use the peers around you. Talk to them, show them the picture and get ideas on what they would do. Sooner or later one of them will give you a route you hadn’t thought about which will totally inspire you.
• Acquisition of new sounds. Sometimes it just takes a few new sounds to get you inspired when you hear a certain element. Either record or buy a commercial library. Several sites (or so I heard) also provide free sounds. So there should be a plethora of sources to get you going.

Hopefully some of this was helpful. You can always reach me by email, facebook or linked-in if you have any further questions. I hope you had fun reading the articles this month. Cheers !

-charles

Every sound designer has to make new whooshes in record time. Whenever I’m stuck in that position I’ve always tried to come up with some quick automated ways. A long time ago I made a template that allows me to quickly make new whooshes, and on top of it it’s incredibly fun to “operate” since you get to actually orchestra the whooshes in realtime. I’m still using this template on some material in these days. On top of it, throw virtually any sound at it, bit of protools knowledge, and you’re set. It works best if you have a control surface (C24, Procontrol, D-command, Control 8 etc.) so you can throw the faders.

disclaimer: The first time you set this up, it’ll take you approx 45-60 minutes. Every consecutive use will only take you a few minutes.

• Create 10-20 tracks with continuously edited sounds for about 4-5 minutes. Place a sound, and use the “duplicate” command plenty of times :)
• Include sounds with specific characters you want (i.e Growls, distortion, tones etc.)
• Include single-shot sounds like hits, explosions etc. as well as tonal sounds. These will create the peak-points.

The following video-clip will solo each track to show what types of sounds I’ve picked. Notice there are several types of tonal ranges, flanged sounds etc. Track “Hit1” and “Hit2” are typical “punch” hits.

Variation of Lib sounds put on several tracks. “Bara” track contains sounds by maestro Dave Farmer.

• -Create 2-3 submix busses, and route similar sounds to each bus
• Apply realtime processing on each submix bus using a plethora of movement creators like:

– Dopplers (GRM, Waves)
– Low-end enhancers like Rbass, Recti-fi or Lo-air (Waves)
– Flangers/Phasers (Soundtoys, Waves)
– Envelope filters (Soundtoys) etc….
– Anything else that creates movement or distorts the way in fun new ways

• Setup busses with side-chain ducking. i.e. if Submix 1 has the more “agressive” sounds, then Submix 1 should duck down submix 2 etc.
• Other fun ways are to use envelope filters and create side-chaining on these to low-pass filter a submix bus by another
• If a sound is not “steady” enough, add a few long delays (2000ms etc.) on that track to fill in the gaps etc.
• If you need to beef up the mid-points, use something like waves C4 and/or McDSP ML4000 to expand the low-end at the loudest point of the submix.
• Setup the “hit” sounds as you peak point on the whoosh. This is a bit tricky, but you’ll get the hang of it;

– Send the main submix signal to a aux gate, so it only opens up at the loudest point. This will act as the trigger for the hits.
– Gate the “hits”, and open up the gate using the signal from the above aux-gate. The signal output will become the trigger for the peak points on the submix busses
– Now, duck down the submix busses, using the output of this chain.

• Be careful not to setup a feedback ducking chain, otherwise it’ll end up “mute”

The following video shows one track solo’d, with the processing on it, which is only Waves Doppler and Digidesign’s Recti-fi (for low-end enhancement)

So you got that far, that’s cool ! Now the fun really begins.

• While you’re playing the protools session, start interactively move the faders, controlling what each in and out of the whoosh will sound like.
• Make lots of mistakes, and simply go nuts at times. Don’t try to over-control it.
• Keep recording. In every take you’ll end up with probably 2-5 new whooshes that are usable.
• Random automate other stuff (doppler speed etc.)
• Once you get sick of the sounds you’re currently using, delete some of the sounds, and put new ones on the tracks.
• Turn some plugs on/off, anything goes. Mondo-mod is awesome to automate tracks by itself by simply LFO’ing the volume. make sure to offset the speed for each track. Sit back and enjoy your protools session auto-creating whooshes.

The following video shows all the tracks being used, and me moving the faders in random a bit to make the sounds in realtime.

…. enjoy…..

Written by Charles Deenen for Designing Sound

The following article contains small excerpts of the 65 page “Need for Speed” Car Recording Guidebook, published internally at Electronic Arts, written by Charles Deenen.

Car sounds are some of the most inspiring and entertaining sounds to record. Like a human voice, each car has a signature sound, with the driver being the actor.
Recording these machines should be simple right? You call a buddy with a cool car, grab a microphone and recorder, go find a spot somewhere and hit record. Many folks have had great luck doing it this way, but when deadlines, ownership and budgets are at stake, you can’t risk shooting from the hip. The following pages are a random sampling of some the book and mainly cover the setup phase. Thanks to the many folks who originally contributed their thoughts, pictures and feedback to the full book. The recording setup procedure is mostly for gaming, but will help any person setting up car (or any vehicle) recordings.

The following is a list of steps to ensure a successful recording session.
We’ve sometimes skipped items on this list, but in many cases wish we hadn’t!

Set your Budget

Before you start any searching and recording, set your budget. It’ll give you a playground to work off and put a concrete limit to the choices you have. These items should be considered for budgetary purposes:

Be careful of setting your budget too low as it will have an immediate impact on the following aspects:

• Safety. Your budget might not enable you to record on a track, or allow for proper insurance.
• Time and Detail. The time you might have with the car might be severely restricted, thereby not allowing you the time required to address details like wind-problems.
• Quantity of cars.
• Ability to obtain “hard to get” cars.

Before booking the car, make sure you like the “Tone” and character of the car, especially if the fee involved is high.

• Hire a local recordist to test-record the car. Make sure they use the recorder and microphones you have specified and know.
• Since this recordist is the first interaction with your car owner and your company, make sure he/she behaves very professional. Hiring a local recordist blindly is therefor not preferred.
• Instruct the test recordist to not get into conversations about money, safety, insurance or anything else not sound related.
• Make sure he politely thanks the driver/owner, and that they have your contact-number.

Shot List for the test-recordist

• All specs, upgrades, modifications of the car 
verbally spoken. Include name of driver, phone # etc.
• Revs from both the engine and rear of the cars. For the engine side, get both regular perspective (see picture) and one with the hood open, mic’ng it close-up.
• Car taking off rapidly away from the recordist. Ensure the driver (almost) hits the rev-limiter. It’s critical to hear the car through the full range of RPM
• Car by with a shift-up past the recordist.
• Note down any problems with the car; rattles, potential mechanical
problems and driver/owner. Politely ask the owner/driver about the 
found problems, and if they are fixable.

You’ve established the needs and budget for your exterior recordings. Now it’s time to start actually finding the perfect location. Locations are as critical to the success of your recording as the source itself, so being picky about it is not a bad thing;

• Obtaining Contacts; You can call the car-teams to find out about contacts for tracks and airports. If not, googling is your best bet. You often will have to do quite a bit of diggin’ before you find the right person.
• Inspection; If you can’t visit the location before recording, hire somebody in the area to take pictures, inspect the environment and surface. If possible, have this person also do a “noise-test” recording. Rev up a car 50 feet away and check if the environment’s noise-level is acceptable.
• Dirt/Rocks; if you like the location, but there’s loose material like Dirt/Rocks, it can be removed by a street-sweeper. Find out if there’s one 
available for rent around the location.
• The deal; When dealing with the owner/representative of the location, they hear “money” the moment you say “video-game” or “Movie”. Try to establish the price before you mention it. The opposite is true as well. Sometimes these folks will actually cut you a deal when they hear it’s for their favorite game. Feel it out carefully.
• Other users; Some locations are shared with others (like race-tracks). Before committing, ensure that the location is quiet enough, or the possibility for enough sound isolation exists.
• Forest roads; If there’s no wind and birds, closed forest roads are amazing. They act as a large enclosed “tunnel”, and the sound will travel very far.
• Walled Areas; Sometimes you need an enclosed sounding area for a particular “sound”. Make sure the road is closed off to other traffic in case you’re going going to break any speed laws. Privately owned roads are the easiest to obtain.
• Weather; check with the location owner how long it usually takes for the road to dry after rainfall. This will give you an indication how longer of a break is needed in case it would rain
• Time of Day / Time of Year; Birds and crickets are the most active during early & late parts of the days in hot times of the year. Try to avoid “subtle” recordings like distant car-bys & ins during these periods.

Recordists

Recordists for cars are specialists in this area. You want to hire people who’ve done this dozens of times before. Saving money on lesser experienced people is not worth the hassle in the long run.

The requirements are:

• Equipment; Operates and knows the equipment they’ll be using. Find out what the recordist will be bringing, and if you feel it is enough coverage. If not, negotiate the extra rental equipment and figure out who’ll be bringing it, and who’s paying for it.
• Time; be very straight-up with the recordist in regards to time they’ll have available to setup, mount mics on the car, calibration etc. They have to be comfortable with this time for the session to succeed.
• Technically savvy. The recordists needs to know the mechanical parts and workings of a car well. This will allow them to operate quickly and safely. Mounting microphones in extremely hot & dangerous areas would not be good.
• Professional behavior. Car owners want to know that the person mounting all the mechanical gear and tape on their car knows how to do so without hurting the car, its paint-job and the interior
• Reliable behavior. Shows up on time, does what he says. Works alone when needed.
• Pleasure to work with. You’ll be spending a lot of time with the recordist. 
Ensuring he’s a pleasure to work with, will make for some enjoyable productive days.
• Insurance; It should be very clear, and stated in a contract how the recordist is insured, whose responsible for the equipment he’s using etc. It usually falls on your shoulder to pay for any damages done to equipment.
• The deal; The deal should include milage-cost, day-rate (up to X hours), equipment (incl. rentals). It should also provide you the cancellation agreements.

Hopefully these (short excerpt) pages were helpful for setting up your next vehicle recording. The full book can be read if you’re employed at Electronic Arts. In case of doubt, just hire John Fasal or Bryan Watkins, or any other qualified car recordist. They’ll get you the desired result. They’re their worth in gold sometimes.
cheers !

Written by Charles Deenen for Designing Sound

For years, Charles Deenen has been the audio director of the Need for Speed Franchise. I had a nice talk with him commenting about some aspects of the audio of the award winning franchise. Let’s read:

Designing Sound: First of all, tell us something about your passion for cars, and what you enjoy most about working on Need For Speed Games?

Charles Deenen: As a kid I played a lot with toy cars, build lego race-tracks and liked anything associated with speed. In the netherlands you can’t start your education for a drivers license until you’re 18. Before I started that, I got my speed-kick out of BMX biking, competing and doing jumps too high for my own health (the hole in my tongue is witness of that :) Oddly enough I’d always told my family I wasn’t ever going to drive a car. I’d seen one burn down during younger years, and was afraid I’d get burned alive in a crash. But hey, that fear didn’t last long, and I obtained my drivers license quickly and have always driven with a lead-foot.

Before “Need for Speed”, I’d never worked on a “big” racing game. Previously I’d worked on some C64 and SNES racing titles, but in those days sound was a low priority in a racing game. Heck, we were happy enough it made some tolerable sound.

On the Need for Speed franchise I’ve always enjoyed the people I work with the most. Without a team driving each other to excel, you don’t get industry leading results. We’re blessed to have that team in place. The execs at EA understand what great audio brings to a title and support the development of it. The other aspect I enjoy is the constant drive to find new and better ways to give the user a true car racing experience. This includes the plethora of cars we have to record (and sometimes get to drive :) which is always a really fun but exhausting time during the dev-cycle of a title. Having worked for many years on slower RPG style games, the racing genre changes up the pace nicely by introducing constant action.

DS: How has the evolution of the franchise been? What are the main improvements on the game since the first version?

CD: Need for Speed has been around for over 16 years(!!), and the very first version was 1994’s “need for speed” on the 3DO, with audio by Allistair Hirst. A lot has changed since then, but the platforms are so different, it’s hard to compare what the main improvements are. The previous games always have sounded great for the platform limits. The new consoles have allowed expansion of the realism of the sound, and provide a more engaging and believable soundscape. New playback techniques got introduced during 2004 on NFS Underground 2. Air distortion, split engines and environment integration were introduced in 2007. We’re now working on something that will bring it to another level by making the car come alive, which I’m very exciting about. No other game has done this yet. When this gets released it’ll be another few years hopefully before the competition will catch up.

(Sound by EA Media Works)

DS: How is the relationship of the sound team with the rest of the developers of NFS? How is the importance given to the sound of the games?

CD: The development team and NFS management realizes that Audio is a critical part of a racing game, and supports it. The audio artists and audio programmers are among the development team, and interact daily with the rest of the team. In other words, there’s no real separation between “sound team” and “dev team”. Everybody is part of the whole team.

DS: What techniques or methods you use on the game to enhance the player experience and provide realism/emotion with sound?

CD: Over the years we’ve tried several methods. Some that worked well, some that didn’t. Through all this we noticed a few interesting points. First off, the consumer thinks they know what a great race-car sounds like after listening to youtube clips. 2nd, the consumer still listens to racing games mostly on TV’s at low volume. As much as us developers want to believe they listen to games at higher volumes in 5.1, it simply isn’t the norm. Over the years we’ve changed our ways and style of mixing (using our advanced fully automated mixer), and tried out new techniques of sound reproduction. Some methods tried to make the experience go towards a movie by focusing on the most predominant sound requirement (i.e. focused mixing), while other methods involved a more defined car experience or putting you in the world. Music and dialog treatments have gone through several phases as well, with cop dialog being some of most believable you’ll hear in games (as mentioned by other people). All in all, we tried out a bunch, focus-tested, and then awaited the consumer’s response. Not all stuck :) What did stick are the elements which made the consumer less aware of audio as part of the game. The more audio works together with the experience, the better the result. The moment the consumer notices audio, it starts to work against the game experience. This all ties back to one of the articles we touched upon before; the believability gap. Audio can be a major offender in that area. How often have you heard a song stop/start on a racing game with “radio station” music treatment? It takes away from the smooth gameplay experience since you notice the audio being a layer on top of the game.

So instead of focusing on the latest cool audio techniques, we’ve gone back to the basics for future titles. The goal is that users won’t notice audio, but the moment they play the game silent, they notice their experience diminishing greatly, or even impossible.

DS: You also worked on Fast And Furious films… Any influence of NFS there? Did you learned something on the films that you implemented on NFS later?

CD: The fast and furious films were all about hot (tuner) cars, flashy body-kits, neon etc. It was a car culture considered very hip during the early 2000’s. Naturally NFS follows, and sometimes trend-sets this culture. During “underground” and “most wanted” NFS’s, there was quite a bit of audible cross pollination between NFS and the furious films. Even if I hadn’t worked on both, this would have most likely happened, simply due to the culture cross-overs.

What I learned during the Fast/Furious films was how to create the emotion of car sounds projected by other sounds. We used a plethora of bears, pigs, tigers, leopards etc. to enhance cars in a layered, or sometimes standalone way. Each character in the film got their own “treatment” and style. On the NFS side, we always started with the car recordings as a base, but on cinematic moments we’d enhance them with various other layers. During the early 2000‘s we used to go for animals and metal. Now we’re more into the distortion/synth sweeteners as you might have heard in the cinematics of NFS Shift.

Also when working with some great sound designers/editors in the world, you always pickup new ways and techniques of creating sound, which naturally get used in future titles.

DS I think you’ve had a lot of fun recording all the cars stuff (engine, inside car, skid noises, impacts, etc) for the game?…Could you share some experiences on that?

CD: We’ve had a lot of fun on all these recordings. They are some of the best times we have on a project. Over the years we’ve changed our recording techniques in search of methods which made the cars come alive. We used to record cars by placing them on on a dynamometer, but this gave us a pretty “stale” lifeless sound (perfect for programatic, scientific cars though :) Now most of our recordings are done on a track, with dyno recordings filling in some gaps. We employ some of the best car recordist to ensure we get the result we need as there’s only 1 opportunity at times. As always it’s a team effort.

For NFS we’ve recorded 150+ cars, anything from regular to high end 1 million dollar race-cars. Each of those is a new experience as you always have to find the optimum recording spots. Besides that we’ve done car crash recordings in multiple ways, several sessions of skid recordings, road surfaces, bumps, turbos, rattles etc. You name it on a car, and we probably recorded it.

There are a few sessions that always stick out as really fun or interesting. One of them being the “Touge” research. For one of the NFS, we added a mode which was a craze in japan called Touge. It involved going through mountain roads incredibly fast, drifting the cars. We hooked up with a crazy touge driver in L.A and recorded a lot of reference material, both onboards as well as exterior. Lets say that a human is not meant to go so fast on those mountain roads. It was absolutely insane. The dozens of skid-marks on the road, trailing into the deep valley are proof of that. Too many got into accidents there.

Another fun trip was a few days of recording at Sebring. Jesse Lyon connected with a few racing teams running in the GT1 class like the Corvette Racing team and we ended up having full access to their cars for a day each. We were initially not prepared for 130+db cars. These were the loudest cars I’d ever heard. However, John Fasal pulled a few tricks out of his sleeve and we ended up recording 3 magnificent cars those days with a team of 4 people.

Everybody loves crashes. We’ve done several crash recordings, but the most elaborate one has been the hiring of a construction crane, dropping cars 100 foot down. We went through about 15 cars that day, and dropped anything from cars, vans, huge cement blocks to metal beams onto various items. Every time we did this, we stuck an SM57 in the middle of the crash, at impact point, thinking it would die after 1 time. After 40+ drops the SM57 had a minor scratch on it. Go figure. It simply didn’t want to get killed.

DS: And what about the ambiences?

CD: We do ambience recordings when needed as NFS isn’t an ambience heavy game. We’ve been to many race-tracks, city races, drag-races, drifts, bridges, tunnels and other locations that we’re set for some time to come.

DS: I love the cinematics of every NFS. You directed some of them, so how is the sound design approach on that animations?

CD: The cinematics are always done by a team of people, and on most NFS since 2003 I acted as one of the principal sound designers and/or sound supervisors and/or mixer for the cinematics. The cinematics are usually hard to do as they come in at the last moment, have to integrate well with the game, and have to flow smoothly in and out of the game. On average, each NFS has between 20-45 minutes of movies. Over the years several groups and post houses (Danetracks, Warner Brothers, Sourcesound, Soundelux etc.) have worked on these cinematics and each have given it their own flavor.

The approach we use with editing is not really any different from a feature film. We usually start off with a design concept to establish what the general feel should be. Often this has been preset by the game already, so the movies follow that path.

We then find a post house, or group of individuals who can take that concept and make it their own. The sequences get spotted, sound edited, designed etc. The team usually has a principal sound designer, several sound editors, a musical editor/designer, FX recoridst(s), foley artist and re-recording mixer(s). When editing is about to finish, the premixes start, and after some design tweaks, followed by the final mix. These sequences are usually some of the hardest to mix, as so much is happening. 2 years ago we started to work with Tom Ozanich who really understands this, and does a fantastic job mixing the majority of the ingame cinematics.

NFS Carbon

NFS Undercover Trailer

NFS Shift In-game Cinematics

NFS Shift Teaser

NFS Pro Street First Look

NFS Pro Street Teaser (one of my favorite)

DS: Another great feature on the Need for Speed series is the implementation. How is that process done? And what about the audio engine used on the game?

CD: On NFS we use the majority of EA’s tool-set; AEMS, Pathfinder, Renderware Audio etc. Beyond that the NFS team wrote their own mixing tool starting in 2004 which also has been used in numerous other titles (Skate, FiIFA, NBA street etc.). This tool can modulate over 2000+ parameters each frame without eating up much CPU and acts as an interactive dub-stage equivalent. It was developed by John Twigg and Cliff Kondratiuk. It is still in use today, but in the next few months will be replaced with a more refined version. Splicer is another tool written by the NFS crew. It basically can read Protools sessions and allows very quick multilayer sounds to be created.

Splicer

Aems is our MAX/MSP equivalent runtime. Originally developed during the SSX years by EA Tech. NFS audio programmers recently wrote a new interactive music tool, taking full advantage of beat-matching, overlays, multi-tracks, animation-matching etc. This will be used in a future NFS. We also have a proprietary way of playing back car audio. This was developed by Patrick Ratto. It’s been our work-horse since 2004 when the first review on NFS Underground 2 (official U.S playstation magazine) read “The sound effects are without any shadow of a doubt the most amazing I’ve ever heard in a videogame. The rasp of the engine is so unbelievably believable that you can actually feel the reverberation of the exhaust as the ower surges through it. It will change your expectations of what a game can sound like”. Now this engine is in it’s 3rd version, and we’re doing a re-invention on it. Most games are still working on refining car audio sound reproduction, we’ve moved into making the cars’ audio come alive, be real, be as expected. We’re using a whole new tool-set for this, and some magnificent audio artists.

NFS Mixing Tool

DS: And what you can tell us about the dialogue? There is a particular way to deal with this on NFS?

CD: The majority of our dialog has been Cop Dialog. During NFS Most Wanted we came up with a new way of recording dialog which was the breakthrough for that game. It added a whole new layer of realism which carried on through Carbon and Undercover. During GDC and other events, people still ask me how we’ve done this, and I smile :) Last year, Audio Artist Phil Hunter did a lecture during GDC about this and explained the simple, but very effective method behind it. That said, to us this method is now a bit of a has-been. We’re looking for the next solution; how to get great, instantly believable performances out of actors without making them sound gamey. So far we’ve had some good results, but also found a hundred ways on what not to do. As previously mentioned I think this is where gaming will get to their next incarnation; believability. That’s our main focus now. Gaming in general needs to move on, and leave the saturday morning cartoon performances behind.

DS: What would be the next step for Need for Speed? Would you like to have something special in the next-gen consoles to improve
the game?

CD: For next gen consoles we’re not going to say “no” to more ram, and more DSP. Our awesome NFS audio programmers always find a way to make use of every little bit of CPU or ram left over. That said, graphics in general on games have to catch up to audio to overcome the uncanny valley effect, so a better graphics processor is in dire need.

Need for Speed is continuing strong. We’ve listened to the consumers and EA has put in great effort to turn the franchise around. The next few releases should really show this. I’m very excited about it. It feels like the re-invention that happened during NFS Underground. Everybody was stoked about that game. That same feeling is coming back, in a big way.

As for sound, we’re doing the same; giving multiple spins to audio and car reproduction. Each game will feel very different. Even though we might share the sound recordings, each game has a totally different way of processing and implementing this. Hopefully consumers and sound peers will enjoy the next generation of NFS as much as we enjoy making it.

Need for Speed main website

Charles Deenen has created this exclusive video for Designing Sound showing one way to fast sound effects designing with Soundminer and plugins. The software used is Soundminer 4.2 and Pro Tools 8. Plugins are Waves, McDSP, SoundToys and other stuff. Enjoy!

How do you design sounds in a fast way? Your stories are welcome!

The following article is an excerpt from “The future of sound design” lectures done during GDC, VFS and DFF between the periods of 2006-2007 by Charles Deenen. Rewritten for “DesigningSound.org”.

The Future of Sound Design in Video Games, Part 2

Every day in our life, sounds occur. Our brain thinks about virtually every sound we hear, and depending on how we’re connected with that sound, either (unknowing) react, translate, notice or feel something. On each sound we hear, we connect a space, event or happening to it, thereby learning how or when these sounds occur. Each human experiences sound every day, and learn about them, just like we learn a language. Some sounds are artificial, yet we connect a certain “moment” to them (i.e. computer graphic beeps in movies)

Now, you probably think “blah blah, yeah, yeah, where the heck are you going with this”. As a sound designer our job is to learn that language, transcribe it, understand it, and enhance it. You can easily make use of the human learned language of “experienced” sound. Fundamentals in sounds can be used together to form a combined emotion.

As an example, I’m sure you sometimes hear a distant fighter jet come by. By hearing it’s fantastic air-distorted rippling effect you instantly know it’s going incredibly fast without seeing it. When you hear a wasp buzzing, your instinct probably says “holy crap, swat it!”, all due to your brain associating a previous reaction/learning to that sound.

So, lets put this in practice by listening to some examples. The following is an example of standalone sweetners which would be used to add to parts of a car-by sound. It’s various ways of adding a “scream”, “howl”, “pain” or other sense of emotion to a car-by sound. Something probably that most of you have done, but why you did this is really the question:

As sound designers, we often try to emulate a certain sensation we’ve heard in real-life. Instead of using the real thing, we can reproduce the same effect by mimicking the feeling we want to chase. In this case we’re after alternate ways to add a sensation of speed to a car by. First sound is a regular Jet-by, followed by the pictured sounds, finished off by the car-by with the added ‘speed’ layers (example contains sounds from various sources)

To quickly grab a sound “feeling” in the future, one of the things I did a long time ago is make a list of various sounds which moved me somehow. Then I wrote down the feeling they impressed on me, and some ideas on how to use them.
Every time when I was in a rush, with little time to think about sound design and feelings, I pull up the list and scan it for my previous thoughts. Usually I find some ideas in it, especially in relationship to expressing a certain (combo) emotion.

• Make a list of “experienced” sounds and the emotion you feel when you hear them, with possible ideas on how to use them

“Fighter Jet fast By” – Speed sensation – Car by Sweetners

“Jail Cell Door close” – “Closed off feeling” – Logo slam

• Create some new sounds by using the character of what defines the “experienced” sound, in combo with some “plain” sounds.

S(t)imulating Learned Ear Deficiencies


The ear is an odd looking piece of human isn’t it? On some, it sticks out like a TV dish, shaped like a weird alien disformed growth, freezes when you’re in Montreal during the winter and oh yeah, does this awesome thing with sound. The ear behaves in weird ways sometimes. Now, this is not scientific in any way, so please don’t rant to me about it. It’s purely my own speculation on what happens.

Have you ever noticed that your ear seems to “compress” or partially shut-down the high-frequencies when it hears an instant loud sound? Or how it seems to “warble” when there’s a lot of low frequency build-up in the real world?

There’s a few tricks you can use (and maybe use already), which mimmic this ear behaviour, thereby tricking the listener into believing they are really hearing something much “bigger”

• ‘Low frequency Distortion’ is read as “loud” by the ear. It mimics the high frequency compression that’s happening when you’re listening to very loud sounds, and at the same time adds to the air distortion that happens between the source and your ear. The first sound in the below example is an indication of this (that sound btw was simply made by boosting the low-end by an incredible amount, running it through a crappy (behringer) compressor which freaked out about this low end, and then reducing the low-end back down.
• I believe your ear and brain have learned to translate spiked high-frequency sounds going into mid-range/low-end as “loud”. It’s a similar scenario that happens on guns & explosions. You can easily mimic these sounds by simulating an ear “shutdown” where it rejects higher frequencies after a brief moment. Lets call this the “Hi/Lo offset technique”; offsetting high frequency sounds, followed by a mid/low frequency sound. Try it out, and realize why does this sound “loud” to you?

Example: ear_def.mp3

Build-ups… ok, no rocket science here :) Any sound rises can be used to create a build-up of tension. There is a large variety of ways to do “rises”. Many of these techniques are used in Film Trailers daily. Not all are commonly used in gaming though;

• Music rises (the most obvious one)
• Building Rhythmic sound effect (i.e. pulse growing in size over time). Very effective to draw attention.
• Pitch / Frequency increase, effective in denser layers as you’ll certainly notice these through a dense layer of “noise”.
• Volume increasing over time
• Repetition frequency increase (i.e. pulse speeding up). The most overused sound attached to this is probably the heartbeat (yikes ! :)

In gaming I’m usually only hearing music used as a way to build intensity over time, yet the combo of delayed animation spawning combined with the above can create such a nice build-up of tension.
Now the cool thing is that the opposite (the descend), creates the opposite feeling. The feeling of calming down, loosing, “letting go” etc. can all be enhanced or created in that way.

Example of some “pitch” and “Volume” rises back to back. Some of these have been used in games. Starting with the most known “rise”.

rise.mp3

Hopefully some of this was useful or interesting to you. My hopes for this article are that you consciously use these “experienced sounds” in your daily sound design, and hopefully better understand why we actually use them, or shape certain sounds to begin with. Shoot me any comments you might have.

All movies and sound contained in this article are (c) Charles Deenen and cannot be distributed or used in any way without prior written consent.

The following article contains excerpts from the “Future of Sound Design” lectures at GDC, VFS and Dutch Film Festival originally presented in 2006. Please note that certain expressions are personal opinions, and cannot be read as “fact”.

In our endless passion to make games have a similar, or exceeding sound-scape experience in comparison to other media, we constantly try to find new ways and techniques to obtain this. Some people ask “why are we comparing ourselves to film sound design, we’re very different”. Other say “Film sound experiences are the ultimate goal”. I say both are right. But to really figure out what the future may hold, we have to first learn from the past to enable measurement of missing objectives and goals.

To answer, we have to being by asking ourselves some questions:

• What’s been done in the past?
• What’s broken/missing?
• How does this compare to Visuals?
• What about Emotions ?
• Is there a future for Audio?
• What about everything else ?

The Past – Evolution in Numbers

Technical hinderances, ever since the X360 and PS3, have been much less of a hurdle for a sound designer to create engaging soundscapes. Lets look at the history, based on the most popular game machine/console during each period.

As you can see in Fig 1 & 2, the amount of sound-data currently storable on the console is so much, that in comparison the old consoles barely show up on the graphs. Memory isn’t really a technological barrier anymore.

What’s broken/missing?

The obvious one to look at would be the Sound Designer/Artist. Are the requirements of creative vs technical understanding still too high? Are they a hurdle we still have to overcome? In fig 3 I’m showing my estimates of the job requirements of a sound artist/designer working in the video games industry, when looking at the biggest selling platforms. Funny enough, the industry seems to repeat itself. Consumers are now using phones and other small devices to play games. These devices seem to be equally powerful to game consoles 4-5 years ago, which brings back the same technical hurdles, all well known and documented.

The 2nd obvious one to look at is the “no boundary” story telling experience. During the years I’ve noticed that for some sound folks who grew up in the technically restricted era, its very hard to cross-over to new platforms. As an example this is one the reasons I originally stopped doing music in the mid 90’s. I was pretty good at making small processors like the C64 and SNES do things they weren’t meant to do, and therefor got an edge on making enjoyable music. With the introduction of Redbook (CD) audio, the playing field was open to everybody, and I was no longer able to take advantage of any hurdles others hadn’t overcome yet. It’s critical that these folks find ways to move to the story telling, un-inhibited way of thinking. They have to gain this experience, or they’ll be left behind.

So what does this lead us to? To me, the biggest general missing link in making games have equal or better sound experiences than film is an investment in emotionally believable audio followed by treating the player smart, in both gameplay and audio. Lets focus on the first one for now.

Too often when playing games (including our own), I still feel “disconnected” from the experience due to sound. Some games make a great attempt at it, but in the end, there’s always something happening which causes the de-focus from the experience. During the remainder of this article we’ll touch upon what causes these disconnects. To understand this better, lets also look at how audio and visuals work together

Visual Media

Look at the below pictures. You’ll probably have a different instant feeling or emotion about each. You can tell that approaching visual realism isn’t always a good thing (the “uncanny valley” effect). It distracts from the believability, and the connected emotion you’re supposed to have. We’ll see later that Dialog has a similar issue.

Another interesting effect is that feelings generated from visuals can be interpreted different from person to person and feelings created by visuals are culturally relevant at times. Images generate a feeling, a response that we learned during our life.

VISUALS and AUDIO –  THE MARRIED COUPLE

Now, lets do a quick exercise to see the relation-ship between visuals and audio (note: due to copyright, we can’t put this music here).

• Pick one of the above pictures. Look at it carefully. You’ll notice the feeling you had initially withers away quickly.
• After a few seconds, cue up your favorite rock piece near the chorus… Did the meaning of the picture change?
• Now cue a film-score (I like to use “seven pounds” as an example). How dramatically did the meaning of the picture change, but importantly, did the feeling it generated in combination with the picture sustain?

What can you conclude out of this? How does Audio fit into this picture?

• If picture gives you the instant feeling/reaction, audio maintains this feeling over time.
• Audio cues can change the expected emotion a picture generates
• Audio can enhance picture in more than a support role and change the emotional outcome
• Audio emotions take (usually) time to establish

A quick word about Feelings and Emotions

We have to understand when to say “Feeling” and when to say “Emotion”, as both are pretty different. It’ll also help us understand how audio plays a big part in this.

• Feelings are a learned response of the culture and your surroundings in which you grew up.
• Feelings are a subset of all your mind-body states (i.e. disappointment, hunger, hope etc.)
• A Feeling is the response part of the Emotion. (“I feel disappointed”… a resulting emotional reaction could be “I’m Angry”)
• Emotions are cross cultural – the same meaning all over the world
• Emotion is a chemical state in our brains. Those same chemicals inhibit our capabilities and limiting what we call rational thought

So how can a game use this ? If visuals and audio work together to establish feelings and emotions, you can use this to a certain degree to influence game-play:

• More emotion = less judgement
• If you want to remember something, get into the emotional mood you were in when you first experienced it.
• You’re likely to come back to a “liked” emotion. Some emotional states can be addictive.
• Person’s mood tends to follow that of the situation presented in front of them.

OK, so lets get back to Audio…..

The main ingredients of Audio in Game:

Everyone reading this probably knows the 4 main “technical” ingredients of audio in a game: Music, Dialog, Sound Effects and Mix. During the many lectures on this topic I always asked the question to the audience: “What is the most important element to a believable and emotionally engaging soundscape”? “What is the top contributor”, and “What is the top damager”. The answers usually ranged across the board, each picking their “favorite” one. Composers would pick music, sound editors would pick sound effects. Repetitive footsteps was often mentioned. Dialog was the most picked damaging ingredient…. Seldom the answer was “all”.
It’s probably obvious to you that every single ingredient is of equal importance to create an emotionally believable soundscape. You can’t approach a single ingredient in a lackluster way. Believability is key.

Believable Dialog

Dialog is still the #1 offender in believability area. I’ll get probably flamed for saying this, but I’ve yet to hear a single game which makes me believe I’m listening to the characters on-screen for an extended period of time. None have captured it as truly “believable” yet. Space, placement, acting, story, odd breaks, visual discrepancies etc. all contribute to dialog flaws. We’re running up against the same “uncanny valley” effect as visuals. We’re approaching reality and the human ear will now pick up every flaw, and is no longer forgiving. Yet if we’re very far from reality, we’ll believe it. Have you noticed you can watch a saturday morning cartoon and believe the characters?

What also isn’t helping us is that some characters in-game on-screen still look robotic (or don’t even exist), making us having to work even harder to make that certain voice believable in contrast to the visuals.

One issue I’m hearing quite a bit is the recording method used. Lots of dialog for games is still recorded in the traditional “music” way of placing a U87 (or similar) close-up to the actor. Often, introducing movement, space, air, body shocks is totally negated. 

Game Example: "NBA Street"

In 2005 we did a quick test for a game called “NBA street” for which no longer accepted this type of recording. We rigged up a lot of players with wireless lavs, and had them play for several hours while feeding them scenarios and lines. The resulting effect was a much higher degree of believability. Following is an example with the “U87” version back to back with the “Lavalier” version. On purpose, similar hokey lines were picked to illustrate the concept (this was not a concept of good acting). Which one is most believable to you?

Example: nba.mp3

#1 is the old U87 version, #2 is the Lavalier version, separated by a beep

Believability Gap

Believability “gaps” are the #2 offender. Everytime a player is jerked away from the game’s believability, it makes him realize it’s a game, and intensity lessens. When this happens the intensity buildup has to be restarted to a certain degree. The game will never be able to reach the full potential of engaging, emotionally believable audio. Some examples of these gaps are:

• Awkward forced Loading screens (i.e. “silence screen”)
• Repetition on dialog, sound effects, or anything else noticeable
• Un-natural imbalance (Vol / EQ / Space etc.)
• Non believable Dialog
• Anything which goes against “learned” sounds, if not on purpose (more on this later)

Audio Mix – “The Glue”

This is a large topic, one that’s too big for this article to cover, to which we’ll come back later. It’s the #3 offender to create sustaining believable soundscapes. Too many games still ship with the “wall of sound” approach. A player can only take this so long. There are many solutions to this problem. One of the causes still seems to be “producer X listening on his TV in a noisey floor area wanting to hear every detail”, which is a hard one to overcome.
With any of the solutions, the mix shouldn’t make a user notice what’s happening, yet get more engaged. If your producer is asking for the “wall” approach, he’s in reality not asking for this. He just couldn’t hear something he wanted to hear. It’s now up to you to refocus the mix constantly to allow him to hear what he wants to hear, yet doesn’t take away from the rest.
Much more to come on this topic as there are many tricks to accomplish this.

Excuses

One of the other blockers in achieving an emotionally engaging soundscape is excuses. Yeah, the ones that every Sound Designer or sound-sup makes when he can’t achieve the needed result. We’re all guilty of it (including me). Yet, it’s one of the hurdles we have to overcome if we ever want our industry to excel above the film media’s level of engagement. If you know you can’t mix for an emotionally engaging soundscape, don’t do it. Don’t pretend you can learn it overnight. If you don’t have enough money to achieve the result, scope down, sell your ideas to execs or whatever you have to do. Don’t use’ em as an excuse why you couldn’t succeed. There are many reasons, many which are direct blockers, and many which can be overcome with creative solutions. I often hear “well, we don’t have the tools that some others have”…. Tools are a means to get to a result, but not the only way. Come up with creative ways to get the tools you need.

Wrap up

So what is the future of sound design ? It’s not some sort of new tool. It’s not a new console, it’s not a new “cool way” of creating sound in real-time. It is purely us overcoming our hurdles to find new ways creating emotionally engaging and believable soundscapes. Breaking out of traditional ways, learning what the human reacts to. How feelings and emotions tie in with sound is a must-know Content is no longer king, technology is no longer the queen. The combo of all of it, and the stimulating, game supportive result is what the player will be experiencing and wanting.

–end of part 1– We’ll look at “ear deficiencies” and “experienced sound”, including methods on how to use those to build an emotional soundscape, in the next few days.

Written by Charles Deenen for Designing Sound

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The deadline for questions is February 25 and the answers will be published on the final post of the special. Charles will choose and answer any questions that he want. Note that all questions will be considered, but not all will have to be answered.

And for those who are waiting for the Richard Devine Answers, don’t worry… all the answers will be published very soon.

Designing Sound: Hi Charles, first of all, would be great to have an introduction about your career. How did you start, how you grow up in the sound world, and so on…

Charles Deenen: Thanks for the invite! We’ll have a fun month together with (hopefully) lots of usable info.

I’ve been called an old fella by some young folks in the industry, so am getting up there in age. I grew up in the netherlands and around 1983, attempted to start doing audio on a computer. That was the era of Commodore PET, so I tried to get tolerable sound out of a single-beep CBM-PET, and oh my, that didn’t go so well, LOL. Soon after acquiring a C64, I started to make music/graphic demos, through which I met Jeroen Tel. We wanted to make our own music, and wrote a music-driver for the Commodore 64. Well, this led to us having the “odd” idea that maybe we could make money doing this. You know, maybe just enough to pay for some gum and floppy-disks. There we travelled as young teenagers, all dressed up, to the european computer show in London where Hewson gave us our first paid gig. Apparently they liked what we did, and this led to many more jobs from a wide range of companies. Initially, I mainly provided the sound-effects for the titles which we did, but soon had to delve into doing music. Well, I knew nothing about music. I knew that a C major sounded OK after a D minor, that’s about it, LOL. However, funny enough the first music pieced I did wasn’t bad, and started doing more and more.

Early appreciation of cars

In the late 80‘s our company “Maniacs of Noise” had to begin sub-contracting, and at its peak had 5 people making musical noise at once. Considering those early computer-game years, that was huge. During those time, computer games were not nearly as main-stream as now. Zzap 64 was about the only magazine dedicated to gaming, and a game development team was 3-4 people. We provided music and/or sfx for over a hundred games on Commodore 64, 128, Amiga, Atari ST and Spectrum.

In 1990, one of the projects we did was “Dragon’s War” by Interplay which I’d taken on. They liked what I did, and asked me to move to the USA. Only 20 years old, I said “sure, why not”. After all Visa related items were completed I moved to Irvine, CA in the middle of 1991 where I started as Audio Director for Virgin Games and Interplay Productions. After doing McKids for Virgin on the NES, I moved solely to Interplay where I stayed for the next 10 years. Startrek, Baldur’s Gate, Ice-Wind Dale, Descent and others were some of the franchises I worked on while employed there. After a short stint at Shiny where I worked on the Matrix game, I went freelance to work on feature films. Thanks for Soundstorm, who gave me a chance on “Superman”, “Fast and Furious” and “2 Fast 2 Furious” were some of the first ones I worked on. This is were I fell in love with cars and emotionally engaging sound design.

Electronic Arts was in the process to re-boot their Need for Speed franchise a bit with NFS Underground.  During this, I received a call from a very nice gentlemen at EA who asked if I’d be interested to move to canada to work on this. My first reaction was “canada… oh man… that’s too cold… thanks, but no”. Through the generosity of EA, my wife and I visited Vancouver, BC and actually really liked it, so we ended up moving there.   We had the fortunate luck to find a house which allowed me to build a nice studio from which I do a fair bit of (non game) projects as well.

Since 2001, doing sound for Feature film trailers has been a side-job on weekends. Daredevil was my first one, and since then have worked on more than 60 of them including some recent ones like “Clash of the Titans” and “Salt”.

They are my learning cases. How to do great sound-design under an extreme tight deadline has you reaching for the most odd solutions, which in turn help with the production of video-game sound design.

DS: You’re creating sounds since the era of the Commodore and Atari ST… What do you think about the evolution of the game audio industry? What could be the next step?

CD: We’ve now reached a level of sound reproduction similar to film sound. The next era will not be about “more voices” and “more dsp”, it’ll be about creating emotionally engaging and believable soundscapes. 95% of games still break the believability barrier within the first few minutes, wether it’s through actor performances, character placement or odd pauses and gaps. There are many ways to take a player out of the experience, and that’s still our biggest issue today. Added technology will help, and make it easier again, but until we overcome this believability gap, all the technology in the world is not going to do it for us.

DS: You have worked as freelance and in-house… What would better for you? What you learn of each “status” and what do you recommend for all the sound designers out there?

CD: I was always freaking out a bit when I was freelance. Always looking for the next gig. It drove me insane at times. The insecurity of having a mortgage and family to sustain and the need for a constant stream of income worried me greatly. Oddly enough I never had to really look for jobs when I was doing freelance work, it was merely the “what if” factor that did it.

What I’d recommend freelance sound designers to do is become good and fast. Easier said than done I know, and it might be a simple statement. There are so many sound designers out there who haven’t been exposed to musical pacing, musical editing styles, or haven’t been exposed enough to highly demanding directors who crave for a emotionally stimulating and fitting soundbed. These experiences are needed to sustain in a demanding, volatile market-place to be able to rely on your experiences to deliver. Also, specializing in something really helps getting some sound design jobs. For example right now I’m hired a fair bit for car chases and any other vehicles. That seems to have become my “thing”.

The amount of games with large budgets is rapidly decreasing. The request for “cheaper and faster” not only is hitting the film industry, but also the game industry. In this situation though, cheaper and faster doesn’t mean “worse”. Industry peers are still expecting high quality work. The trick is how to gain the experience of doing something fast and good. This is only something you can learn mostly on your own, learning your own strengths and boundaries. Its critical you acquire honest feedback. If everybody keeps on telling you your work is awesome, there’s something amiss, unless your name is Randy maybe. You simply haven’t met the producer or director yet who has found some flaws in your work which requires improvement or adaptation. Now, make sure you continue to work for that person. He’s the one who’ll drive you further (or nuts in some cases :)

DS: I can see a couple of series of video games and films, such as NFS series, Star Trek and Fast and the Furious. What are the sound challenges on each sequel? The game/film is always different, but the essence is the same, so how you make to have a sequel of sound too?

CD: Sequels have indeed their dilemma’s. You’re asked to better the work you did which was last year was just considered “your best”. Now “your best”=old, and you’re faced with re-inventing the sound-design you did. In some cases you’re lucky and the movie or game has a new feel which will inspire this. For each project I always look for the single “it-factor”. Sometimes this doesn’t come to fruition until the last second, and sometimes it ignites the project. For example on NFS Shift we did these “in your head” driver experience sound-beds. This resulted out of an early teaser where I played around with non typical sounds, trying to emulate what a driver would hear in a race. This came partially due to the “driver experience” slogan the game just got. This stimulated the signatory sound for the NFS Shift FMV’s and menu-beds.

Charles at Interplay

DS: What kind of software you use to work with sound at EA Black Box? What are the technology to work with the implementation process?

CD: Some industry folks say that we’re spoiled at EA. I hear this often at GDC and such. Know though that the technology we use is build by a very small team, and often on the game-teams themselves. Technology is not the end all be all.  For me, it’s less important how the tools work, as long as the result can be obtained. For the past years we’ve worked with a MAX/MSP style tool where we can manipulate sounds in almost any way in real-time. This has been the work-horse for many EA games for over 8 years.

Then there are game specific tools. For Blackbox’s Skate, we build tools which were able to emulate the skate-boarding sound much more realistic than ever before. For our driving games, we build a car-engine technology which (until recent) hadn’t been done in any other game. Now, with Dice’s Frostbite technology it makes it even easier for Artists at EA to integrate flawlessly with the game itself. So, yes in one way, we’re spoiled, but these tools are driven by folks who know what they want to hear, and through team-work, get great results.

I recall when I started at EA in 2003 we were mixing in text-files, and had to restart the game everytime we made a single change. Now, it’s all real-time, thanks to a talented group of programmers and the artists who steered them  In hearing the many storeis from other companies, I do believe EA has some of the most advanced tools right now, and we’re making them even better every day.

DS: What you consider as the most important skill of any sound designer must have?

CD: Will-power. Never give up. Sometimes directors will ask the impossible of a sound-designer, and I’ve seen many give up. The ones that didn’t,  became the leaders in this industry. One story I’ve told many is one that happened to me during Descent; I wanted to make a very cool ship fly-by, and whatever I did sucked. Determined not to give up, I locked myself up in my sound-design room, not to leave it until I arrived at a result. I started off by mimicking some other ship fly-by’s from movies in order to learn. This was the hardest part; I had to create each element from scratch with a very limited library. Frustration set in rapidly, but got to know my effects processors (DSP4000, PCM80, DSP4, BBE, SPL’s etc. etc. at that time) very very well. After 3 days and nights I ended up with a set which I really liked, but that wasn’t the payoff. The real payoff was that I had just learned 100+ ways on how to make by’s, air-distortion, clean tonal whooshes etc. Those 3 days have brought me partially where I’m at today.

Another big part is real-world inspiration. Sound Designers who don’t get to hear the world and its wonderful plethora of sounds, and/or don’t expose themselves to other people inspirational work, will inhibit themselves of growing to their full potential.

Sound Designers also must find a mentor to learn from, people who inspire them to greatness. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. You’ll be amazed how many people are very willing to help others, especially in the sound community.

Few more things I value in sound-designers; musical understanding, musical sensability, and rhythmic sense, as well as the ability to know every owned plug-in’s potential very well.

DS: You’ve worked in film and video games. If you had to choose just one, what would it be? and why?

CD: That’s like making me choose between Candy and Chips. Come on !! :) Each have their best parts; Game development has a real sense of team-work. You become part of the development from day 1, and get to adapt the game to make it work better with audio to enable a richer player’s experience. You get to play with a lot of technical tools, which is really fun, but the amount of emotional fulfillment isn’t nearly as high as film. With film or other cinematic experiences you’re usually working to make a director or sound supervisor happy. You work purely on sound and its emotions, with no worries on how to play it back. The amount of emotional connection to picture is a dozen times higher. I edit sound on picture based on feel, not on # of channels available or trigger mechanism. It’s a whole different paradigm, but I wouldn’t want to miss either one. Sound design for film speaks to my emotional side. Sound design for games covers a lot of my technical outlets.

DS: How you survive to “the crunch”?

CD: When you get older, surviving a crunch becomes harder and harder, and I can’t honestly say I survive it well anymore. I simply can’t do the 80-100 hour weeks I used to do. At this point its more important to me to get stuff done earlier vs. later. This makes the crunch at the end is a lot shorter. My job over the last 3 years  (through my own doing) has been close to a constant “crunch”, helping out several games during their final stages. It also had me travel quite a lot which, combined with late hours, can get a bit straining. But that said I’m not complaining about it. Will-power makes me overcome the crunch, and the end-result always is the pay-off. Lets say I like coffee and “beaver buzz” energy drinks :) But my real goal is to limit crunches by setting deadlines much sooner, and by distributing more of the work. The crew at EA is awesome. They all help out during needy times.

However I’ve had my downs too; during my first year at EA I was doing some late nights since I wanted to learn every tool quickly, and was drinking a lot of Mountain Dew. Now, nobody in canada had told me that you can artificially put caffeine in a drink, so the mountain dew I was drinking didn’t have the usual buzz I was used to. After 7 cans I was wondering why the hell I was falling asleep.. The next morning, there was quite a bit of chuckling going on when they explained the canadian non-caffeine rule… damn :)

DS: How many time you spend playing games?

CD: Honestly, fairly little since I have little spare time. I check out the competition of games we work on, and any games my friends work on, and/or highly praised sound-jobs on games. Usually I spend enough time with them to get the jist, but hardly find myself continuing to play for “fun”. Luckily through some peer judging panels I’m part of, every year I get to play 20+ games during december and march, and usually those are the best of the best that year, so it’s fun to check them out and talk among peers about what’s great etc.

DS: Someone you admire? Any special influence in the world of sound?

CD: There’s many folks I admire, either for their talent, their perseverance, their contributions to the industry or other. Whenever people ask me this question, the first person that comes to mind is Harry Cohen. For the last 15 years he’s been my inspiration for sound-design, and he’s always open to share some advice and/or techniques.
The other that comes to mind I John Fasal. Everytime we work together he remains calm, even under the greatest stress, and always delivers quality work. There aren’t many people who can do this on a consistent basis. I want to learn his “zen mode”, LOL.

Having known Tommy T for 19 years, ever since we worked together at Virgin, I admire everything he’s done to promote the game industry towards the outside world. We’ve had our differences for sure, but that doesn’t take away from everything he’s accomplished in those 19 years.

I also admire people who speak their mind, and don’t bullshit. Some execs in my past talked a good talk, but don’t always walk the walk. This in turn made them loose respect from the crew. A great visionary (exec) producer who knows what he wants is his weight worth in gold.

DS: Finally, could you tell us something about your current projects? And for the future?

CD: In January, I went back to work mainly on Need for Speed games, to help shape its bright future. At home I’m still helping out on an occasional ad, trailer or movie, but have tried to take more time off to enjoy life with my lovely wife. My hobby of photography (http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdeenen/sets/) is also moving a bit to the foreground. A few years back I noticed that a lot of fellow sound designers are also photographers, and have enjoyed sharing techniques with them on both sound and photography.   One of my biggest pleasures will remain helping folks excel at what they do, and succeed.

Seeing the plethora of young, very talented sound designers arise through the masses makes me realize our industry has a bright, but very different future.  Each person brings their own element to the table.  Too bad we don’t have a sound design museum. We should. There is so much great work out there done by all these folks to be enjoyed and inspire a whole new generation.

The future will also hold more relaxing time, I hope :)

Thanks for listening

February will be a great month for Designing Sound. We’ll have a lot of great stuff, starting with this month’s featured sound designer: Charles Deenen.

Bio

In a career that has spanned more than twenty years, Charles has leant his hand to over 200 games, numerous films, and dozens of film trailers.

In the 80’s, Charles and a partner founded the world’s first company dedicated to producing audio for computers. Charles’ work was eventually noticed by Interplay Entertainment, he moved from the Netherlands to work on Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, and Star Trek game franchises, among others.

In 2000, Charles took a break from the gaming industry to pursue sound design for films. During that time, he worked on two Fast and Furious films , among others. This work translated into a passion for fast cars, loud sound, and the ultimate pursuit of emotionally-engaging audio. Alongside long-format sound design, Charles continues to contribute to Hollywood’s trailer advertising arm.

Charles returned to game audio on the Matrix franchise for Shiny Entertainment in 2002. This led to a full time position in the role of Senior Audio Director at Electronic Arts Vancouver. Here, he managed to combine his fascination for fast cars with his history in games on the Need for Speed series.

Currently living in Port Moody, BC with his lovely wife Ana, he enjoys spending his spare-time withpPhotography, music remixing and watching movies.

Some Works

• Need for Speed – Franchise (2003 and up) – Sr. Audio Director (Blackbox) & Sound Designer
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) – Sound effects editor
• The Incredible Hulk (2008) – Sound effects editor
• Skate – Franchise – Sr. Audio Director (Blackbox) & Add’nl Re-recording mixer/designer
• NBA Street Homecourt (2007) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Enter the Matrix (Video Game) (2003) – Audio Director & Sound Designer
• Baldur’s Gate – Franchise (1993-2001) Audio Director
• Star Trek – Franchise @ Interplay (1993-2001) – Audio Director & Re-Recording Mixer
• The Fast and the Furious – Sound designer
• 2 Fast 2 Furious – Sound designer
• Fallout – Franchise – (1994-2001) – Audio Director
• Icewind Dale – Audio Director
• Descent – Franchise – (1995-2000) Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Trailers: Clash of the Titans, Salt, Fast & Furious, Hancock, Dark Knight, 10000BC & many more

Full Credits
Charles Deenen on IMDb
Charles Deenen on Twitter
Charles Deenen Website
Photography hobbypage