Guest contribution by Cormac Donnelly I am, at heart, a techno-nostalgiast and I’ve worked with tape machines of one kind or other for most of my career. When I sold my 2” multi-track, in 2010, I resolved almost immediately to get myself another tape machine (albeit something a little smaller than the 250kg Otari I had just parted with). A few weeks later, I found myself … [Read more...]
Creating the Spaces of Ambience
Guest contribution by Michael Theiler (Kpow Audio) Situating an Ambience When creating ambiences for games (this applies equally to film), I am striving to make them blend into the background and not mask any important in game sounds. For most ambiences, these are the most important qualities that I am attempting to resolve. In order to achieve this, I need to firstly focus on … [Read more...]
Recording Impulse Responses
With growing computing power over the last decade, convolution plugins have become commonplace. Some of the most common ones include Audio Ease Altiverb, Logic’s Space Designer, Avid TL Space, Waves IR-1 and McDsp Revolver. They are usually packaged with large and useful libraries of impulse responses (more on what all this means below), but what makes them really powerful is … [Read more...]
Panning Reverb Returns
Guest contribution by By Douglas Murray OK, here is the ugly truth for film post, or really any surround sound work… Most reverb plug-ins do not sound natural for applications using greater than 1 or 2 speakers. What you don’t want: a reverb that jumps to completely different speakers from the source. What you do want: a reverb that spreads out from the sound and helps localize … [Read more...]
Reverb: The Science And The State-of-the-Art
Guest Contribution by Anish Chandak In the previous article by Ian Palmer on this month’s theme of Reverb, you have already seen various creative uses of Reverb. Here are my two cents to the creative: using reverb to synthesize physics-based sounds for percussion instruments. [youtube]http://youtu.be/i7D_ao-LUBw[/youtube] In rest of this article, we stick to the uncreative, … [Read more...]
Rewind…Audio Implementation Greats #3: Crackdown – Realtime Worlds
In the run-up to this month's reverb theme, former contributor Damian Kastbauer suggested we re-run this article he put together discussing the game Crackdown for XBOX. The article may be two years old, but the content remains undeniably relevant. Never one to ignore good suggestions, here we are... One area that has been gaining ground since the early days of EAX on the PC … [Read more...]
EMT 140 Plate Reverb
Guest Contribution by Elizabeth McClanahan, Assistant Mixer at Heard City EMT 140 Plate Reverb The majority of today’s common reverb plugins contain plate reverb settings, the designs of which are primarily based upon the popular Elektromesstechnik (EMT) 140 model plate. Upon its introduction in 1957, the EMT 140 Reverberation Unit quickly garnered popularity, providing a … [Read more...]