(seen via Game Audio 101 and Twitter ( @EngineAudioTom )

Click here to view the embedded video.

SPRINGS is a diverse new library of sound design source material released by HISSandaROAR and recorded by Tim Prebble.

Traversing from literal & very powerful trampoline springs & impacts through very strange bowed & manipulated extention springs all the way to abused outboard hardware (AKG BX5, Vermona Retroverb, Doepfer A199 with an Accuphonics tank) and of course, the classic slinky – but in this case stretched across a room and recorded with a contact mic at each end! Three sizes of thunder drums (long flexible springs attached to a drum resonator) were also hit, bowed & scraped to capture physically useful sounds as well as more evocative abstract material. This library is a diverse and inspiring collection of material that is incredibly fun to play with!

Available at $79 until December 25th (Regular price $99). Delivered at 24bit 96kHz. Includes 1,100+ sounds (6.9GB).

Below is a q&a with Tim, talking about the springs and some HISSandaROAR news:

What inspired the library?

Tim Preble: Being a bit of a dub-head I’ve always been into spring reverbs – I bought an AKG BX5 off ebay a decade or more ago, and I always remember almost blowing my speakers when I had it cranked up & accidentally moved my rack! But it was when I was working on the Cirque De Soilel 3D film that I had an epiphany. There is a scene in the film with some super hero characters doing totally outrageous moves on trampolines and despite being told the scene would be a music montage, I decided to try augmenting the rhythm with trampoline sounds. Next door to my studio is the rehearsal space for local circus group Fuse Circus, so I borrowed a small trampoline from them and recorded it using contact mics as well as normal mics. As soon as I listened to the contact mics I realised it was basically a large scale spring reverb – every hit made the all of the springs resonate! We did end up using some of the recordings in the final mix, and after I uploaded a video of recording those effects a few people contacted me, wanting access to the sounds. I couldn’t give them those particular sounds as they were specifically for the film, but I made a mental note to revisit that particular prop. And as always I started researching other elements I could record….

Click here to view the embedded video.

What else did you find?

TP: Good characterful springs are not actually that easy to find, but one source that proved useful was from exercise equipment – I disassembled a few chest expanders, and spent a bit of time attaching them to objects in ways that would encourage resonance… I also bought an old kids toy – a ride on horse, that was suspended by nice creaky springs. I explored other spring reverb outboard effects – I also own a Vermona Retroverb which is great – it actually has a ‘crash’ button on it that sends an impulse to the springs, but it also has a really nice resonant filter. My modular synth has a spring reverb, a Doepfer A199 module, so I bought an old Accuphonics 3 spring tank and used the module to get clean audio output from it, and I beat the hell out of that tank! I’m surprised it survived, but it was worth it. Some of the short sounds make me think of retro weapons, but some of the flickery sounds I got from it by applying friction along it, I have never heard before!

And of course I messed around with some slinkys – I hunted for the biggest/longest one I could find and then tensioned it horizontally across my studio, with a contact mic at each end, 20 feet apart. Another device I messed with are called Thunder drums – I bought one when I was in Bali a few years ago, its basically a long small tightly wound spring that is attached to the skin of a drum. If you shake it, it makes a sound a bit like thunder and hitting the spring has an almost flangey tone to it, but I discovered a few other interesting ways to extract sounds from it. Bowing the spring while varying the length created some really interesting pitch bends, but so also did rubbing or scraping your hand along the spring. A few times I’ve had to make sounds for someone suddenly abseiling or lowering down & I’ve always struggled for source material with that constant descending friction, but I’ve found a great element now!

Were they difficult to record?

TP: Some props really took some thinking about, because the sound they produced was acoustically very quiet but attaching a contact mic to the primary vibrating element meant the mic itself would absorb and/or stop the resonance. I think there is a concept in physics, where the act of making an experiment alters the circumstances or environment to such a degree that the experiment itself is no longer valid – it was a bit like that! I also soon learned that it is difficult to keep a contact mic attached to moving objects, so it took different setups and strategies depending on the specific sound I was after, even within the same prop. That little wood block with the tiny spring at the start of the video is a good example. I could get tone from it but I couldn’t record it – it just didn’t vibrate enough to excite the wood it was attached to. It was only when i clamped it down & actually attached the contact mics between the wood & the spring itself that I got interesting results. But, as you see (backwards) at the start of the video, it eventually flew to bits!

What are your favourite sounds? Any happy accidents?

TP: This library is full of happy accidents! Someone on my blog asked how I go about choosing what sounds to record, and I had to confess its half intent and half happy accidents – experimenting & being curious. The last prop I recorded for the library was when I revisited that trampoline, and having spent so much time recording other springs I had a few more ideas about how to get some new sounds from it. One aspect I now know is that to get ‘big’ dynamic sounds often requires gentle technique and hitting that trampoline gently with a gong beater, and being mic’d up and gain staged accordingly allowed me to get some huge subby sounding impacts, which feel more powerful than the hardest hits that I did later. But going back to that tiny spring, I now knew that attaching the contact mics on to the spring itself led to interesting sounds (it just couldn’t be the spring that was doing all the work, or the mic would detach) So the last sound I recorded was one of my favourites: attaching the contact mics directly to the springs and then very gently hitting other springs & elements of the trampoline. I swear there is an entire gamelan orchestra inside that trampoline when it was rigged this way – I could have sat & played it for hours. Over-recording was actually a real problem with this library, not over-level but content. I’d find a sound that I loved, that was really evocative or interesting and I could easily keep playing with it for hours! Must. Stop. Recording.

It’s been a great year for independent sound libraries – do you think its reaching saturation point with all these boutique library start ups?

TP: To be completely honest I think we’re barely scratching the surface. If you combined all of my libraries with all the great libraries released by Frank, Michael, Chuck & all the new sites, we would hardly match 5% in terms of quantity of the old school libraries such as Sound Ideas CD collections or whats on the Sound Dogs site. But in terms of quality, resolution and providing unique, characterful and interesting sounds I think at times we surpass them… Every time someone releases a new collection of recordings, whether you buy them or not, you know they are a resource waiting to be called upon. I sometimes dream about the huge library resources studios like Skywalker Sound must have, and while we’ll never get close to that, at least we’re slowly providing more diverse options, and they are options available to anyone.

Whats next for HISSandaROAR? Are you having a holiday??

TP: Indeed. This is my last library release for the year. As 2012 is a busy year with films for me I’ve deliberately been recording as much as possible and I have another couple of libraries recorded. The last task for me for the year is to finish the HISSandaROAR Christmas present, which is a free 24bit 96kHz collection of Tortured Cymbals, a preview of a library for next year. It will get sent out to everyone on the mail list next week, as a small gesture & to say a huge thank you for all the support this year. And thanks to you, Miguel and everyone at Designing Sound for an inspiring year!!
Happy Holidays!

I wanted to write a different kind of article, one that indulges my more geeky-tech side. While the main source for material remains great recordings, there are lots of times when we find solutions to problems in processing; these days that mainly means plug-ins, but that was not always so.

Sometimes, looking back, I see creative sound design moments as being more like a place you might visit, as opposed to a method you might use over and over. Time has shown me that the tools will constantly change around me. My main editing platform has changed three times during the course of my career. And so, some great tools become obsolete or unavailable. For this reason, I always encourage designers, when they find their way to an interesting combination of source/processing, to keep going and record lots of material; the next occasion you may want to repeat the process might not be so easy to get back to !  Some examples from my past follow:

The Ionizer

This was a great, if somewhat hard to master, plug-in. It did lots of stuff, eq-wise. One of its tricks was to be able to analyze the frequency profile of one sound, and then to impose it on another. I used it in the film “Wanted” to make some design-ey glass breaks in the convenience store scene by imposing the frequency spectrum of glass windchimes on some explosions:

The Ionizer was so widely cracked that its makers decided not to carry it forward to OS-X; so it has become inconvenient to use, to say the least.

Vokator

While the NI vocoder Vokator still works, I notice that NI no longer sells or supports it, so it is only a matter of time before it too, becomes unavailable. I have had great luck in using it for creatures. In short, I like to put a series of animal sounds on a software sampler, under different keys, put some under midi fader or foot pedal controller, feed that into Vokator as the carrier, with a mic as the modulator. Set up so you are listening on headphones to your output only, and using lots of gestural control on the faders and pitch wheel, while making ridiculous sounds and screaming into the mic, start to work your way towards interesting sounds. Record your output so that you only have to get it right once, for any given moment ! Record lots of stuff, go through it and pick out the good bits, then edit it together as you would for any creature.

Synclavier

Ah, the synclav. While I have so much to say about how the interface on this wonderful machine shaped the outlook of so many sound designers, for now I will mention only one detail. There was a button combination that would allow you to use the big wheel control to change the octave ratio of the keyboard tuning. This meant that on each side of a breakpoint, as you turned the dial, the sound would pitch up to the right of the breakpoint, and pitch down to the left, by as much as hundreds of semi-tones. It was useful for making some sci-fi type turbine sounds; like this Minbari engine made for the tv series Babylon-Five.

Hyper-prism

It’s not that the plug-ins in Hyper-prism did things other plug-ins don’t, it was more of the interface it presented you with. In particular, the pitch-time widow let you move a dot around in a 2-d box in a way that made interesting ‘warpy’ sounds; here is some warped out bg vocal stuff from “Exorcist the Beginning”

PCM 80 Doppler

Once upon a time I actually made doppler bys by waving a mic past a speaker. Then came the Lexicon PCM-80 with a pair of doppler algorithms that could be mapped to a mod wheel controller. While not as realistic as say the Waves or Grm plug-in, it was much warpier. This is some warped out metal used in “Spawn” made with the PCM 80

Sound Hack

This program is still available, though I find lately that it has problems with the headers on lots of my sound files. While not real-time, I found that I could still have some ‘lucky-accidents’ with the convolution and mutate functions. Here is a bit of screeching metal mutated with a slow masking tape-pull, used as the antennae freezing in the Super-Freeze scene for “The Day After”.

Max-Msp

This wonderful program is very deep, and I will never totally master it. But it does unheard of things with sound. There is a free-ware player only version available, but it is hard to adjust your inputs and outputs on the free version. There is also a freeware language called Pure Data (PD) that has the same functionality; but MAX is the one I was introduced to and became familiar with. Here is some granular type stuff made with MAX, for the smash movie hit “Apollo 18″

There are tons more to list. While there are more plug-ins for Pro Tools than I will ever have the time to truly explore; it’s good to remember that there are lots of other interesting platforms and programs and hardware to check out when looking for sound solutions to design problems.

Let’s get started with this month’s special. Below is an interview I had with our guest Harry Cohen, talking about the general aspects of his career.

How did you get started in sound design and what’s been the evolution of your career?

I backed into sound design by accident; I showed up at EFX studios in Burbank to do some piano overdubs on a new-age-y album, and met the staff. They were a music studio just getting into post production. The owner asked me if I would help with some sound effects for game shows they were posting, since I knew synths pretty well. Three days later he asked me out of the blue if I was interested in trying my hand at doing sound fx for a film. (a super low-budget film !), and for better or worse , I agreed. I stayed with EFX for about 12 years, and slowly we built a reputation and started getting better films. Looking back , it was like a rare alignment of the stars or something; so many talented people were associated with that place. (Paul Menichini, David Farmer, Ann Scibelli, Tim Gedemer, Tim Walston, Mike Kamper, Gary Rizzo, Mark Fishman, and on and on). Later, I accepted an offer from from Wylie Stateman and Lon Bender to join Soundelux. Except for a 6 month period where I was ‘on loan’ to Soundstorm, those are the only 3 facilities I have worked for. I’ve been with Soundelux for more than 10 years now.

What are your biggest influences inside and outside the world of sound?

Well , of course , all the great sounding films over the years, and, all the other sound professionals I have worked with. Many people are so open and willing to share what they know, and that is probable the greatest resource we can tap.

I think also that being a musician has had a lot of influence on how I hear things.

How you deal with deadlines and creativity? Is there any special method you have for staying creative?

Aha ! Deadlines and creativity… I find that fear and panic have great effect on your productivity ! But seriously, my thoughts on it are that when you are crunched, you tend to work longer hours, and that after several hours of working with the problem and your material , something ‘clicks’ in your brain , and you go into this mode of being focused and productive. So often we go back to the stuff we did in a hurry when under time pressure , and realize that it is good ! Unfortunately, this is not a great way to work all the time; it tends to take a toll on your life. But I am not one who can be creative all the time; it comes and goes, and I have to take advantage of it when I am ‘in the mode’.

DS: What are your favorite tools in the studio and the field?

In the field , I love my Sound Devices 722. The small portable Zoom type recorders are also super convenient for casual and ‘stealth’ recordings. I have been doing most of my recording with either a Sennheiser 416 or 418; I also love the Neumann 190i. This year I intend to try some larger diaphragm mics. In studio, pro tools of course is the main platform, but I also work in Logic, Max msp, Reason, and other standalone programs. Kontakt has become an important tool for me.

DS: What’s your take on technology and how do you think it has affected the way you design sound today?

Well, looking back, I used a synclavier and a rack of outboard gear. Complex patch-ups were often hard to re-create. Now, if I need 3 more eqs and 2 more compressors, a couple of pitch shifters and some reverbs and delays, the computer isn’t even breathing hard. Also , there are constantly new plug-ins and
new sound technology coming out. I try to experiment with new stuff when I can.

How would you define sound design? What is the essence for you?

Sound Design has really come to mean two separate things. In the larger sense , a sound designer can be someone who is involved with the whole sound of the film; the creation or supervision of all the elements,(except the music) and how they fit together, the arc of the soundtrack, actively working with the mixers to realize the directors wants and vision for the film. But, it also means the guy(s) (or gals) that are tasked with creating and organizing the cool sounds themselves.

Much of what we need does not exist in the real world; or there is a creative ‘re-purposing’ of real world sounds to be something else. Its hard to be both of those people; they are both very time intensive. In practice, my work falls somewhere in between the two, which is to say that I am usually present during the mix to contribute a voice to the shaping of the track , and to manufacture lots of last minute adds and fixes.I do a lot of work with supervisor Wylie Stateman , and we tend to see a lot of things the same way, in terms of what we are trying to accomplish with the sound.

Harry Cohen and Michael Keller

What have been your most challenging projects and why? Any favorites also?

Challenge can be lots of different things. Earlier this year I helped out on Green Lantern, doing the evil monster, his thrall, and any ‘evil energy’. My first day on the project was also the first day of predubs ! That was a particular kind of challenge. Each film presents its own challenges, and while that sounds like a cliche, it is very true. I once told Wylie that if I was really honest with a director at our first meeting, I would say that I have no idea what I am going to do for his film. The film will tell me what it needs……to which Wylie replied “You’d better let me do the talking at that first meeting !”

As far as favorites; the first ‘Blade’ and the more recent ‘Wanted’ are two films that sound very close to my intentions.

What are your favorite type of sounds or scenes to work with and why?

I like creature sounds; I love the subjective type of sounds that are somewhere between sound effects and music. I enjoy doing things that affect the audience emotionally.

DS: Would you like to give an advice to other sound designers out there? What would it be?

My advice to up and comers would be to seek out other people to learn from. One of the things that made EFX such a special place was the continual sharing of information and techniques; its hard to figure everything out yourself. Build your own custom library full of your own recordings and creations. When you are making new sounds, make more than you need, and save some for later. When you wander into an interesting area (design-wise), explore it and record some stuff, even if its not what you currently need. And when playing with processing or plug-ins, I always think ‘how do I know if I’ve gone far enough until I have clearly gone too far ?” Listen to stuff you like and try to figure out how to do some of that. Heck , email the designer , and ask him !

What are your favorite films for sound? Any special recommendations?

Well , I am old enough that Apocalypse Now , the Star Wars films and the first Indiana Jones totally re-defined film sound for me. But advances in recording technology have engendered a whole new era of ‘high definition’ sound that is equally as exciting.

DS: What are you currently working on? What’s next for Harry Cohen?

I am currently working on “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter’ for director Timur Bekmambetov. Down the road for us is Oliver Stone’s ‘Savages’ and Quentin Tarrentino’s ‘Django’.

[Written by Tim Nielsen]

I’ve been recording with MS since I started in this industry, about 12 years ago now. There are of course many other recording techniques available, and I own microphones suited to most of them. I tried to elaborate a tiny bit on some of the other stereo techniques in my previous article, and that’s when I realized that MS really needed it’s own article.

Of all the stereo formats I record in, MS is my favorite. I find it to be the most compact, and by far the most versatile, of all the stereo recording techniques I know. It’s also a bit tricky to wrap your head around the first time you try to understand it. I remember at USC the day I asked Tom Holman, creator of THX, to explain something about MS that had been puzzling me (probably the entire idea behind it and how it worked at all). For the next hour or so, he proceeded to draw math equations on the dry-erase board. I sat, staring and dazed, occasionally nodding to feign understanding. The fact is, MS is a strange recording method.

I’ve had quite a few people, even ones I work with, tell me they don’t like MS, but many times it seems to me that they can’t tell me why. Maybe it’s simply that it’s a bit too much like voodoo. But properly done, MS recording is basically another form of XY recording. David Farmer and I, while both in New Zealand, did some tests between his Schoeps XY microphone, and my MS rig. Neither of us could hear much difference, and my memory is that both of us slightly preferred the MS rig when we felt we could hear any differences. There is really nothing to be afraid of with MS.

For those who don’t know, an MS rig consists of two microphones (or more, as there is a Schoeps Double-MS setup and I’ve personally set up and tried a Triple-MS rig of my own Frankensteinian devising). In the stereo version, there is a Mid microphone, and a Side microphone, hence the name MS Recording, or Mid-Side Recording. The mid microphone faces forward, and can be of any pickup pattern, although almost always a cardiod or hyper-cardiod microphone is used. The side mic is always a Figure-8, or bi-directional microphone, whose polar pattern is perpendicular to the front facing microphone. The two microphones are ideally very well matched, and most of us use mid microphones that have in their family a Figure-8 version as well, for instance the Schoeps MK series of capsules, the Sennheiser MKH series, or the Neumann KM100 series with AK capsules. All of these have cardiod, hyper-cardiod and Figure-8 mics available and are ideal to use in an MS setup. There are also self contained MS microphones, made by companies like Pearl and Sanken, or the Neumann RSM-191, which I know several people here use. The only reason I tend not to like microphones like the RSM-191 is that they use external powering and matrixing boxes, which I find cumbersome. But the RSM-191, the Sanken CMS-7 are very nice sounding MS microphones as well.

You can see pictures of my two MS rigs in the previous article on microphones. My rigs consist of separate microphones in an MS array, rather than a single MS microphone. In my case my first MS rig consists of a Schoeps CMC6XT / MK41 hyper-cardiod mid microphone, with a CMC6XT / MK8 side microphone. My second rig consists of a Sennheiser MKH50 hyper-cardiod mid mic, and an MKH30 Figure-8 mic.

So how exactly does MS work? Basically through some summing and phase manipulation, you can derive from the two channels, a stereo image, which will sound about the same as an XY rig aimed somewhere between 60 and 120 degrees apart. Rather than explain too much how exactly it works, I’ll simply link an article on WikiRecording that explains it better than I could.

So why record in MS instead of XY, ORTF or any other method? I’ll list some of the advantages, but first I’ll admit there are a couple of disadvantages. Let’s get them out of the way first.

The first major disadvantage to recording in this format is that MS Recording requires processing after the sounds have been recorded. This is because what you are actually recording is a forward facing microphone, and a side facing microphone, or two mono channels. Only though some summing and phase manipulation can you turn this into a stereo recording. Many recorders now have the ability to do this during the recording process, and many single MS microphones can do this internally or through the use of an external box (like the Neumann RSM-191), but most of us who use MS prefer to process the sounds in ProTools. The Sound Devices 722 that I use actually has a brilliant feature to decode MS only to the headphones, allowing me to record the raw channels, but hear the decoded stereo channels. I prefer to record MS as the raw mono channels, load the files into ProTools, and master them into stereo files. Processing consists of either using a plugin such as Waves S1 Imager (there are others) or else building a set of tracks to do the MS Decoding. If people here are really interested, I’m happy to write another article explaining more the details of building MS mastering tracks in ProTools. Just make some comments here if you want that kind of thing.

The second disadvantage is that if you decide not to master the MS recording into usable stereo, and store it as an MS file, and forget, you might have problems later. This is because the two channels of an MS recording won’t sum nicely together into mono. In fact the phase will be all over the place. If later you forget that a file in your library is MS, and you use it as stereo, you might not actually catch it just by listening to it. I’ve found that even raw MS files can dupe your ears into thinking it’s stereo. But later, especially in a film environment, in a mix for example, those channels maybe get summed together, and result in a very strange phasey sound.

But now for the advantages, and this is where it gets fun, and why I’d really encourage that your first rig or main rig be an MS Rig.

First, for a stereo recording rig, the MS system can be quite compact, compared to say XY, ORTF, Spaced Omnis, etc. Because the two microphones are placed one above the other, it’s quite easy to fit an MS Rig into a single Rycote zeppelin, even one designed for a mono microphone. In the pictures in the previous article, you can see that in practice, the smaller rigs are Schoeps rigs in mono Rycote suspensions. Unless you’re building a miniature XY set, or using a compact XY microphone, MS is going to provide you with the most compact rig.

Secondly, in an MS rig, you always have a forward facing mono microphone, and for a lot of general effects work, this is incredibly helpful. I mentioned in the previous article the usefulness of a short or medium length shotgun mic, like the Sennheiser 416. While this is true, most of the time, I’m perfectly content to use the hyper-cardiod mic in my MS rig as my mono effects microphone. The MK41 Schoeps, and the MKH50 Sennheiser in my MS rigs are not as directional as the 416. But they are actually close. Close enough for a lot of what I want to record. I’ve built some cables to connect my stereo rig in the Rycote to just one input on my 722, so I can easily use my stereo rig as a mono rig, the cable simply dropping the figure 8 channel out of the way.

Third, MS allows for post processing of the stereo image width after the recording. This can be quite useful. This is done by varying the amount of the side microphone signal against the amount of the mid microphone during processing. Pull the side microphone out completely, and you’re left with only the forward facing microphone going to both channels. Adding the signal from the side microphone back in adds width to the stereo image. This is over simplified, but the advantage of MS is that you can vary the width of your stereo image.

Fourth, a small one, but because the microphones in an MS rig are coherent (the capsules aligned vertically), stereo files derived from an MS recording are fully mono compatible, which can still be important in the film sound business. XY recordings are mono compatible too, but other methods like ORTF or Spaced Omni recordings may not be.

Fifth. OK, I’m going to reveal one of my best kept secrets. Quite some time ago, I realized something. If you’re recording in MS, you’re not recording in stereo. You are in fact recording in LCR. Think about it this way. If you recording a forward facing microphone and a side microphone, and then use them to create two stereo channels which behave like XY recording, then what happens if you add back in the raw mic microphone? Think of the screen channels across the front. Decoding the MS files into stereo give you the Left and Right. The mono forward facing microphone can give you the back the Center.

I now master most all of my MS recordings into LCR instead of stereo. Again I’m happy to build a walkthrough on how to do this in ProTools. It’s not complicated, but there are a couple of pitfalls to be avoided. But I’ve found it incredibly useful. First, LCR recordings are very useful in film. I’ll give you an example. When recording backgrounds, say you record something in stereo. Now you take that material to the mix stage. One thing that mixers tend to do, is to pan in the stereo channel to get some bleed into the center channel. They do this because they need help masking the natural background of the dialog. But this results in your nice wide stereo background now being panned into something less wide. If you instead have a natural LCR file, there is no need to pan in the sides, instead, the mixer will have a natural center channel to be brought up to fill in the center channel. I find LCR backgrounds sound incredibly natural. Things panning across now pan from Left, to Center, to Right, for instance, and the sound image for film use is very smooth and very natural. Crowds sound brilliant in LCR, as do city backgrounds, just about anything really. Just as stereo is a huge improvement over mono, I feel like LCR is a big improvement over stereo.

The other great thing about mastering your MS recordings into LCR is that you are then preserving that forward mono facing microphone. Need a mono version of the effect? You already have it, just use the center channel by itself. When mastering into LCR, you will be placing the raw forward facing mic as the center channel. Need a stereo version, no problem, just drop the center channel of the LCR and you’ll have the normal XY version of the sound. So what you are preserving is a mono, stereo, and LCR version all in the same file. Later versions of Sound Miner will supposedly allow you to just select the left and right channels of an LCR effect for spotting right to a stereo track in ProTools. This will be very useful. For now, I tend to spot to an LCR track, and from there, drag it down into three mono tracks, to allow me to work with the LCR file. It’s cumbersome, but still useful enough to me to make it worth doing.

And if I haven’t confuzzled you enough (for the definition of confuzzled please see the brilliant stop-motion film Mary and Max), here is where it gets really interesting. Imagine an XY rig, consisting of two microphones, the forward facing mono mic, and a Figure-8 microphone. Now, imagine we simply add in another mono microphone, but this time, facing backwards, in the opposite direction to the forward facing microphone. By adding in only one more microphone, we have actually now created another MS pair. This is because the side microphone will also still be facing perpendicular to the newly placed ‘rear’ microphone. It only requires the phase to be flipped the opposite way, and it will work to create backwards facing channels. Schoeps actually makes a microphone doing exactly this. It’s very expensive, but with only three channels, you can derive a quad recording.

But wait, if I told you earlier that recording MS is really recording potential LCR, then a Double-MS rig must be recording Double-LCR, or the ‘potential’ for them. A Double-MS rig can actually be decoded into Left, Center, Front, Left Rear, Center Rear, and Right Rear. Six channels can be derived from just three recording channels. This is very easy to do, once you’ve built a template in ProTools to do it.

Still with me? A few years ago, while living up in Vancouver, I had a crazy idea. To understand it, remember that I mentioned that you could use any polar pattern as a mid mic, but that mostly a cardiod or hyper-cardiod microphone is used? Now imagine we build a simple MS rig, but this time with an omnidirectional mid microphone. What this actually yields are two channels, aiming 180 degrees apart. Or imagine that using the omni, you create a stereo image that follows the polar pattern of the Figure-8 microphone. So back to my crazy idea. I realized, that in a Double-MS setup, adding in a fourth mic, an omnidirectional one, would allow me to derive two more channels, a hard left and a hard right. And actually, the omnidirectional mic itself would be placed right in the center of the image, and could be called a true ‘center’ channel, or top channel for instance. Also, since the omni would be very flat down to extended frequencies, I could use it to derive a .1 channel if I wanted. So what I came up with was that a Triple-MS rig (consisting of two hyper-cardiods, one Figure-8 and one omni) could really record 9.1 channels of info into four recording channels. With it, you could derive the following:

True Center, Left Front, Center Front, Right Front, Left Rear, Center Rear, Right Rear, Left Side, Right Side and LFE.

I am the first to admit that this is silly and fairly useless. But it does indeed work. I set up a Triple-MS rig with the Schoeps, recorded some city sounds, and mastered them in that format. I didn’t have the proper speakers to hear it in it’s full glory. And I can’t say for sure how great the separation of channels would be. And the truth is, in film work, you find that most multichannel recordings don’t sound ‘wide’ enough, so you for instance cheat another sound for the surrounds in an attempt to create that wide spacious sound you want. But hey, I love to do silly things to see if they work, and I can say that with a ridiculously elaborate ProTools session, you can indeed master four Triple-MS channels into 9.1 channels of sound.

That then is a little MS primer. Post any questions in the comments below. Later when I’m home from traveling, maybe I’ll make a screen capture movie showing MS mastering in ProTools, I don’t have ProTools with me at the moment.

But I hope that might give you some ideas of what you can do with MS.

McDSP has published a new user profile, featuring sound designer David Farmer.

“When I’m designing new sounds, I build in premix tracks that get bussed down to auxes, and those auxes then get bussed down to a composite.  I almost always have an instance of Analog Channel on those premix auxes, and often an ML4000 too.”

“It’s hard to put into words why McDSP products sound so good to me.  When I listen through a McDSP plug-in, it sounds like the plug-in has been listening.  So many plug-ins just sound like they’re crunching numbers, but McDSP sounds like they’re actually listening to the audio.”

Continue reading…

New video of SoundWorks Collection featuring Marie Ebbing and Jonathon Stevens who talk about their work on removing noise from recordings.

Marie Ebbing & Jonathon Stevens offer advanced noise removal services for music and film post production using a suite of tools by the software developer Algorithmix. These noise removal tools are divided into 2 categories, broadband — including surface noise, hiss & hum; and transient — including camera hydraulics, coughs, page turns and other instantaneous noises.

Their use of these tools extends into the non-standard as well. They can remove unwanted dialog and music from stereo or multi-channel master recordings. Rebalancing or complete removal of instruments in a master recording is also possible and on occasion pitch correction to a specific instrument in a mix. All of this is done with the utmost respect to the sound quality of your original master.

Projects that have benefited from their noise removal services include:
Tron: Legacy, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Capitalism, Public Enemies, San Francisco Symphony’s Keeping Score Series, The Lord of the Rings: Complete Music Boxed sets

Despite being huge sound design fans, when we listen to any narrative soundtrack, our attention is naturally focused on the voice. “Dialogue is King” – plays a particularly key role when listening to radio, where you don’t have the benefit of pictures to tell the story.

I spoke to Ralph van Dijk, who is an award winning, radio commercial’s writer and director, to find out more about the techniques and considerations that go into getting that great voice performance. You can listen to his work here www.eardrum.com.au.

Designing Sound: First of all, what got you interested in making radio commercials?

Ralph van Dijk: I reckon it was because it combined a few of the things I really enjoyed at the time when I was deciding what to do. I love music, I love writing and I like acting. I was doing all of those things to varying degrees – of awfulness. Advertising itself was interesting because it was a combination of all those things. Plus comedy. I’ve always enjoyed comedy. Radio was like a very condensed version of all those things. I could experiment with all those different areas in a very short space of time.

That’s the other great thing I love about radio, is that you can conceive and execute the idea in a matter of days. Whereas with television, back when I worked in an advertising agency, it was just so frustrating to have an idea, then to have to wait for months whilst it went through research and client changes, before you could even go anywhere near actually making it. And when you have a very short attention span, that’s not a good thing.

I guess it was also very satisfying creatively because writing radio is quite liberating. You can do whatever you want. And I felt I could do it well.

DS: What are the key elements of good radio?

The first thing you need to do is engage. Engagement is critical because radio is a secondary medium. You’re often doing something else, or thinking about something else at the time of listening, so you really need to reach out and intrigue and engage the listener with something funny, interesting, arresting. So that’s absolutely a major requirement.

Intimacy is also important because the medium itself is very intimate, as in, it’s one to one. You’re listening to your choice of station, on your own, in your own environment. So an ad that’s conversational fits the situation well because it is a communication medium heard where people are very relaxed. The best commentators on radio are those who communicate naturally, sounding like it’s all from off the top of their head. So a good radio ad should reflect that.

DS: What kinds of things do you first consider when you get a radio script, prior to the studio?

When I get a script, the first thing I look at is to define the tone and emotion of the piece. Whether it’s a character’s monologue or a five-word corporate end line, because if you don’t assign an emotion, however subtle it is, it could end up being bland and forgettable. So that’s the starting point, just to work out, what is the emotion? What is the feeling and tone we’re trying to convey? It makes the casting more streamlined. Ideas on appropriate people seem to fall out of the woodwork once you’ve defined what feeling you want to capture.

DS: So when you are casting actors, are you considering their skill over their experience? Or is it the quality of their voice?

RvD: The most important criteria is acting ability and that’s followed closely by skills and the experience they’ve got. By skills I mean things like breathing and timing. Voice quality is less important for a lot of the roles we tend to be involved in – which are more character roles – and the priority there is to achieve a more natural, authentic performance. When I say character I don’t mean silly voices, I mean being someone who might exist beyond the ad, not just a voice floating around in the ether. In a straighter read where the voice is representing a brand, the texture and timbre of the voice then becomes really important. Some actors are blessed and have it all! They have the acting ability, the technical skills as well as a beautiful voice.

DS: A lot of your work transports your listener to a specific space in the ‘theatre of the mind’. What are some tips you have for achieving realism in your radio works?

RvD: Let’s assume the actors are brilliant, have been cast well and understand the script. So that’s a starting point there because you’re not going to bother trying to imagine where the character is, if you don’t believe they exist in the first place. I guess after that it’s mike dynamics, which make a big difference. Encouraging the cast to move around as they would if the scene was being filmed. Approaching the mike for a conspiratorial tone, or turning off mike to help suggest movement. It means often setting up stereo or multiple mikes. The changes in perspective create a much more vivid picture for the listener.

I always tell the cast where the scene is set and play relevant sound effects in their cans. That just helps them get it clear, in their minds, where they are and dictates their projection and performance.

DS: Is there a different skill set required for directing a voice only piece as opposed to directing theatre or film?

RvD: I always say, our ears are incredible bullshit detectives. Authenticity is more important when you are just working with voice. You have to be so much more in-tune with the tonality of the piece when working with voice alone. There are subtle nuances I use to communicate emotions that you would normally see on an actors face.

DS: Such as?

RvD: I guess I’m talking about sub-vocals – which are meaningless sounds that occur in the middle of a sentence when someone is responding to something someone is saying, that can tell you exactly what they’re feeling, without having to use words or wait for their lines. The benefit of seeing both characters on screen is you know how the other person is reacting without having to use sounds. In radio, by having little sounds and responses, noises or pauses in strange places, it can suggest a lot of that information that you wouldn’t have otherwise had to do audibly, if you had it all there for you to see.

It’s all about that authenticity. It’s going to sound like a cracked record! But anyone can make written words audible and it’s up to me to make sure those words are actually pulled to life, so they mean something.

So it’s all about an awareness of the details, to achieve an emotional authenticity.

DS: Has there ever been a point in studio when you have felt ‘this isn’t going to work’ and how did you get things back on track?

RvD: Yes – quite a few times! Some of the techniques might be stopping, bringing them into the control room for a cup of tea and having a chat about something completely unrelated. That’s just usually because the words have become a bit meaningless and they’re getting a bit tired, starting to question everything. So we just need to recalibrate and take a break. Also, taking their headphones off is a very simple way of getting people to stop concentrating on what their saying so much and start to become more instinctive and fluent.

If they’re not getting the right tone or emotion, I’ll sometimes play music. Whether or not that music’s going to be used in the final mix, it takes their minds off concentrating on how they’re saying the words and they naturally match the tone of the music. It also helps them drive the pace. Then you just take the music away and presto!

The other one is sitting in the studio with them and turning the script into an interview, so they respond to real life questions. It adds meaning to the words on the page.

You know if you’ve been working on something for too long, it’s hard for actors to unlearn everything. So a lot of it is about distracting and trying to help them not think too much.

Rodney Gates: I wish I knew how to make something sound large, other than just using reverb tail. One way this can be achieved is by pitching something at multiple intervals – an octave down, two octaves down, and blending with the original. This makes whooshes longer and fatter, and impact sounds beefier. Letting the sounds pitch and change their duration naturally is smoother than keeping their length the same as the original, but the time-correction has it’s uses for keeping heavy sounds short (as long as they are blended a bit with the original, most pitching artifacts are hidden in this process). Also, working with the highest sample rate and bit depth files you can helps a lot with fidelity (24-bit / 96kHz is great, with 192 being even better). The higher sample rates help keep the high-end of the sound as the upper harmonics are brought down during the pitching process, whereas rates of 48kHz and below have their limits, causing the sounds to get darker the further down they are pitched.

DSR: What is your weapon of choice (or method) to create production elements (whoosh, sci-fi sounds, etc)?

RG: I like to use Waves’ Doppler plug-in for creating whoosh effects. However, I wish it handled audio files at a higher sample rate than 48kHz since it’s pitching sounds as it’s core usage.

For electronic sci-fi sounds, adding light MetaFlanger is nice to “tech” something up a bit. For a little low-end emphasis, a Rectified (Pro Tools plug-in) sine wave around 80Hz (or sweeping around that area) is cool to add.

Plug-in automation is your friend, too – it can add a lot of movement to your sounds when using it with plugs like MondoMod or Enigma, etc.

DSR: What file formats do you prefer to have a resume delivered in and what does it take to get you to watch someone’s reel online?

RG: Usually a Quicktime video is fine (stereo or 5.1), whether it’s streaming online or on disc. YouTube at high quality, or Vimeo are decent choices too (if showing video). I try to watch everything that’s sent to me and offer constructive feedback.

DSR: I have a degree in music, and I have mixed a lot of live shows, I have also done voiceover. I really want to get into this industry. What is the best way to get a foot in the door?

RG: Read what I covered in my initial Bio / interview on DesigningSound.org – I go over a lot of it there. Being persistent and keeping your eyes open to what positions become available.

DSR: What has been your favorite project you have worked on thus far?

RG: From a creativity standpoint, it has been “Transformers: War For Cybertron”. I had wanted to work in the sci-fi realm for a while before finally getting to do it.

DSR: Thanks for great articles Rodney. In your “featured sound designer of the month” photo on this site, it seems like you are using a lot of hardware. Can you tell what kind of hardware boxes you use, what you use them for, and which is which on the picture?

RG: That photo was my former office at High Moon. Mackie monitoring all around, on the left a Digidesign PRE, a Presonus ADL600 mic pre were were trying out, and below that an Avalon 2022. Those are Behringer ultracurve pro outboard EQs in the upper-left, and a Mackie HUI controller center. On the right (can’t really see) are Dorrough meters and a Dolby DP564 decoder.

At SOE, I run Pro Tools | HD on an 8-core Mac Pro, with a Euphonix MC Mix controller, through Blue Sky 5.1 system with Dorrough meters. We also use Soundminer Pro for our sound effects database organization. We don’t have a lot of outboard gear due to the fact that we do not have a recording space right now.

DSR: What sort of things do you look for in new talent? Is it also worth learning C++ as well as audio middleware tools?

RG: New talent should use the tools and resources that are available out there – see my “Getting the Gig” article on DesigningSound.org for additional information. There isn’t really a need to learn C++ unless you are heading down the programming route. However, Audio Programming is a specialized niche, and a worthy career choice as they are usually in heavy demand.

DSR: How often do you find yourself needing to use sounds that you didn’t record yourself, or using any synths?

RG: We use commercial library elements every day, though not usually by themselves (they are always edited in some way, or just part of a more-complex sound). Synths can come in handy when going for that kind of synthetic effect (we got a lot of mileage out of Moog Voyager during the production of “Transformers: War For Cybertron”). However, I usually would only use a synth for part of a sound. Say a spell-cast in fantasy land…if it’s a pad sound, they can make nice tails for sounds that are usually comprised of elements that are more organic.

DSR: How often, if ever, do you get useable results from severe pitch or speed (or both) alteration of any recordings?

RG: I do this nearly every day. Pitch is the first thing I usually alter when designing a sound for something. I like to double-up sounds that are pitched an octave or more to make something sound heavier, or pitch it much higher if it’s meant to sound smaller / faster.

DSR: Any tips for using convolution or vocoding, or similar in sound effect design?

RG: I haven’t experimented much with using the convolution process for things other than reverb tails yet, though I’m sure you could get some great results (using Altiverb or other processors). Vocoding is cool but has its limitations – if you’re going for robotic voices, you can do a lot with it.

DSR: As an Audio Director, How do you make sure that your team of sound designers, audio programmers and composers share the same vision regarding the game audio.

RG: Good question. A lot of the time, with sound designers on the team, this can be automatic as we tend to think the same way on a lot of things already. With “Clone Wars”, it was easy to do being a game built on the canon of the Star Wars universe that we are all familiar with. For other projects, I can generally use some terms like “gritty” or “slick sci-fi” to impart the ideas and as we progress into the project, it will become automatic second-nature way of creating the sounds for it.

For composers, the approach needs to be more carefully-structured. They will benefit greatly from concept art, video capture of gameplay, story / lore and descriptions of a game’s pillars from meetings (as they are usually contract and out-of-house). Sometimes a course correction or two in the beginning may be necessary to help set the tone or palette, and then they’re off running.

DSR: Also, What kind of word description (adjectives, verbs or onomatopoeia) approaches do you have for your sound design team, so that everyone is on the same page?

RG: I actually tend to do this a lot with emulation of a sound verbally – especially when discussing the syllables a sound should have and how they play into one another. Usually the sound designer I’m speaking with gets it, with minimal actual word usage needed.

Jason Bourne – One Skilled Fighter

Jason Bourne is one of my favorite characters brought to the silver screen in the early 2000’s. More realistic and practical than James Bond, he made for a great character to watch.

I loved the tightly-choreographed fight scenes in the films, so when we set out to begin development of a game version of this character and his story, I was totally excited. After all, I already had a “Bourne Supremacy” poster on the wall in my office. :)

PAF, BOOM, BAM!

We knew the hand-to-hand combat aspect of Bourne was going to be a large component of the game. The animators, designers and programmers created an extensive fighting system over the dev cycle to help bring this to life.

There were rapid light and heavy punches, kicks & blocks, combined with slowed-motion, quick-time event takedown moves for multiple assailants, as well as the seemingly-endless contextual takedowns moves you could perform on all manner of objects and structures around you. With the expert attention to detail and proper framing, these were highly-cinematic events that were cool to watch unfold onscreen.

Creating the sound for this part of the game was a playground for the Audio team, and I for one had a blast.

Eat Your Veggies – From My Fist!

Initially, I tried creating a lot of the impacts using the large, custom library of vegetable Foley and material destruction we had recorded after “Darkwatch” was done. There were hits, ruptures, snaps, and rips performed across a slew of veggies, fruit and meats that provided a lot of raw material for building up these sounds.

While some of these elements remained in the end, ultimately, it didn’t quite have the impact when we tested it. Early tests showed that we needed more.

We redesigned the impacts using elements from the SoundStorm library as well as other custom-recorded source, and quickly ended up with hit sounds that were ridiculously deep in layers. One punch impact would fire off 10 or more tracks of elements, comprised of all manner of frequencies, and they became quite the voice hogs when we tested them in-game, despite the random variability of playback we got from it.

Scaling back, I think we ultimately ended up with no more than 4, maybe 5 tracks of elements that would play their randomized variants for each of the impact types. Many of those elements were shared, cutting memory costs, with the goal of trying to make them sound as unique as possible.

Reactions & Exertions

What added a lot to the believability of the fighting were the extensive grunts, breath, exertions and reactions we recorded with Jeff Pierce, the voice actor who played Bourne, and the martial artists who performed the motion-capture choreography for the animation team.

Every attack and hit reaction animation had a corresponding vocal exertion that could play, and we could control how often that occurred. It was definitely a tricky balancing act.

To this day, some attacks stand out way beyond the others when I hear the game, usually due to the frequency those attack types played back with in the combat system. A little more tuning could have been done, with a few more vocal variants recorded with the actor, but we just can’t work on the games forever, can we? (Say it with me…mmllleeaaAHHH!) J

Inspired by “300”

A multi-opponent takedown move would fire off slow-motion quick-time events to allow the player time to initiate the move, rewarding them with a nicely-choreographed, cinematic takedown scene where Bourne kicks it into gear and lays everyone out flat, much like he does in the films.

It was difficult to set these up with sound, however. Using Unreal’s animation viewer tool, we would tag notifications on the timeline for not only the sounds of the impacts that would occur, but also the “slow-motion” mode’s stylized sound effects that brought you into and out of the transitions.

To enhance the slow-motion feel, whenever this state was initiated, delays and a larger reverb fired off, while most of the ambient and other background sound elements disappeared. The music was also put into a sweeping high-pass filter to open up the low end of the spectrum for the extra-heavy hits that would play for the quick-time event sequence.

One challenge was that the animation tool did not perform this drop in speed like the game did, so we had to experiment with leading most of the notifications for fight impacts, exertions, Foley movement and other sounds, in anticipation of the player hitting the correct quick-time event in time to play out the rest of the fight sequence. We could only do it through trial and error; so many hours were spent positioning these sounds so that they played correctly for the many multi-opponent takedowns. Frame rate glitches would cause misfires, or make them play early, or sometimes not at all; it wasn’t a perfect system, but pretty cool overall (check 5:26 for some overall hand-to-hand fighting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP2oAhwlaZ8 )

The Joy of Contextual Takedowns

A large part of Jason Bourne’s technique is using the environment as a weapon. Game Designers would set up areas around a fight space that would tell the combat system to utilize them while performing takedowns in that area. This could be anything from a mail cart sitting in the hallway while escaping the embassy in Zurich, to being laid out against a wall in the Paris apartment fight with the assassin Castel, busting picture frames and such.

It was great fun designing these additional impacts that added a lot of unexpected variety to the regular fight routines you get into (check 2:22 here for the mail cart, 3:46 for a desk, 6:02 for a window: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsd6y1tJx7Y )

Conclusion

I still wish that we could have made a sequel to “The Bourne Conspiracy”. I was gearing up with all-new Foley recording for the character’s moves and getting excited about the proposed storyline, but ultimately the license was pulled back and the studio went another direction.

When I heard rumor that another developer was going to create a game based on the franchise, I had high hopes for another fun Bourne adventure, but that also disappeared. Maybe one day the character will resurface again in the game world, and hopefully the audio folks on that future title will have as much fun as I did.