This article is an excerpt of the The Complete Guide to Game Audio. It's used with permission from Focal Press. Sound effects are an integral part of any game, equal in importance to artwork, music and game play. Good sound effects create an impact which rounds out the entire gaming experience; without them, that experience would suffer. They are designed to completely absorb … [Read more...]
Aaron Marks Special: So, You Want to Be a Sound Designer?
People often ask why I’m a sound designer and how I ended up with an active career creating sounds. It’s not something I specifically sought out but now that I’m a dozen years into doing it professionally, I’m really happy that I’m here. I actually started as a composer with the dream of scoring blockbuster Hollywood films but with the unpredictability of life, I ended up on … [Read more...]
Feeling
"I’d love to record everything every time, but the most important thing is to find the sound which provides that feeling you’re looking for regardless of where it comes from." - Richard King … [Read more...]
Rob Nokes Special: Guide to Recording Dogs
Untrained dogs can be very hard to record. Unlike trained dogs, they don’t know commands and are usually scared or uneasy when put in a different environment. Also, their reactions are hard to predict and most likely they will not perform as you want them to when the time for recording comes. In order to minimize these problems there are some things you can try doing: First of … [Read more...]
10 Tips to Make You a Better Sound Designer
George Spanos has published another of his great articles on GameSound Design. This time he gives 10 (actually 11) different advices that can make you a better sound designer, no matter your field of work. I agree with almost all the tips, but as George said, this is the most important of the list: Make mistakes. Ok, so I lied. This list actually contains 11 things to make you … [Read more...]
Rob Nokes Special: Guide to Recording Cars
Back in the day when I first started recording cars, we were using small DAT machines, the Sony TCD7 and back in those days DAT machines were very expensive, so we had maybe 2 DAT machines. We had to record sounds for this movie called The Chase, and it was all a car chase movie. So Greg and I set out to figure out how we could make big hollywood sounding cars and between the 2 … [Read more...]
The Power of Limitations
As I told in my previous post, I would like to talk about my experience with setting limitations on my work, something that has helped me a lot since I'm on this sound world. Setting limitations is a really great exercise both for newbies and professionals. It's a fantastic way to improve your skills and learn new things and new ways to do the stuff you normally do. Also, in … [Read more...]