Here’s a Q&A I had with Axel Rohrbach of BOOM Library, talking about the process on their latest release, Medieval Weapons.

Could you tell us a bit about the process on this library? What happened on the different stages of production?

First we had a rough concept of what should be included in that library. Of course there have to be tons of elements for the Construction Kit and as always a good general sound base for the pre-designed weapons of the Designed collection.

We started discussing about the experiences we had in recording and designing hand weapons and ranged weapons like bows and crossbows for movies or games. One big issue we all came across: we just don’t have enough material to work with. Shortly after that we talked to some reenactment fighting clubs about the most important fighting techniques and what kind of sounds they make. There was one interesting statement: “You can actually hear who knows how to fight with a sword and who doesn’t – the less sound variation, the less skilled the knight is”. That only encouraged us to provide tons of different clanks, clonks and scrapes from different sizes, materials, etc.

We started to record the most important medieval weapon: swords and blades. First we used the real thing and had about ten different swords including one handed, one and a half handed and two handed, a whole bunch of knifes and daggers, one- and two-handed axes, scythes and more. But we already knew that those might not necessarily produce the best thinkable sound for swords or hand weapons. So we grabbed metal poles, bars, sticks, planks and so on to get the extra thing.

After recording the most basic thing for the medieval battle scenery, we started to go out and shoot some bows again. We had a bow / arrow manufacturer build some for us and we tried a lot of things on our own. We attached all kind of things to the arrows, used so called Flu-flu arrows and different kinds of bows. However, same thing here, the real bow sounds interesting but doesn’t really give us the elements to create an in-your-face bow shot, in our opinion. So we also recorded some bow shot sweetener sounds like wood impacts, string sounds and so on which we used either on top of the real recording or on their own to create bow shots for Medieval Weapons – Designed.

We shot a crossbow a while ago which was one of the most boring sounds I ever heard for such a powerful piece of equipment. Again, we decided to record a lot of elements so that designing that mighty William-Tell-ish shot is easy and fun.

How was the experience with the siege weapons? I wonder how challenging it was to record those ones

We went to a bunch of festivals and medieval shows that happen a lot in the castles around here in the spring and summer. We realized that real catapults don’t sound too impressive. The sound you can hear is mostly squeaking hinges. We recorded one catapult to have a whole shooting sequence and fire shots. But for the rest we decided to focus on good sounds rather than good marketing material. We used the time more efficiently in recording gears, winches, squeaks, wood and metal impacts and rattle sounds – all the stuff that fits into the process of designing sound for a catapult. We went to a winery that actually had a lot of historic equipment. Those things sounded just perfect for our needs. One of our Sound Designers, Sebastian Pohle, went out to record large wood drops of whole tree trunks from an excavator. Tristan Horton recorded a whole bunch of large fire whooshes down in South Africa.

You went to a very special place to find medieval weapons to record. Could you tell us how were the sessions in that place? Any favorite weapons you found there?

We are actually located in the upper Middle Rhine area, which is a Unesco World Heritage Site. There are tons of medieval castles around here, some habitable, others are only ruins. However, we did not really record there, but we were able to get contact to reenactment groups who work at shows or festivals which take place in or around those castles. One of them was Robert Forster (German only: http://www.ritterausleidenschaft.de). He had a bunch of equipment and it was his catapult we recorded. Most of those reenactment guys are amazing. They really try to be as authentic as possible. Some of them even have their homes furnished like an average medieval house – no electric lights, just candles, straw beds, arsenal of weapons right next to the bed. I can relate to their passion, though. Most people don’t understand why we are always listening to the surroundings rather than the small-talk either.

Any happy accident or unexpected sound you got in the process?

Speaking of accidents: we saw some real blood during the recordings. The catapult slipped out of Robert’s hands once, hitting his forehead pretty bad and leaving a bleeding cut. The bow string slipped off the bow twice, resulting in major bruises, literally reaching down Michael’s and my whole left arm. We missed the windshield of our car with a burning arrow once by about an inch or less. The rest was some minor stuff like splinters, bruises from dropping stuff and such. Well, it’s called “Medieval Weapons”, not “Medieval Toys”.

Sounds that accidentally happened are not really in the library. We knew for about a year or so that we were going to create this Medieval Weapons library. So before the real process began, whenever we heard something that might suit the library we tried to reproduce that in the studio or wherever it was possible to do that. We ended up recording some things at our homes. I recorded a loose wooden floor board at my place which makes very cool, low creaks and Michael has this wooden cabinet that creates very cool grumbling squeaks.

Finally, is there anything you’d like to add about the process on the designed package? How was it?

For the designed collection we decided to make them less aggressive and loud than the Trailers – Designed sounds because their field of application is a whole different one. With the Designed sounds you will still be able to compress, limit and layer them with other sounds if necessary. They are ready to use as always, just more open to the application, be it TV, games, movies, radio shows etc. Once again, the making of the Designed collection influenced the Construction Kit. There’s a bunch of blood and gore libraries out there and originally we did not want to include those sounds in the Construction Kit. However, since we only use the audio of the corresponding Construction Kit for a Designed collection, we had to record some. Designed hammer hits without breaking bones, stabs without blood, arrow impacts only in metal and wood – we found out that this doesn’t make too much sense.

BOOM Library

BOOM Library has released  a new library called Medieval Weapons.

It’s done. Get ready to unleash an epic battle and blow away your audience. With our “MEDIEVAL WEAPONS” sound effects library, you get a fascinating collection of bone-crushing hammer impacts, deadly sword hits, wall-tearing catapult shots, bows and arrows, armor impacts and much more to design an incomparable medieval soundscape.

Medieval Weapons – Designed (€ 99) – Get 450+ “ready to use” sound effects to unleash an epic medieval battle right out of the box. Pre-designed bone-crushing hammer impacts, deadly sword hits, wall-tearing catapult shots and much more will help you to build an incomparable medieval soundscape – Instantly. Impressive results in no time? The “designed“ collection is your best choice.

Medieval Weapons – Construction Kit (€ 149) - Get ready for more than 4500 sound effects of Hand Weapons, Ranged Weapons, SiegeWeapons, Armor, Whooshes, Blood & Guts, delivered in top notch BOOM quality. Want to design some skull-breaking and orc-smashing epic battles? You need that one special heroic arrow shot? This collection is the right choice and provides the final touch for your medieval scenario.

Medieval Weapons – Bundle (€ 199) - With this collection you won’t take no prisoners! An armory filled with thousands of high quality source recordings to create any kind of medieval weapon sound. On top of that, you get the finest choice of deadly sound effects, pre-designed by our award-winning sound designers. And you save money. The bundle leaves nothing to be desired.

All the sounds are delivered at 96kHz and 24-Bit with Soundminer metadata. More info at BOOM.

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.

Chuck Russom FX has released Gun Handling HD PRO, a new library loaded with 417 sounds from 13 different guns.

Gun Handling is a collection of Gun Mechanism and handling sounds. Featuring sounds from 13 different rifles, handguns, and shotguns. Included are sounds such as: gun cocking, magazine inserts/removes, bullets being loaded, dry firing, and more.

All sounds are newly recorded and mastered at 24bit 192K using a Sennheiser MKH800 high res condenser mic and a AEA R84 Ribbon mic. Both mics were run into Great River mic preamps to help make the sounds phat and huge.

Gun List

• Kimber 1911 .45 ACP Semi Auto Handgun
• Smith & Wesson 686 .357 Magnum Revolver
• Smith & Wesson SW9VE 9mm Semi Auto Handgun
• Walther P38 9mm Semi Auto Handgun
• Walther P99 .40 caliber Semi Auto Handgun
• Mossberg 500 Pump Action Shotgun
• 1897 Coachgun Double Barrel Shotgun
• Ruger 1022 .22 Semi Auto Rifle
• Ruger Mini14 .556 Semi Auto Rifle
• Saiga 7.62x51mm Semi Auto Rifle
• SKS 7.62.39mm Semi Auto Rifle
• Mosin Nagant M44 7.62x54R Bolt Action Rifle
• Marlin .357 Magnum Lever Action Rifle

Gun Handling HD PRO – $49 | 878MB | 417 WAV Files | 24-Bit 96kHz and 192kHz versions | Metadata ready

If you bought the old Handgun Foley Library, send an email to Chuck for a special upgrade price.

Chris Sweetman, Audio Director at Splash Damage, has published a very interesting article about the sound of “Brink”. Let’s read:

INTRODUCTION

I’m Chris Sweetman, Audio Director at Splash Damage, and this developer diary is all about Brink’s sound design. What does an Audio Director do all day? Well, I’m responsible for the quality of everything that is heard in our games, including music, dialogue, and sound design. This can be broken down into various areas, including in-game gameplay, cut scenes, trailers and tons of other stuff.
I work with composers on music and licensing, actors on dialogue, and myself on sound design. I also have Simon Price – our dedicated Audio Programmer – working with me, without whom none of this would be possible.

SONIC SPACE

Having played many single player and multiplayer shooters, there was one thing that always concerned me – sonic space. In other words, how do you overcome the problem of having too many sounds all playing at the same time? When you have music, gunfire, dialogue, Foley, explosions, and ambient sounds all going off simultaneously, you’re generally left with aural mush. This was a problem we were determined to solve when beginning work on Brink.
I’d made some progress working on BLACK with the Choir of Guns concept, but it was evident early on that with Brink’s focus on blurring the lines between single and multiplayer, we had to up the ante . We wanted every sound in Brink to be heard perfectly, whether it was a Molotov cocktail exploding, a mini gun winding up, or a heavy body-type player coming round the corner to stomp on your face. These sounds were only going to be heard properly with enough space in the audio mix. If you consider that it’s entirely plausible to have 16 players in the same part of a level, all triggering the same sounds, then the true scope of this challenge becomes clear.

Continue reading…

Via @lostlab

Chuck Russom has announced the release of Metal Impacts, a new SFX library loaded with more than 900 sounds.

Metal Impacts could be called a sword library, but no actual swords were used to create it. My goal was to put together a set of sounds that could be used to design swords and other metal weapons. With a creative imagination, you’ll find many other uses for these sounds. I sought out pieces of metal that I felt had great sonic quality when they were struck together.

12 different metal props were used in a variety of ways. There are solid hits with nice metal ring outs, fast muted hits, and some really great metal scrapes. There is also an insane amount of takes and variety in this library. My arms and ears cringe just thinking about the work that went into creating this one!

All sounds were recorded and mastered at 24bit 192K using high resolution Sennheiser Microphones. So they are ready for extreme pitch shifting and processing. Also included are 24bit 96K versions. Metal Impacts is a downloadable collection of wav files embedded with metadata readable by all of the popular sound library apps.

Metal Impacts HD PRO – $39 | 192/96kHz 24-Bit | 974 sounds | 1.4GB | Soundminer and Pro Tools metadata ready.

Below is a little interview I had with Chuck, discussing several things about the library.

Designing Sound: Why did you decide to do this library?

Chuck Russom: I always need metal sounds on the projects I work on. When I started creating libraries, I had planned to do multiple metal libraries. My first library was Metal FX, which contains what I’d call “non-standard” or “odd” metal sounds.  With Metal Impacts, my goal was to build a set of sounds that I could use for swords, axes, and other metal weapons. I am in constant need of great metal weapons sounds.

DS: What kind of props did you use? How did you use them?

CR: I went shopping at Home Depot and went through the place, picking up various pieces of metal, banging them together, and listening to the sounds that each piece would make. It’s amazing I wasn’t thrown out of the place! I’ve recorded sounds like these before, so I had a pretty good idea of the type of metal props that would work for the sounds I was looking to record. For the most part, I used various pieces of steel; flat bar, round bar, and angle bar. I used various thicknesses of each. There were a couple other things that I found in the store that I thought sounded pretty cool such as some steel anchor bolts and some 18 inch flat iron stakes (which were pretty heavy, given their size).

DS: What gear did you use on those sessions? How was the recording process?

CR: This was pretty simple to record actually. Years ago, I did a similar recording session, so I knew what to expect.  I had an idea of what to do and what not to do. I knew how I wanted to perform with each prop. I recorded at 24 bit 192K to my Sound Devices 744. I used my Sennheiser MKH800 mics, which have an extended frequency response to 50 khz, which is really great on stuff like metal.  I also used those mics on my Metal FX library.

The hardest part about the whole process is how physically demanding it is to record and edit this type of material. The recording process is basically holding one 3 foot long piece of steel in each hand and banging them together as hard as I can for as many takes as I can.  Sometimes up to 100 takes. To make it even more difficult, one piece needs to be held loosely (sometimes with just my fingers) so that it will vibrate and ring out.

These pieces of steel get very heavy after a while and I would get very tired. My hands would also hurt from the shock of the impacts. I tried wearing gloves to absorb some of the impact, but the gloves ended up being noisy. I’d have to take constant breaks while recording, if I pushed myself I could get through 2-3 props a day before I was just physically done recording. The editing was just as painful. Ringing metal sounds penetrate deep into your ears and just kill you to listen to for any length of time. On top of that, I’d play the material back at loud volumes, so that I could be sure that I was hearing all the unwanted noises, such as my body movements, stomach growls, breathes, etc. I limited myself to editing 1-2 props a day, with constant breaks throughout the day. The editing process took a very long time.

DS: How do you typically use these metallic sources on your sound design job?

CR: As I mentioned earlier, my primary use for sounds like these are swords and metal weapons. But, I’m sure with some time to play, I can find all sorts of new ways to use this stuff.  Especially once I get into pitching and processing the 192K source.

DS: What’s coming in 2011? Any hint on next releases?

CR: 2011 is going to be a very busy year. I’m hoping to get at least 12 libraries out this year, hopefully more. Right now, I’m in “recording mode”. I start recording for two new libraries this week; a new gun foley library and Metal Impacts 2. The second metal impact library will be totally different from the first. Mostly larger metal sounds. As I was working on this library, I kept getting more and more ideas for Metal Impacts. I quickly realized that I have enough ideas to cover multiple libraries. So, I start Metal Impacts 2 this week, and plan to release it in the Spring.

I’m planning some ambience libraries this year. My December Rain library has been very popular, so I’d like to complement it with other cool ambience/background libraries. I also want to expand my HD FX Series which is my lower cost line that starts at $19. The great thing about doing the lower cost libraries, is it gives me the opportunity to release smaller collections of sounds that are often difficult to scale up to the lager sized libraries. Sometimes I have ideas for something, but can’t figure out how to make it work at a $49 price, maybe I just can’t find enough material, or whatever reason. By focusing some libraries at the lower price point, I can continue to release high-quality sounds, but not have to stress so much about delivering a high quantity of sounds.  I’ve got a lot of ideas and have pretty solid plans for the next 6 months. I’m already starting to plan out the second half of the year  As I said, 2011 is going to be very busy.

I love the Fallout franchise. The gameplay style is fantastic, the technology is top notch and all the places and stories are really unique. After the success of Bethesda with the great Fallout 3, now the turn is for Obsidian, who released “Fallout: New Vegas”, a new installment of the game which bring us to a journey through the world of New Vegas, a post apocalyptic interpretation of Las Vegas.

Below you can read an interview with audio director Scott Lawlor, who tell us how the audio team created the amazing sound of New Vegas.

DS: How early you started to work on “Fallout: New Vegas”? How was your relationship with the different dev teams on pre, pro and post stages?

SL: Back in early 2009, only a few months after the release of Fallout 3, we started to get the first inclinations that we were going to be working on the next installment of the Fallout franchise. Needless to say, everyone was excited to have a chance to work on the game. From the many ex-Black Isle vets who worked on Fallout 1 and 2, to those who were new to the series, we all felt that this game was going to be something special.

Bethesda was very forthcoming with any information we needed, and helped all of us get up to speed on the new toolsets. From here we were able to help solidify the plans of how we hoped to move forward and what technologies we wanted to improve upon for this project. We set out four major goals for the project; realistic and open sounding weapon fire, dense and creepy ambiences, deep and well-acted dialogues, and reactive and adaptive music. In the preproduction phase, we laid the groundwork to make these things technically possible by updating aspects of the engine and planning out the systems.

For the music and dialogue in New Vegas, it was important that we begin working with our external partners as soon as possible. We started working with Inon Zur for the game’s music and with Blindlight for the voice over production. Early on, it was important to make sure we were defining the style of the music and dialogue that would best match the change in setting to the Mojave Wasteland. We drew heavily upon Southwestern and rural influences but always tried to keep an updated, sci-fi feel in mind. This is the Southwest of the future.

At Obsidian, the Audio department supports all projects simultaneously. Over the course of the development of New Vegas, we were also finalizing Alpha Protocol and beginning work on Dungeon Siege III. By February of 2010, New Vegas became the number one priority. It was at this time that I would say that we fully started production in earnest. At this point a lot of work had been done on the global systems – including creatures and weapons – but little work had been done on the locations in the game. Once we really started to dig in, the scope of the game started to become apparent. It was a real eye opener. No one in the Audio department had worked on a game of this scale before. To give some idea of the scope: there are over 55,000 lines of dialogue in one language (a quarter million in total with all translations included), hundreds of uniques locations, countless miles of open wasteland, hundreds of quests and unique NPCs and a ton of weapons and creatures to support.

The final stretch of the project came in July and August of 2010. At this point, all of the dialogue was being recorded, the music was mostly complete, and the majority of the global sound effects assets were created. It was time to make sure that we covered the huge expanse of the game. I can’t say enough about what an amazing job my Audio team did during this time. Andrew Dearing, Justin Bell, Mikey Dowling, and Jonathan Pendergrass gave their all to the project. It meant long hours and a good amount of stress, but in the end, we all felt that we accomplished all of the goals we had set out for on the project. So far, the reviews of the game have seemed to agree. We are extremely happy to see the positive reception that Audio has had on this project.

DS: In terms of sound… what are the new features and differences in Fallout: Vegas compared to Fallout 3?

SL: In Fallout: New Vegas, we set out to focus on a few specific features in the game; weapons, ambiences, music, and dialogue. Almost all of the changes we made to the engine were done to support these goals.

For weapon fire, we wanted to portray a strong sense of space and distance. We wanted to hear the sound of the weapons reflecting off of the distant rocks and reverberating through the open desert. We added functionality to have layered weapon sounds based on distance, and designed the weapon sounds with this in mind. This also meant going back to all the weapons from Fallout 3 and updating the sounds to reflect the new direction and add the distant sound layers.

For ambience, we mostly used the existing systems except for one key addition. We added the ability to attach sounds directly to the art objects that the designers would place in the game. For example, when we added a wood creak sound to the wooden telephone poles in the town of Goodsprings, that sound would automatically propagate to all of the telephone poles in the world. This was a key feature for us. We added subtle sounds to anything we could from broken down cars to piles of dirt. The more subtle sounds we added on the objects the more the ambience would come to life. Every fence, billboard, water tower and sign has sounds attached to it, and really pulls the player into the world. We also changed the physics system to respect the velocity of the objects and change the volume and pitch of them as they fell. This really helped the rooms where the player could interact with a lot of objects.

We completely redesigned the music system into a location based and layered system. The intention was to create a musical experience that sounded more intentional and composed as the player roamed the Wasteland. For more information on the music system, please see the article I wrote on the subject over at Gamasutra.

The game design team rewrote the dialogue tool with a hierarchical, tree-like structure that allowed them to create deeper dialogue structures.  This allowed the conversations to have a more natural flow, which ended up helping the actors’ performances. We also tried to make sure to increase the number of actors for the unique characters and the generic voice types.

DS: Players have a lot of freedom on this game, You can make many different choices in every moment. How this affect the way you design or implement the sounds in the game?

SL: Yes, the amount of choice the player has affects us directly! It is a real challenge to address this. I’m not sure there is any sort of “magic bullet” solution. Communication with the design team is key. We had to keep in direct contact with the designers about all of the quest details. We also needed to rely heavily on the QA department, both internally, and at Bethesda, to let us know if sounds were missing from certain portions of the game.

One thing we did to make dealing with such a large scope more manageable was to make templates for music and ambience that could be shared throughout some of the locations in the game. We then had to play through every location in the game taking notes on what type of ambience, music, reverb, and emitters we wanted in each location. Each location then had a template assigned to it. This was a good way to get a quick first pass of music and ambience. The next step was making sure the more important unique locations in the game had unique music and ambience set up. The Strip and the casinos are a perfect example of this. We relied heavily on walla and off screen one shots in these locations to give the impression of a living and breathing city that exists in the middle of this post-apocalyptic desert.

The use of the templates allowed us to cover the scope of the game relatively quickly. Playing through the critical path and focusing on the unique locations in the game is what gives the world its charm.

DS: How much field recording was needed? Could you tell us about the sources you recorded for the different sounds of the game?

SL: At Obsidian, we try to record as much of our own source material as we can, utilizing a Sound Devices 702 and a Sanken CS5. For New Vegas we went on a number of field recording trips:

• Anza Borrego State Park – We traveled out to the desert and camped out, getting all kinds of sounds: rocks slides, digging, brush footsteps and whatever we could find.
• Weapon Shoot in Piru, CA – We were able to tag along with a friend on a weapon shoot. We were able to capture the distant sound of the weapon fire which was a perfect for New Vegas, since our goal was to add an element of space to the weapons we created.
• Tumbleweed – We wanted a real tumbleweed for the physics object in the game. We ended up finding one on the side of the highway, bringing it back to our recording room and dismantling it. Authentic tumbleweed!
• The quest for the perfect wood footsteps – the wood footsteps in the game are from a number of sources:
  • Trip to Panamint City – a ghost town in Death Valley National Park. We found a bunch of abandoned structures and odd sounds along the way.
  • Trip to Paramount Ranch – an old Hollywood movie set out in the Santa Monica Mountains.
  • Multiple other attempts at finding just the right amount of creakiness.
• Physics sounds – Almost all of the physics objects in the game were recorded in the booth at Obsidian with objects found around the office or our homes.
• Walla – We wanted the walla in the Strip and the casinos to set just the right mood. This meant a bunch of searching for the right place to record walla.
  • Newport Beach bars last call – the bars at Newport Beach had the right type of environment for the type of walla we were after. The drunken screams reflecting off of the building were a huge part of the sound on the Strip in New Vegas.
  • The Outdoor Mall across from Obsidian – perfect for the daytime ambience of the Strip.
  • Various hotel lobbies – great for casinos.
  • Recording in the Obsidian Lobby – we got a group of 15 or so developers together in our lobby and directed their performance. This is a big part of the sound of the casinos in the game, especially the Gomorrah.

DS: In the tech diary we saw that the developers did a lot of work on the weapons, giving all kind of details, different performances, many different types of weapons, etc. How was this handled on the sound design side?

SL: In Fallout: New Vegas there are a ton of new weapons. Andrew Dearing worked with every single weapon sound in the game. All the old Fallout 3 weapons were reworked to account for our goals of making the guns sound more distant and “live.” Andrew would do a pass and I would review the results along with our Project Director, Josh Sawyer. Josh was focused on making sure the guns were represented as accurately as possible. He drew upon his extensive experience with the weapons to guide the sounds toward something that was appropriate for the caliber of the weapon as well as how powerful it is in the game. We also recorded the shell drops for each of the different calibers and made sure that the physics sounds for the shells hitting the ground were accurate to the gun.

One of the troubles we ran into with weapon sounds was a limitation of how the engine loads sounds for an open world game. New Vegas uses a loose file system. This means that sounds are loaded on an “as needed” basis. This means that the system gives priority to sounds that are already loaded and it meant that the weapon fire sounds would sometimes not sound as random as we would have liked.

DS: Being post-nuclear Vegas, with lot of desolated areas and desert wastelands… What kind of sources you recorded for recreate those places? What were your goals on the sound of backgrounds and different ambience of the game?

SL: The ambience, along with the music in Fallout: New Vegas is largely responsible for the atmosphere of the game. There were a large amount of locations in the game that relied on Audio to sell the experience to the player.

In the open Wasteland we put a lot of work into making sure the transitions between the times of day were fluid and seamless. In order to do this, we added two more times of day for the ambient loops, dusk and dawn. The background loops themselves ended up being fairly static, without a lot of motion. We did this to keep repetition to a minimum. The more noticeable and recognizable sounds are called through the one shot system. This also allowed us even more flexibility with the time of day. We could start to call the one shots of a single bird waking up before dawn and the one shots of the wind gusts could peak in frequency and intensity at different times throughout the day. It kept the entire ambient bed in the Wasteland feeling dynamic and fresh, no matter how long the player is listening for. The Wasteland also needed a sense of danger in its ambience so we added plenty sounds of distant screams, glass breaks, and muffled explosions.

In certain ways, we also treated the music as part of the ambient system. We never wanted them to be fighting each other. For this reason, there is a very minimal music layout in the open Wasteland. When the player is out in the middle of the desert without a town in sight, the music plays in a matter that is similar to the one shot system described above. Bits of music come and go in small bursts and blend with the sounds of the Wasteland itself. The music also builds upon itself as the player moves towards locations of interest in the Wasteland. Hopefully the experience is all very seamless and natural to the player and it just feels right.

DS: How was your approach on the mix? There are a lot of desert scenes and all kind of perspectives for the events… How you dealt with distance and perspectives in the interactive mix?

SL: The overall mix of the game is a very iterative process. It isn’t like a movie where you sit down after everything else is complete and mix the game. It is important to make sure you are setting up a baseline early in the process and mixing to it. Sometime back in the Spring of 2010 we sat down with a couple of other games and got a few reference levels to make sure were weren’t coming in too quiet or loud. We then set the main menu music of the game at a level that sounded appropriate since that is something we will be mixing against every time we launch the game. From here, ambience was next. We had to make sure the levels of the ambient beds were set just right. From there, the game largely mixed itself. The game’s engine doesn’t have a ton of bussing control or mix snapshots so we were mostly just focused on making sure we had one good solid mix. The guns should be loud and satisfying and you always need to hear the dialogue. It is a delicate process but it something that happens over many months as sounds are added to the game. Each one us on the Audio team was responsible for mixing our own assets as we added them and we would constantly adjust as we did our playthroughs and as we took notes on our experience.

Part of what helps make this process go smooth is that I stress that everyone at Obsidian does their sound design over video captures of the game. When we design to video, we are subconsciously making those mix decisions as we design the sound itself.  It is easy to make a sound that sounds good on its own, but to make it fit in with the environment as a whole; it is another issue all together. This is especially true when designing sounds that happen at a distance.  Perspective in this game is important because of the vast space that it covers. Altiverb was a huge part of how we were able to make sure that the distant sounds had the right perspective and designing this in relation to video was crucial.

Overall, the combination of setting strong reference levels, and working to video plus endless hours of playthroughs, and note taking made the process go fairly smooth. This project had its share of stresses, but in the end it is a complete soundscape that we are all proud of. We hope everyone enjoys it as much as we loved making it.

Here is an interview I had with Jamey, talking about his work on Gears of War 1 and 2 from Epic games. Hope you enjoy it!

Designing Sound: How did you get involved with Gears of War?

Jamey Scott: I started doing sound design work for Epic in 2002 for Unreal Tournament 2003. I was living in San Diego and was working with voice director Lani Minella. She used my studio to record her voice actors from time to time and luck of the draw landed the UT2003 recording gig in my lap. I met Cliff Bleszinski during those sessions and the topic came up of the dialog processing, which he needed matched to the previous game’s dialog. I offered to do it and I think my ability to match it proved to him my value because he then started asking me for original sound designs, which I was happy to take on. Heh… I was a bit consumed by the original UT just a few months prior, so you could say that I was a bit of a fan. I did a lot of work on that game and continued to do odds and ends for them on games like UT Championship 2, and Unreal 2. I didn’t hear from them for a while after that until they needed help on an E3 trailer for Unreal Tournament 3 (then called UT2007). I turned around that trailer in a couple of days and they all seemed to really like it because they offered me the lead sound design gig for Gears of War just a few days later. I hadn’t seen the game at that point but I figured it would be pretty good being from Epic, so I accepted and that was it.

DS: How was your relationship and collaboration with other members of the audio team? and what about the rest of dev teams?

JS:Well, Epic hasn’t always had a traditional audio team like most developers. In fact, they didn’t have anybody when I first started working for them; they contracted out all audio content and the LDs implemented audio. I would work directly with Cliff during those years. They hired Mike Larson as their audio director at the tail end of UC2 sometime in 2004. Mike hired me to do the UT3 trailer and consequently for Gears of War. Mike is a good sound designer and musician in his own right, but at Epic he’s an audio director, so he deals with a lot of the implementation and logistics of the games so not as much of the design or music. That’s were I came in. But then, content is only part of the chain. The work that Mike does as an integrator of my sounds is vital to the process and is a very large part of why the games sound so good. The sound for Gears1 was done pretty much just by him and me; there really wasn’t anyone else involved in a large capacity. Kevin Riepl did the music and I did the vast majority of the sound design and dialog designs. I also designed and mixed the cinematics.

DS: There’s a lot of story on the Gears of War in-game cinematics. How did you deal with them in the sound design side? And what about the process in the cinematics?

JS: The Gears cinematics are really great and they’re a blast to work on. I did all of the sound and mix for the original Gears cinematics and I was pretty much on my own with them, eventually working and fine-tuning the mixes with the game’s cinematic director, Jerry O’Flaherty. Since I had made most of the sounds for the game and had been deeply engrossed in that world for 16 months prior, the concept was already established in my mind, so staying true to the world was easy to do. I think it gave the cinematics a great consistency with the in-game audio. Interestingly, they didn’t give me the cinematics gig because I was the game’s sound designer. In fact, I know that they originally did not have plans of having me do them because they were already getting bids from bigger post houses when I told Mike that I wanted to audition for it. They let me audition and thankfully, they ended up liking mine the most so they gave me the gig; but it was definitely not given to me out of convenience. I had to really fight for it and win the privilege.

In terms of process, my workflow was pretty much exactly how I work on feature films and shorts. I start out working on the stems individually and then bring it all into a master protools session to mix. These mixes get REALLY big. For Gears1, I was using an HD3 system on a G5 at the time and I was constantly pushing the capacity. I would have to bounce out some of the large backgrounds and bring them into my sessions as mixed stems because otherwise it would choke; too many tracks and too many plugins. I’ve since started working on 2 PT HD Intel Mac systems and a dedicated video machine so I can keep more things live throughout the mix. At some point, Avid is going to have to come up with a freeze track scheme to facilitate big mixes, but until then, this is how I work and it’s going fine. In regard to a stem-based workflow, I start out with a protools session dedicated to the backgrounds. Then I work on Foley, then FX, then Dialog, and then music, so it’s a very compartmentalized production process. For Gears1, Kevin didn’t score them specifically because it was late in the production and the orchestra date had long passed. Instead, he gave me ideas of edits of the ingame music and then I ended up doing a bit of music editing to get it to work. After all of my stem work is done, then I bring it all into a master session and start mixing away.

DS: Having some similarities with your previous projects (ie: Unreal Tournament -big guys, big guns, destruction, battles-) how do you approached the sound on Gears of War to develop a unique sounding game?

JS: Well technically, my previous work on UT was a bit of a warm-up for Gears. The kind of design that I did prior to working with Epic was very controlled and had a lot of dynamic range, so it was a bit of an adjustment when I started working for Cliff. I would deliver what I would consider really big sounds and he would say things like “weak sauce. try again”, so I would have to shift my paradigm of what “big” really was in the context of Unreal. It was a bit startling because I was all about clean, precise audio, but ultimately it didn’t really matter because he was hiring me for sound content and I needed to deliver, so I just started pushing it all to an extreme. I started using a lot of sub-harmonic generators and squashing the living hell out of things to make these sounds speak to Cliff and eventually I just got used to making sounds like that. It’s definitely over the top but it can be fun to do. Personally, I think a lot of the sounds that I made for UT3 are some of my best work. They’re so big and beefy and exciting. Lots of hardware and ballistic craziness, and a lot of it is frankly very original and unique. Although technically similar, the conceptual designs for Gears were stylized in an entirely different way from UT however. Whereas UT was sci-fi and exciting texturally in the high end, Gears was mostly textural in the low end. We had a mantra of “Destroyed Beauty” when we designed the sound for that game, so there was no high-tech design at all. Pretty much the exact opposite. The beefiness was similar to UT in that I had to make everything feel weighty, but that’s where the similarities ended.

DS: What were the new challenges in Gears of War 2? What did you do to enhance the sound of the game?

JS: Gears2 was a second chance to try and top what we did on Gears1. There was the obvious stuff of making new sounds for new content that matched the stylization of Gears1, but there were opportunities to take things farther. We had some new tech in the engine that allowed us to do more interesting things like stereo playback and more layers of sound, so that opened up a richer sonic experience. The audio team grew a little bit on Gears2, so I didn’t have quite the broad canvas that I did with Gears1, but I still managed to do some things that I found interesting. The highlights in my mind were the larger creatures such as the leviathan and the torture barge. Those were behemoth tasks that took a long time to develop. Some of the other creatures that I did were pretty cool such as the tickers, reavers, and the giant riftworm. They upped the game just in the scale of the sound and the effort that I was able to put into them and these new creatures required a lot of attention to detail. The hydra was a big task as well. I developed hundreds of sounds for all of these creatures. In fact, I did most of the creatures in the game, so coming up with unique concepts for so many creatures is a challenge in itself. It’s really tough not to do the same thing over and over because I’ve only got one throat and there are only so many ways to process voice so that it sounds like “a monster”. All of these creatures need to be scary, so that even further confines what I can do, so I end up really searching for new and creative ways to make creatures emote in scary ways. I end up spending a lot of time searching for “a hook” before I can really develop the creature as a whole. They have to be unique and interesting in a way that separates them from the last creature I did so starting with a hook helps define those variables before I develop the whole creature. Gears2 was a lot grosser than Gears1 too, so I ended up doing several gore recording sessions to expand my palette of source material. There’s one level that takes place inside the riftworm, so all of the object sounds and ambients inside of it had to be really gross and goopy. There was so much more time spent on goop and gore than Gears1, that’s for sure!

DS: All the weapons in Gears of War are very detailed. Could you talk us about your workflow on creating weapon sounds for the game?

JS: I did all of the weapons in Gears1 and about half of them for Gears2. For Gears1, the weapons were the primary focus throughout the game’s development. For Cliff, the sounds of the weapons, specifically the fire sounds, are the most important sounds in the game, so it can be really really tough to come up with stuff that he likes and approves. Each of the weapons were iterated many many times and a lot of them had multiple concepts proposed for direction before the iteration even began. Sometimes we would go through a huge iterative process and nail something down but then a month later, Cliff would get bored with it so we’d have to restart the process. On the rare occasion that I would get something approved on 2 or 3 tries, I would celebrate!

My workflow on all of the weapons was a heavily layered design that would combine a lot of library recordings, custom recordings, and a lot of synthesis to glue it all together. So much attention is paid to the initial attacks and the tails. I spent a lot of time studying movie guns throughout history. In fact, understanding gun sounds is a lifetime pursuit and a few years of study really only cracks the first few pages of the book. Still, I did the best I could with the knowledge that I had obtained at the time and the intense study that I underwent before and during the development of Gears really helped me evolve the concepts of the guns that ended up in the game. I grabbed a huge collection of movie gun sounds off of DVDs and tried to match them but I never ripped anything off of movie things. I just took the knowledge learned in recreating them and applied that to the concepts as I was developing them. The one consistent element of all the Gears guns is that they’re all basically canons at their core. I always started with a ballistic explosion of some sort and beefed them out using either subharmonic generators or reverbs with bassy collections and lots of compression, limiting, and eq’ing. then I’d work on the mid-range elements, which is where all of the crack lies. Then I’d focus on the high end detail and the tails, which is where all of the character sits in a big mix, so those two things took the most time and thought.

DS: There are a lot of big elements in Gears of War games, including giant creatures, robots, heavy ambiences, etc. How was your approach on the size and perspective of the elements of the game? Any specific method or technique to design and mix all these huge sounds?

JS: Heh.. yep. Every task is bigger than the thing that I just did. I think if there’s one thing that I’ve learned the most from Gears sound design is that there’s always something you can do to make a sound bigger, or at least seem bigger. Not that that pursuit is the most desirable for a sound designer, but in terms of pushing yourself as a sound craftsman, there’s always a new challenge in this area. There were some really big creatures in Gears1 and my mandate was to exaggerate their size, so it always seemed like I was making the hugest sounds ever, but then the next creature would come down and that would be even bigger, so I had to figure out how to make that one bigger than the last. Gears2 upped the ante in creature size, and then Gears3 has even bigger creatures, so it’s a continuing effort to try to adequately describe these creature’s size and mass within the confines of digital audio production.

Specifically, I spend a lot of time tweaking the bass frequencies to describe the creatures mass, but also I tweak the acoustic properties of how that mass influences the environment. Tough to do because I can really only make one sound pack per item that has to be multi-purpose in terms of its location (interior, exterior, in a bathroom stall, etc), but I still have to use delays and reverbs to help describe the item’s acoustic footprint. I typically end up using a lot of delays and early reflections and keep reverb tails to a minimum. There’s reverb tails in the game engine, so printing that into the source confuses the issue. For creatures, footsteps and body sounds describe the mass so I focus a lot on that. I typically make distant versions of footsteps which usually consist of low end rumbles and some mid-range texture, but not too much high freqs. On the close version, I typically deal with some low end, but I keep it short and tight but then I focus a lot of attention on the high-mid texture. If it’s a really big creature, I use things like cracking concrete and dust bits to relay the feeling that this guy is so big the ground can’t support his weight. I use explosive sounds a lot too. If the creature is really big, I’ll do a stereo sound with a lot of sub-harmonic freq detail that gets steered into the sub for a huge, ground-shaking earthquake type of effect. This has to be used for specific effect though, because you can’t spatialize stereo sounds in UE3 and the rules in multi-player confine me to mono most of the time. When there are specific situations where we can use stereo to great effect, we do it and it makes things significantly bigger. That’s one area where we’ve really stepped it up on Gears3; lots of specific situations where stereo sound gets used for bigger effect.

DS: And what about the creatures of the game? There are a lot of amazing monsters and lots of different sounds on them. Could you tell us about the conceptual beginning and recording/design process of the creatures.

JS: Gears creatures have a specific sound to them and I think the unifying characteristic that links them all together is that most of them are me. lol :)

There’s a bunch of different ways to create creature sounds, but obviously none of them include sticking a mic in front of a 20 foot, man-eating creature and waiting for them to emote angrily. There really is no guideline for what is “authentic” in this area. The traditional role set forth by everyone’s idol Ben Burtt is to mix and mash a bunch of animal sounds. I did employ that process quite a bit in the Gears universe, but generally, I needed a means of doing things with a lot of variety and expressiveness that would have been prohibitive culling together with animal sounds so I ended up going the route of recording myself grunting and cackling into the mic and then manipulating it digitally. I used a TON of plugins to come up with each individual monster and it would frequently require hours and hours of experimentation and tweaking until the process and what I was doing with my voice congealed into a monster with personality and emotional range. As I stated previously, I’m just one guy with one set of chords so coming up with different concepts for different monsters required that I develop new ways of contorting my vocal passageway and mouth. I’ve developed some pretty serious skills in this area over the years and I’ve got some unique talents that have evolved specifically for this purpose. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really benefit me in other areas of life too frequently unless I’m at a gathering of game nerds. Then of course, I’m the life of the party, but short of that, there’s really very few venues in real life where I get to show off this fantastic collection of acquired skills.

DS: Also… I know you guys worked with an amazing team of voice actors, including the voice over master Fred Tatasciore, who made some vocalizations for “Locust”…

JS: The voice talent that they work with is phenomenal. I really love all of the guys who act in these games. It’s always been the core group of guys, Fred Tatasciore, John DiMaggio, Carlos Ferro, and Lester Speight, but they’ve brought on some really great colorful cast members throughout the series. Gears3 really ups the ante with some very recognizable actors and a lot more personalities from the stranded community.

I come up with the fx processes and final master all of the dialog for the games so I have a very close relationship to the games dialog, however I have never met any of the actors. I’ve never been to a recording session (even though they record at a place that is walking distance from my studio), and I’ve never even met any of the core group who deals with the casting and recording of the game’s dialog. In fact, I wonder if they even know that I exist and play such a vital role in the chain… Sometimes I feel as though I’m just a dialog mastering vending machine out in the ether… hahaha! But as anyone who has done any serious dialog mastering work will tell you, it is a behemoth task and requires a very refined level of technical skill, organizational skill, and critical listening mastery. I’m the last step for the dialog before it goes into the game so I have to make sure that every single line of dialog is processed with the right effect, eq’ed properly, matches all previous dialog (from all 3 games), and is leveled perfectly. Dialog is by far the most important aspect of a game’s overall soundtrack so it’s extremely important that it’s done right and has gone through a very meticulous process which includes several stages of quality control and error checking. I don’t batch process dialog because it’s so important. I go through every single file and adjust accordingly, tweaking things down to the phoneme level. It’s a lot of effort but ultimately, I ensure that every line gets delivered consistently crystal clear, which is critical for gameplay. If there are clues being given to progress in a game and the dialog isn’t perfectly legible, then that’s a failure in the soundtrack, so critical attention is absolutely essential.

I can’t remember who did the original locust dialog, but a lot of what makes them sound locust was what I did in processing it. I can make pretty much anyone sound like a locust… including myself, which I’ve had to do on multiple occasions where a specific grunt or phrase needed to be added. I would just imitate it and send it through the locust processing change and walla! :) I’m not SAG, so I generally stay away from spoken lines. Roars and grunts I do a fine job with, but if it’s something that needs to be localized, I leave that to the casted guys. With the exception of the Boomers. On Gears1, we had Dee Baker making some crazy sounds for the monsters. That guy is a freak of nature. I aspire to be able to manipulate my throat like he can. He also did a couple of things for Gears2 but I ended up taking over most of the monster voices and ended up doing the vast majority of them for both Gears2 and Gears3.

Gears1 had something in the order of 28,000 dialog lines, Gears2 was even more, and based on what I’ve done for Gears3, I would say they’ve significantly upped the ante on the dialog front, so dialog is a big job and it always requires my full attention.

DS: What kind of tools did you use for audio implementation and mixing? How was the process in that side?

JS: This is entirely the realm of Mike Larson, Audio Director at Epic. He works really close to the metal so he’s really great at implementing everything. In general, he’s a very important part of the sound design process because he has very specific ideas in terms of what he wants things to sound like. A lot of it comes from Cliff or whoever is designing the thing on the team, but he brings his interpretation to the table when we discuss how things should sound. We typically collaborate very well on this level and he’s got great ideas, but he’s also open to my interpretations as well. It’s a great relationship on that level. In turn, I’ve learned a lot of how he implements over the years too, so I make a lot of decisions in my design phase that accommodate for his specific implementation practices. In addition, he tweaks my designs on his end to make them fit more organically into the game so it’s very symbiotic relationship.

For any real specific information in this area, you’d have to interview Mike, but for the most part he works in UE3 with no middleware. Gears was originally designed as a platform for promoting the UE3 engine to licensees, so it was all about “what you can do with this engine”. We couldn’t use middleware because that would be a false representation of the EU3′s audio capabilities so although the UE3′s audio capabilities aren’t as advanced and evolved as wwise or fmod, the building blocks for a great audio experience are there and Mike and I proved that with Gears1. Granted, we’ve been evolving the engine and adding new capabilities all the while to help us keep pace with these middleware solutions, but in an environment like UE3 where wav file playback is the primary methodology, strong content can play on par and even excel.

DS: Kevin Riepl and Steve Jablonsky definitely did an amazing work on the music score respectively. How was your relationship with them? how was the music approached on Gears of War?

JS: Kevin is a great composer and a good friend. He did a great job with the score on Gears1, creating a concrete vibe and theme for the franchise. He’s a music ninja in all senses of the word. He comes in and cuts music like a surgeon, with perfect precision and mastery. We’ve worked on a lot of projects together and I really enjoy working with him. He has a great sensibility about him in that he knows how to write in context and is always appropriate, so I never feel like the music is trying too hard to call attention to itself. But then in cases where the music is the star, he’s right there with a dominant and clear thematic voice. Steve replaced him on Gears2 for reasons unknown to me, and I think he did a great job in bringing the big-budget film sound to the game. My involvement with him and the music is non-existent though. I’ve never met him and I really don’t get to hear the music until just before the games ship. I haven’t heard anything of Gears3 music and I’m not even sure of it’s current state. Music and sound design are very separate in the pipeline of Gears development. The cool thing is that the Gears universe was designed up front to be a sound dominant game. Music is great and essential, but all of the most important and specific things in the universe unfold in the sound realm.

DS: So… you’re working on the third GoW. Could you give us a sneak peak of what’s new there? What can we expect?

JS: Well, I’ve given some pretty clear indicators throughout so hopefully that will give you something to look forward to, but in general, this is the last of the trilogy and Epic seems to take that very seriously as they’re certainly going out with a bang. There’s a lot of new stuff in Gears3, including tech advancements, story evolutions and realizations, and general more refinements and extrapolations beyond what has already been established in the first 2 games. Personally, I’ve developed 20 new weapons, a dozen new creatures, a bunch of new vehicles, and a ton of other odds and ends. I hope you dig them! :)

It’s time for another review and demo of a HISS and ROAR library. Now is the turn for an amazing library: Fireworks, recorded by Tim Prebble with other three recordists.

The Library

The library includes several kinds of fireworks and different performances for each one. Also, they recorded the library in multi-channel 192kHz WAV format, so you can find several takes from each performance, with different gear, approaches and perspectives, which is really awesome because it gives you many different options for each sound. Each microphone captures certain characteristic of the source. For example, with one perspective you could have the first attack of a firework and with other perspective you can also hear the tail of the launch, or the crackle, etc.

Also, having the sounds at 192k gives a lot of flexibility when you need to do several processes to the sounds, specially with time/pitch changes, which I used a lot (and heavy) and never had problems with the results obtained. So, this quality is really gold when you need to design new things.

The work on this library is simply amazing. It’s really unique, powerful and flexible. Was recorded by true masters at the best quality, and the most importan thing: was made with love. It’s definitely a package that any sound designer would love to have in his library.

Tweaking the sounds

I had the idea of putting another challenge myself with this library. This time my goal was to design four different sci-fi weapon sounds using only the fireworks library and my imagination, without specific references. I imagined four different sizes of guns, from mini to big. Let’s listen:

Mini Hand Gun

A kind of futuristic mini handgun with a short impact. The different kinds of small impacts and some of the reflections/tails of the fireworks were useful to create this one.

Small Hand Gun

Another handgun but this time with a bit of more power. Again, several impacts with tails, processed with different approaches.

Medium Gun

For this one I imagined a fast two-hand weapon with dangerous power. I made a first shot, followed with a big impact made from several sounds of the fireworks. The sounds were processed depending on his purpose, trying to give different characteristics to each layer. For example: a group of sci-fi/futuristic sounds, a group for fast/short attack, another for the tails and long reflections, etc.

Big Gun

For this one I imagined a kick ass monster gun with big power. Its system is slow, but it makes a lot of damage. The approach was similar to the medium weapon, but this time I had to create other sounds such as the pulsating tone, a big leveler, and some low rumble. I used almost all the different kinds of fireworks, including the shots, the boom flowers, the crackle, etc.