Want to be a sound designer? There’s lots to learn.
There always has been, really–but today it feels as though it’s happening all at once. Here’s a primer:
- You’ve post-production: signal flow fundamentals, editing, library management and deliveries. There’s a host of DAWs to choose from, myriad ways of customizing them, and an ever-expanding selection of plug-ins, ensembles and techniques with which to craft the sound the piece deserves.
- In games, you’ve some additional considerations with implementation, middleware, low-level integration, scripting and audio programming. Filenaming, workflow, best practices, systems design, post-mortems and analysis.
- Ambisonics is back, as a means of orienting a soundfield around the immersive worlds of virtual reality–but also, in a new and growing selection of coincident capsule soundfield microphones capable of capturing four channels that decode into nearly anything you want from the experience you recorded.
- Right, you’ll still need to get out in the field and capture sound once in a while–plus how best to clean, tag and ship it within the vast independent library scene that’s out there. Unless you’re leaning mostly on procedural sound design.
- And at all stages, you shouldn’t forget your soft skills of client management, work-life balance and self-care. The basics of running a business.
Keen to get started?
As our community rises, as the barriers to content creation fall: we find ourselves awash in just as many ways to learn things as things to learn.
This month, Designing Sound focuses on Tutorials; that special messaging of lessons, that way in which we cope with just how damn much there is to know.
Who’s making them, and what on? How’d they start–where are they going next? How do you take that first step of acknowledging, “I have something I can teach”–and turn it into action?
If you’ve something to say or something you’d like to see, send us your thoughts, or post them below/to Facebook, or start up a conversation on Twitter!
Please email richard [at] this site to contribute an article for this month’s topic. And as always, please feel free to go “off-topic” if there’s something else you’re burning to share with the community.