Andrew Quinn, sound designer at Splash Damage, was kind enough to speak to Designing Sound about his work on the recently announced mobile strategy title RAD Soldiers on the new social label WarChest. The music for the game was produced by Marc Canham of Nimrod Productions.

DS: Can you tell us a little about how you got into game audio, and your audio career so far?

AQ: I always had an interest in sound and music. In my youth I played guitar in local bands, recorded music with friend’s bands and generally made a racket. This messing with sound and music led to me studying a BSc in Creative Music and Sound Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University. During the course I got a chance to delve into post-production and more importantly game audio in the third year and I really enjoyed it. I stayed on another year at Leeds to do an MSc in Sound and Music for Interactive Games under the expert tutelage of Richard Stevens and David Raybould.

After I graduated from the masters, I really struggled to find a job in the games industry. Luckily, the university was looking for a part-time lecturer on their audio course and they took me on. As it was only part-time it gave me a bit of time to work on my own projects and get a portfolio of work together. One project I got to work on was the Game Audio Tutorial book by the aforementioned Leeds-based lecturers Richard Stevens and David Raybould. I ended up creating the tutorial levels and sound library bundled with the book.

That summer I decided to attend the Develop audio track in Brighton to do a bit of networking and generally get my portfolio about. I must have done something right as a few weeks later I secured a couple of interviews and later a job offer.

I joined Splash Damage just before BRINK shipped and I’ve been there just over a year now.

DS: Is there an area of sound that you’re particularly drawn to?

AQ: My main focus is sound design and implementation, that’s what I do. I particularly enjoy creating creatures and weapons.

DS: How did you approach pre-production for a mobile title such as RAD Soldiers? How did this differ from your work on a console title?

AQ: Pre-production for this title was very short. The game had already been going a little while when I was brought on, there was quite a bit of concept art, some of the characters and environments were being worked on and some of the base gameplay was already in. After I joined the rest of the team and I spent some of time working on the overall direction of the sound design and music. I came up with some style examples for the music and did a few pre-sonics for some of the ambience and weapons. I also wrote a document with some initial ideas for cool little audio systems we could have if we had the time to implement them.

In general though it’s very similar or I should say my approach is very similar, but scaled down. For instance, rather than ten variations of a knife stab or punch, we’ll have two. Instead of having all the characters speak localised dialogue, we’ll have very general barks, grunts and vocalisations that could be interpreted in any language. We may not have the same amount of time or budget as a AAA game but I still approach every sound with the question “How do I make this as good as possible with the resources available?”

DS: How large an influence did the Strategy genre and multiplayer aspects of the game have on your decisions?

AQ: We took a bit of inspiration from some strategy games, the Command and Conquer series and Worms being two notable examples. This was more their tongue-in-cheek approach to rather than a particular style.

DS: How do you approach communication with the other disciplines on the team? How closely do you work with the other departments?

AQ: During development I was sat with the team working on a pair of headphones rather than hidden away in a studio, so communication was pretty easy and free flowing. The team has always been fairly small (at its largest 8-10 people), so there was never the issue of not knowing what other people were working on or doing. It created a nice dynamic where you could iterate relatively quickly on content and make the game better.

DS: What do you feel is the hardest part of creating sound for interactive media on devices such as smartphones or tablets? What were the main creative / technical challenges you faced in achieving your vision?

AQ: Delivering a compelling and interesting audio experience on a mobile device is quite a challenge, however there were a few things inherent in the game that helped. The asynchronous turn-based gameplay meant that the amount of sound playing at any one time was largely predictable. This enabled me to orchestrate events in a semi-linear fashion, so the overall design ended up being pretty clean. The mix never really gets too busy which can be a problem in strategy/multiplayer games and would be an absolute nightmare on a mobile device. Additionally, for the most part the game has a fixed perspective and player view, so we didn’t have to deal with shifting distances or multiple player perspectives on the same actions which would have complicated the mix and increased the amount of sound playing back. So in the end we managed to avoid quite a few headaches that can be inherent of strategy and multiplayer games.

One of the major issues we encountered was caused by the devices’ ability to only decode .wav or .mp3. Wav is obviously really nice, but for most instances, the size of the file is just too big for a mobile device. Most of the implementation work in Unity was done on a PC that compresses sounds in Ogg, which is lovely. The Ogg compression seemed to hold up pretty well, even at ridiculously low bit rates. However when the build gets deployed to a device, all the sound gets re-compressed into MP3, which created all sorts of interesting problems. Listening back to the sounds on the devices was night and day; there was aliasing, artefacts and all sorts of other compression nasties. The guns and ambiences were particularly affected by this. In the end, I had to spend a bit of time working out what sort of compression values didn’t degrade the quality on a sound by sound basis. In some cases the Mp3 compression bit rate had to be a great deal higher than the Ogg versions to get the same quality.

Strangely, the usual game audio memory limitations haven’t seemed to be as much of an issue as they usually are. The devices themselves have a decent amount of memory, and being sensible about the amount of sound used has meant we haven’t had to go through assets purging quality. Saying that, it’s not like we have skimped on the amount of sound – in fact, we managed to squeeze over 1000 sounds into the base game.

DS: What are the Splash Damage audio team preferred tools for working with? Do you have any software suites, plugins or apps that you use regularly?

AQ: We use Sound Forge/Protools and a combination of Waves, GRM Tools, McDSP and Sound Toys plugins for content creation. Implementation in RAD Soldiers was done within the Unity Engine with some extra custom in-house audio components. On our other projects we’re running an Unreal-Wwise combo.

DS: What do you feel is the most satisfying part of creating sound for games?

AQ: Sound for games poses a unique challenge that I really enjoy. Not only do you have to create the sound asset but you also have to make it work in an interactive environment. When you have hundreds of events, states, parameters, dsp’s and files being triggered dynamically, just getting a sound playing back in-game as intended is a big win.

DS: Do you have a favorite sound or audio system from any game?

AQ: I can’t really put any one down, but I can mention a couple that impressed me recently. Mass Effect 3 did a great job of selling the scale of the war happening around you in the ambient audio, and the big audio events featuring the reapers were really cool. Portal 2 just generally impressed me audio wise, the gels had some really cool little music systems attached to them and the processing on GlaDos’s and Cave’s voices were really great. Oh and Battlefield 3 in its entirety (damn you, DICE, I want my life back).

DS: What was your personal favourite sound or audio system from RAD Soldiers that we can look forward to?

AQ: I had a lot of fun with the weapon and ability audio, it’s mostly hyper-realistic, overdesigned stuff. They were really fun to create.

Another group of sounds I enjoyed creating was for the UAV character. He’s a plucky little robot that enjoys nothing more than a bit of casual leg humping. The sound of his voice was made using a recording of a screwdriver being fed into a little plastic desk fan and some processing with Sound Toy’s Crystallizer.

Under the hood, RAD Soldiers is pretty simple. There were a couple of little audio systems that I was pretty keen to get in from the start of the project. One of these was a simple ducking system to try and make the big events shine through. It’s essentially a very basic snapshot system that allows us to duck a group of sounds when another sound is playing. We can define the attack, duration, depth and release of the snapshot, and snapshots can layer on top of one another. It’s something that big, grown-up engines have been able to do for a while that I wanted to have.

Oh and seeing as the game is set in London, it would be a shame not to have a working Big Ben!

DS:What developments in game audio would you like to see in the future?

AQ:There is some interesting research going on into sound propagation, I’d like to see some systems that approach real acoustic modelling appearing. However with that, I’d still like to be able to tweak and tune how sound plays back within a space rather than having a one stop reality model.

DS: Thank you for your time, Andrew. We look forward to hearing the game in action!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Featuring Rocksteady audio director Nick Arundel, and foley artist John Roesch and gun recording expert Bryan Watkins

Click here for the video

The Recordist has released Autumn Rain.

A pristine collection of 50 24-Bit 96kHz rainfall sound effects from the forests and fields of North Idaho. Recorded primarily in the fall season of 2011 around my ranch and high up in the mountains. Other rain tracks were recorded early and late winter when the rainy season it peaking. A large portion of this library was recorded with the Sennheiser MKH-8040ST at XY-90 and XY-120 to capture the stunning detail of rain drops on leaves, wood and concrete.

BOOM has released Micro BOOM – Gun Handling.

Impressive and high quality gun shot sound effects are invaluable but they’re only half the battle. “Micro BOOM – GUN HANDLING” now gives you the perfect other half. 11 different firearms. Triggers, dry shots, safety switches, reloading, magazines and much more, delivered in the high BOOM Library quality standard with 96kHz, 24bit. A more than perfect addition to the BOOM GUNS Library. Click, click – BOOM!

Affordable Audio 4 Everyone released Lighthearted Magic. All proceeds above $5 go to Curesearch.org

A must have for anyone looking to add some interesting sounds for their visual FX. Don’t let the name fool you, there is plenty of good stuff to mix together to build up to darker sounding elements. The Lighthearted MiniMagic library was made for building that fun loving disappear sound, or for adding a great feel to some spining particles around a character.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Empty Sea has a sound library. They have one small release so far and there’s another one coming soon.

Coming soon, the full version of Sea Monsters.  This collection will showcase some of Empty Sea’s most original and best creatures.  Each sound will be recorded at 192k/24bit for optimum quality and maximum design potential

Pretty cool blog post by Frank Bry on recording bullet passbys and impacts.

There is a first time for everything and recording bullet pass bys and impacts was a first for me. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at bullet recording but never had the knowledge or association with anyone that had a permit to use a gun suppressor. During the recording sessions for the M60 machine gun with the very experienced and amazing marksman named Richard from the local gun shop I began to inquire about what it would take to record some bullet impacts and whizz bys. I then consulted with everyone’s favorite weapons maven – Charles Maynes (my sincere thanks man!), and he gave me some valuable advice for these kind of sessions. I then explained what I wanted to accomplish with Richard and gave him the specs from Charles and we were off and running. The bullet demo in this blog post has some of the sounds recorded and played back at 35% of normal so you can hear the shot and the impact in greater detail, and they sound much more interesting slowed down a bit.

Continue reading…

The Recordist has released a new gun library, including 550 sounds for $35.

Presenting The Thompson Machine Gun HD Professional Sound Effects Library, a multi-channel collection of 100 Broadcast WAV tracks recorded at 24-Bit 96kHz. The gun was recorded on two separate occasions. There was a session of shooting and foley and one extra interior foley session. The gun was recorded close up, medium and distant. The multiple channels gives you a broad selection of perspectives to choose from. Sound Designers like to create their own combinations so the individual microphone takes are included. All the multi-channel wav files are time aligned and in mono and stereo. Also included are customized mixes created here in the studio with a generous amount of combinations.

The interior mechanical sounds were recorded with two microphones (Sennheiser MHK-416 & MKH-8040) to give you different perspectives and tonal variations. Again the multi-channel foley wav files are time aligned. Both the original Auto-Ordinance Drum Magazine and Stick Magazine were recorded along with various handling and selector switches.

The Recordist

The Irrational Games Insider Blog has posted parts two and three of their Audio team’s experience of recording firearms for BioShock Infinite. In part two, the team discuss the sensations of firing live weaponry that they were aiming to capture, and in part three, briefly touch upon the designing/editing process.

Part one of the blog can be viewed here

The Recordist has released M60 Machine Gun HD, a new sfx library available at $50.

Presenting The M60 Machine Gun HD Professional Sound Effects Library, a multi-channel collection of 129 Broadcast WAV tracks recorded at 24-Bit 192kHz and 24-Bit 96kHz. The M60 is a belt-fed machine gun that fires the 7.62 mm NATO cartridge (.308 winchester) commonly used in larger rifles. The M60 used for this collection is a M60E3: An updated, lightweight version adopted in the 1980s. The M60E3 was introduced circa 1986 in an attempt to remedy problems with earlier versions of the M60 for infantry use. It is a lightweight, “improved” version intended to reduce the load carried by the gunner.

Along the release, Frank has also published some interesting stuff regarding the recording process, including a blog post with microphone comparisons and thoughts on the multi-track setup. Also, below is our usual interview, dedicated to talk about the new release.

Why you decided to create this library?

About six months ago I was prepping ammo to use for a small gun shoot I was doing on my ranch and went down to the local gun shop to purchase the ammo and noticed they had a lot of really cool guns in the shop. After talking with the owner for a while about what I do he said he has something to show me. He took me back to his office and opened a huge gun safe and pulled out the M60. I had no idea what it was and when he told me I knew I just had to record it. He let me hold it and I thought to myself this thing can make some all kinds of great sounds. We decided to wait until the late fall to record so the conditions would be favorable, no birds, insects and less tourists in the area creating all the car noise.

I did some research on the gun and searched through all the sound effects libraries I had and noticed very little variation and consistency with the M60 sounds I found. Some were very good but not enough source material for a serious sound designer in my opinion. Since I have not recorded many guns over the years in any serious fashion I decided that I should practice over the next few months with different guns, microphones and gear. I learned a lot but in reality I had no idea what was I was doing when it came to gun recording.

As the Fall season approached I contacted the gun owner and asked him if I could record the M60. He agreed and we were on. I figured it was now or never so I contacted two of the best in the business Charles Maynes and Chuck Russom and asked them for some advice on different techniques and practices. They were extremely open and helpful and I thank them very much for sharing their wisdom. I also decided to create this library because the gun is located five miles away from my ranch and I really don’t like to get out much so this was easy pickings.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I understand this library was recorded in several sessions. Could you talk us a bit about the process you followed and the setup you used on each one?

I was only going to do one shooting session mainly because this is a $90,000.00 gun and it is very expensive to shoot, maintain and record. I tried to get all the sounds I wanted in one session but since I only have so much recording gear I decided to go back and get another set of sounds. For the first session I really just winged it. I took all the advice I had received and tried to apply it given the location and gear I had with me. We were in a relatively small gravel pit surrounded by high dirt banks and trees. It was isolated except from the rumble of a train passing by or a plane overhead.

I set up a matched stereo pair of MKH-8040s about 75 feet away from the front of the gun slightly to the right. I had a Sanken CSS-5 stereo shotgun  set about 50 feet directly behind the gun and a AT-835ST stereo shotgun directly behind and over the shooter pointing down at the muzzle (I was not sure about this one but it came out really nice). I placed a MKH-416 on the right about 8 feet away pointing in towards the middle of the gun and a MKH-8040 on the left with the same angle and distance. I also placed a Sony D-50 down range near the bullet impacts but I set the input to hot and the recordings did not come out that great so I did not included them. I recorded at 192K except for the Sanken CSS-5 which was used with a Sony PCM-D1 and a XLR-1 preamp at 96K. I recorded many different burst durations and even got a couple single shots. (which is very difficult for the shooter BTW) This guns sounds really cool with a single shot pitched down an octave. Overall, I was very happy with the recordings but I still felt something was missing, so I did it all over again…. the extreme close up.

The second shooting session was a week later and this time I went with 100 rounds of ammo instead of 200 rounds used in the first. I wanted to get the close up action of the gun and belt being fed through the gun along with some longer bursts. I also wanted to get the bullet impacts with the Sony D-50 one more time. I set up the matched stereo pair of MKH-8040s on the right about 2 feet away. This gave me a great stereo image of the muzzle on the right channel and the bullet shell ejections on the left channel so you can pick the side you want if need be. I also had the MKH-416 there on the right aimed at the ejection port. On the left side of the gun I placed 2 MKH-8040 microphones, one aimed at the belt feed and the other slightly behind the shooter aimed at the muzzle in the front. And last but not least, I placed my trust old Sanken CSS-5 stereo shotgun about 25 feet directly behind the gun. The CSS-5 surprised me when mixed in at the right level. It adds some warmth (If there is such a thing with this gun) to the overall sound landscape. My two favorites from this close up session are the left side MKH-8040 muzzle perspective and the stereo pair of MKH-8040s on the right, very fat!

And what about the mechanism sounds?

During the second recording session I was able to get some mechanism sounds like handling the ammo belt and loading-unloading the belt into the gun. I wanted more so during the third non-shooting session I recorded the locking, loading and general handling of the gun along with some really cool legs folding. I recorded this foley high up a mountain just behind the ranch. I was recording some other guns at this great sounding location and the gun handler brought along the M60 so I could record the mechanisms.

How you deal with this kind of loud sounds? How you protect your ears for the guns?

What?… During the first recording session I was physically set up further back from the gun. I had a small table with all the recording devices set on top and when the gun was firing I did not think it was that loud. I was wearing a pair of shooting ear muffs. They are not the standard ear muffs you can get at a hardware store, they offer much more reduction in sound level. I was comfortable with the sound level and could feel some impact on my body but really not as much as I thought there was going to be. For the second session I was set up closer and to the left side of the muzzle. I had to cue the shooter when to fire with vocal commands on the first shoot because I did not have eye contact. It was his first time doing a sound recording gig and he wanted to make sure there was enough space between the shots. Speaking of that, any experienced gun shooter fires a gun naturally. An example is with a shotgun they shoot then pump the gun to reload and shoot again. They have to get used to shooting and staying very still because the microphones pick up everything close. During the second session I found out how really loud and fierce the M60 is. The sound that came out the side vents on the muzzle was so loud and deep my sweatshirt was moving and I could barely breathe. We were only shooting a 100 rounds so I figured it would be done quickly and I got through it.

How was the process of layering and processing for the Designed package?

I included this set of sounds because when I was done with the mastering and editing I wanted to see what I could do with the raw material and push it hard. There are some layered sounds of the “clean” mastered versions and some more that I rammed though various plug ins at 192K. This is where the fun begins. I used some of my favorite plug ins for amping up a sound. Some of those are Tans-X, H-Comp, Decapitator, Ren-Bass and L2. Most of the designed sounds were processed in Soundminer Pro through the VST rack. I really love this feature of Soundminer. I’m able to take a bunch 192K sound effects and pitch them the way I want and then pile on a chain of processors and hear both immediately and then send to Pro Tools HD for final balance and layering.

A special note: This collection includes those raw unprocessed 192K files so anyone can pile on what they want and not worry about the source material being pre-processed. They are all time aligned and easily searchable with full metadata on the microphone used.

Anything else you’d like to tell us about The Recordist? What’s coming next?

The only thing I can tell you right now is I’m getting dirty recording lots of dirt and blowing things up. I do have some projects that have been in the works for a long time that I have not mentioned at all. Since I blog quite a bit about what I’m recording, most know what’s coming down the road from The Recordist. This time want to surprise you all.

Thanks for allowing me to tell you my stories. A special thanks to Doug and Richard at Wrenco Arms in Sandpoint Idaho.

1. Cinematic Metal

The decision which sound library we will do first was easy: “Creatures”! We started creating a concept and did the first recordings. During this time however, we had to make sound for a lot of trailers. It was not really rewarding to search for metallic impacts that can be used for trailers in the standard libraries we have here. So we started to record and create some from scratch. We found out that this works pretty well and started to write a concept again and go out to record things to design our very own trailer impacts, which we can throw into trailers when a client once again calls and says: “we have a trailer here, voice overs will be done tomorrow morning, the whole thing has to be ready tomorrow night.”

Because this was our first library, we stumbled over a lot of things. Besides tons of none audio related topics it took a lot of time to write, rewrite and re-rewrite the Metadata, how the sounds themselves should be offered, which samplerate we want to submit.

In the meantime “Cinematic Metal” is used in a lot of cool projects. The funniest statement we had so far was a client, who complained that he would not really like the “Construction Kit” – half a year later he wrote us an email that he now uses it in nearly everything he works on and that he would be extremely happy that he purchased it. Other user statements are:

Alex Pfeffer – Composer (Crysis 2, Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Halo Legends)

“Every time I open and work with Cinematic Metal Impacts, my heart goes BOOM!”

Christian Schilling – Senior Audio Designer at Crytek

“Cinematic Metal is a fantastic resource for powerful, edgy impacts and collision sounds. Thanks for putting together this excellent material, which was used more than once in Crysis 2.”

2. Creatures

Finally we came back to what we had planned to do first: the “Creatures” library. The first thing we did was re-recording things we used before for all the game creatures we did sound for in the past. That was purely out of experience, but from there we were able to improve things like microphone positions, choice of the microphone, room set-up and so on. When we recorded our own voices or voices from actors, we always had buckets around. Trying to make weird and inhuman noises with your voice brought us to our limits. There were probably no recording sessions without someone being very close to vomiting – fortunately it never happened. Coming out of the studio after only thirty minutes, having wet eyes and a husky voice was always worth it and after all a lot of fun. Some words on this library:

David Farmer – Sound Designer (Lord of the rings, The incredible Hulk, King Kong, Bioshock 2, Dead Space, God of War II & III)

“The “Creatures” library has lots of good wet close proximity sounds that are often difficult to get from real animal recordings.  I typically have to record myself to get those, so this is a welcome addition to my library.  Nice work and nice price!”

Jordan Wilby – Sound Editor (Desperate Housewives, Dexter, The Vampire Diaries, Nip/Tuck, Criminal Minds, The Closer)

“Thanx for the buybuyBoom stuff – am using the creatures in my CW show Vampire Diaries. Looking forward to working with you in the future.”

3. Guns

This was quite a lot of fun and together with Jeff Ball, Zach Johnson and Terren Kissler we had some cool days of hard work and fun. I wrote an article for Sonic Terrain which dives into a lot of details concerning the equipment used, the planning and the mixing. You can find it here.

Here is the demo for the “Guns – Designed” library:

Don’t forget to check out the tutorial videos. Tutorial 01 is very basic, tutorial 02 shows all the details:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We have also some statements on that:

Charles Maynes – (A-Team, The Pacific, Planet Terror, Spider-Man, Flags of Our Fathers)

“Sounds great…. they were all really good – very nice stuff”

Jay Watford – Sound Designer at Riot Games (League of Legends)

“You guys are awesome, thanks for continuing to put out top notch audio!”

4. Wildcats – Tigers & Lions

Wildcats was a tough one. First I had troubles to find animal trainers who are willing and able to suit my needs. The first recordings I did were less optimal than expected, so I had to record the lions twice. Anyway, with this experience it was easier to record the tigers. I was told that tigers love doing that: in one situation the Bengal Tiger walked away from me and started to piss a large jet towards me. I didn’t get hit much, but the windshield was hit, too. And it stank so terribly! Anyway, as a sound designer, I like the animals more if they don’t like me. That makes more noise.

David Farmer – Sound Designer (Lord of the rings, The incredible Hulk, King Kong, Bioshock 2, Dead Space, God of War II & III)

“This is a great set of recordings of some of the most essential animals used in making creature sounds.  I imagine I’ll be using these quite a bit. Nicely done Axel!”

Javed Khan – Post Production Sound Designer at MBC / Dubai

“I just wanted to say that you guys are doing an awesome job with your sound libraries. All the three series I have bought so far are top quality and very unique.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

René Coronado has recently published a fantastic three-part article on gun recording, including details on pre-production, reports of the sessions, how was the editing/tagging process and more.

So a little while back I packed up the mics and headed out west to record some gunfire with my friends. Not because I had a project that required it or anything, but just because they have lots of guns and I have lots of mics. Also, weapon recording is one of those techniques that requires experience and iteration, so any opportunity to do this type of recording is to be seized upon.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Frank Bry has released Rifle Actions HD, a new library of gun foley, including 398 sounds (66 files) recorded at 96kHz/24-Bit. Here’s what Frank says about it:

Presenting Guns: Rifle Actions HD, the first in a series of gun foley action sound effects libraries. Included are 6 rifles, old and new: PTR-91 Semi-automatic Rifle (based on the Heckler & Koch G3/HK91), Remington 700 .30-06 Bolt Action Rifle, Ruger 223 Range Rifle, Ruger M77 Bolt Action Rifle, Winchester Model 1892 Lever Action Rifle (very old) and a vintage Winchester 43 Bolt Action Rifle which once belonged to my Grandfather and now is in the custody of my Nephew Kyle.

I have worked on a few games that have required some crazy gun foley. I made the best of using CD libraries but always had to try and gather my own source when needed. When I began recording at 24/96 some years ago I started recording a brand new custom collection of gun actions. This collection contains the standard actions plus some other things I’ve needed in my video game sound design work. As many of you know, some warfare and futuristic shooter games usually need some “over the top” gun foley. I hope you can find uses for these sounds in your creations as stand alone sounds or in conjunction with the other amazing boutique gun libraries available.

Rifle Actions HD is available at $35. More info here.