Guest Contribution by Frank Bry In this article I will reveal my secrets and techniques to recording decent thunder and lightning. Many, many years and sleepless nights have gone into perfecting the art of recording the thunderstorm and I will finally share. But first, I want to share a little history and tell you how I developed these secrets and techniques. It was not so … [Read more...]
Top 5 Tips for Learning to Listen
Guest Contribution by Karen Collins Listening is the most important skill a sound designer has, and yet, it’s probably the one that’s the most ephemeral and difficult to nail down. What is listening? Are we born with this skill, or is it something that we can learn? Listening is the process that takes the information that we hear and makes meaning from that sound. To listen … [Read more...]
Critical Listening: A Game Audio Professional’s Dilemma
Guest Contribution by Berrak Nil Boya As a composer, musicologist and a sound designer who is making a transition to the world of game audio for the last year or so, not only do I have a new level of respect for everyone who works as a game audio professional but I also became aware of various changes I am going through almost daily to adapt my already established skill set … [Read more...]
Designing GuitarMonics for Kontakt
Guest Contribution by Rodney Gates Greetings! Welcome, and thanks for checking out this (TL;DR) article on the creation of the virtual instrument sample library, GuitarMonics, designed for Native Instruments’ Kontakt software. It was a long road from concept to completion, and I thought it might be a good idea to discuss some of the processes and discoveries I learned along … [Read more...]
The Tonebenders – Vehicle Recording Roundtable
I'm really stoked by the way The Tonebenders Podcast has been jumping onto our monthly topics when they can. This time, they've got a spectacular roundtable conversation with Rob Noke, Watson Wu and Max Lachmann. Give it a listen, and make sure to visit the Tonebenders webpage to find out more information about their guests in this episode. Thanks for the contribution, … [Read more...]
Planes, Trains and Automobiles …and tanks and bikes and boats and…
Guest Contribution by Stephan Schütze Why I am not going to tell you which microphone to use The simple answer to this statement is, because we don’t have time. The exact choice of which microphone to use for each situation of recording a vehicle is a detailed exercise and would take more pages than we have space for. Even then, there is a major flaw associated with the … [Read more...]
Spectral Analysis: Interview with Rob Blake
Many thanks to Brad Dyck for contributing this interview. You can follow Brad on Twitter @Brad_Dyck It was my pleasure to speak with Rob Blake, Audio Director best known for his work on the Mass Effect trilogy. Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare is available now for PC and will be available for PS3/PS4 on August 19th. BD: What originally made you move away from the UK to … [Read more...]