After speaking with a bunch of game audio folks and offering up one on one consults, I put some thoughts down to help those I wasn't able to meet with personally. A more general guide where I had noticed trends of common feedback.
”A Sound Effect” reached out and asked if they could republish it, I felt it was only right to clean it up for a broader audience, expand on a few more points, and get some peer reviews. So this article is the result of those efforts.
If you're looking to build or improve upon your game audio portfolio, I hope you might find this resource helpful.

https://www.asoundeffect.com/game-audio-portfolio-guide/

2023 Summary

Year end summary - I did a terrible job at writing updates throughout the year, so let’s try sum it all up.

Vehicle Recordings
This year definitely had the most vehicle recordings I’ve ever done. I’ve only had the chance to do a few of these in the past, so I am by no means an expert but I have had the privilege of reviewing a ton of high quality vehicle recordings during my time on NFS. I had at least some good references of great vehicle recordings to keep in mind.
Using the FRS “Daily Driver” crowdsource as an excuse to try dig into this subject a bit more, I teamed up with some other local recordists and we captured my ‘07 Impreza about every way possible. 57 on the exhaust with a suction cup mount was the star of the show, but the high SPL Countryman B6’s do a great job there and in the engine bay. We also captured interiors for a bunch of onboards as well.
We captured around 418 sounds for the crowdsource. Contact mics are a real unsung hero for certain buttons and switches, I love them on small consumer products and they pair really well with acoustic mics.
Key learning here was just how important location is for a vehicle recording. Doesn’t always seem so obvious when you’re putting high SPL mics in an engine bay, but birds and foliage always seem to find their way into everything.

Right on cue we needed some vehicle recordings for a project at work, that were much simpler recordings not intended for high fidelity “hero” cars, so it was a great example of how some personal projects outside work can be used to support professional gigs almost immediately.

You can check out a quick sample of some onboard driving examples in a sample I did here, these are essentially raw recordings, but give a good example of the perspectives and fidelity captured: LINK

Sound Library

I already spoke about that way more HERE and HERE, but I released a sound library with Subsocial Studios. It was a lot of fun!
Recorded and designed a few hundred sounds, but it was fun to take such an abstract approach to sound design. I’m so used to creating sounds for systems in engine or to picture, so just creating abstract source to be used for sound design or musical context was a fun challenge and I’m happy with out it turned out.

NDA

So. much. NDA stuff.
Cannot wait to share more details about what we’ve been up to on skate.

Non- Audio Stuff

Welding
This year I wanted to get back into welding. I did it for a couple of years through high school before getting into audio and wanted to see if I was still any decent at it. More of as a hobbyist and more artisan welding projects, but we’ll see.
Anyways, that was a lot of fun. I always enjoyed Oxy-Acetylene, but turns out MIG is a lot of fun, and SMAW is not nearly as scary as I remember it. Glad to see I still had some chops and can stack a few dimes. This is related to audio, but we’ll see if that manifests in 2024.

Game Audio Portfolio Notes
As the year was winding down, I offered up some time to anyone in the game audio community who may want a portfolio review. From my personal experience and my time teaching I know how often creative folks are just looking for any degree of feedback or a way to gain some confidence about the direction they’re headed. The response to my offer was overwhelming and great to see. The only downside was I didn’t have capacity to reach out to everyone. In the interest of not leaving some people hanging, I documented some trends and common pitfalls that I’ve seen from reviewing portfolios from applicants and just other folks in the industry and just put that on my site here. I’ll link to this later, but I hope some folks will find this useful in the future — LINK

Programming
I returned to some programming projects this year diving much more into Python than I had in the past. I had this idea floating around for a while of auto-generating markers throughout audio recordings from stadium recordings. I’m not longer on the FIFA/FC team so I wanted to just fully get this idea stood up and documented so I could see if it was possible and maybe had value in the future. The photo below might not look like much, but those region markers are all generated from a commentary throughout a sporting even. So we can automatically identify and tag every notable action throughout a match with the click of a button. No need to listen through a full +2 hour game just to find a cheer, boo, etc. we can extrapolate that from the game’s events.
This can then be exported to a data structure with video and audio for reference. It essentially turns a full crowd recording from a game into a sound library with metadata in a few clicks, improving sound designer efficiency looking for quality assets and I think could have a lot of long term benefits. This was entirely just a personal project to see if it could be done, and it was fun to see what’s possible with Python and a bit of Reaper scripting.

Generative Art
I’ve been looking to try out other creative mediums for a while, and I’ve dabbled with generative art a bit in the past a bit. But was never really able to make anything very compelling. Turns out these tools have changed a lot and I’ve been really inspired lately with what can be generated with javascript, it’s super early days but the below 3 images were generated with just code and I’m really looking forward to going down that rabbit hole more next year.

Plans for 2024

Obviously the priority is my main work and I’m really looking forward to continued progress there and making things sound even better.

New Sound Library
I’m hoping to make a new sound library independently, I’ve already acquired some items to get started so we’ll see how this comes together.

Revive “Translator”
Translator was the name I gave a modular synth project I started during the pandemic. I made a twitch stream where people could type in chat and I had pre-defined keywords which sent MIDI messages to control voltage. So it was a way to collaborate and have people make sounds on my synth remotely. I kind of want to bring that back and see if it’d be a fun way to collaborate with other audio folks remotely.

Find Ways to Support the Game Audio Community
Once upon a time there was a website called “devbrada” that was the best consolidation of game audio jobs I had come across yet on the internet. It went dark this past year, so I was hoping to create an alternative. Mainly with the output being an RSS feed, as it makes it easy to embed in slack channels and discord servers which a lot of folks already gather in.
The intention is to help out any team looking for an audio person to find great candidates and to make it easier for folks to find available roles.
I made a web-scraping script that works, but turning this into an RSS feed has proven a bit more difficult. I think we’ve made some progress though, so between this and continuing portfolio reviews I think there’s a lot that can be done.

TL;DR
It was a big year, but it was definitely a tough one too. I’m hoping that next year will be much better for everyone and there will be a bunch of cool new sounds to share. Thanks for reading.

This year I really wanted to achieve a goal of releasing a sound library. I’ve released a few in the past (personal and through Broken Robot). But with my focus primarily on work these past few years, it had been a while since I went through this process and I wanted to use it as a good output for some new creative ideas.

My good friend Daniel at Subsocial Studios, reached out and asked if I wanted to collaborate with him on a sound library. So this ended up working out perfectly for us to do something together, and to try put out something new.

Short version, that library came out a few weeks ago, if you’re interested you can check out more info at the link below.

Sound Library Link

Slightly longer version - we tried to come up with a few ideas for this and ultimately settled on the concept of “movement”. It was general and vague enough to give us lots of opportunities to play with, and our goals was to basically try and capture as much movement as possible in the source sounds and see where that led us.

We opted to record in the loading bay of our old recording studio as it gave us the most flexibility for moving things around and making noise without the risk of damaging other equipment.

Our microphone list was:

• Sennheiser 8060

• Sennheiser 8040 (Pair)

• Neumann U87

• LOM Usi Pro (Pair)

We kept the Sennheiser’s pretty close as they were going to give us a more focused sound naturally and reduce some room sound. So we decided to lean into the opposite with the 87 and Usi Pros. We did the get Usi’s a bit closer later on for some more ultra-sonic content, but for the most part we just wanted to know if a lot of these sounds would give us a different character in processing later if we used distant mics.

Our source was basically any physical props we could get and wouldn’t feel bad damaging a bit, this is not a complete list but gives an idea of what we captured.

• Drum Skins/Rims

• Old Drum Cymbals

• Projector Screens

• Lots of Fabric/Clothing

• Wooden Carts/Sticks

• Metal Pipes/Rods

• Plastic Sheets

For performance we just tried to get as much natural movement out of the source that we could, and also a lot of unorthodox things that I probably wouldn’t normally do. For example, holding a sheet of plastic on a broken tuba horn next to a spinning dolly wheel. Now we know what that sounds like, and it has an oddly “electrical” quality to it.

The intention was never to use this source as raw material though. When it came to processing, my goal was to either embellish/enhance whatever movement was naturally in the recorded sound. For example, if it was cloth flapping, can we make that feel more dramatic and support it with a tremolo that’s derived from the movement of the source? If it’s a pass-by, what does slowing it down, or speeding it up do to the sense of motion?
So that’s how you end up with sounds that start like spinning cymbal below.

The intention was not to lean into anything too sci-fi but obviously certain modern processing does lean in that direction. So I decided not to fight it when things went that way.
Ultimately I know this was aiming for Daniel's main user base which is primarily music creators. So I wanted to include a number of sounds which were very distinctly kicks, snares, cymbals. Those are super easy to make by just speeding things up, and layering to get the right transients you want.

After that, I just tried to include as many different whooshes, impacts, risers and other sounds I figured any sound person would want up their sleeve.

For the super nerdy, all the sounds in the library were made over a 2-3 day period. I tried to do a fresh start a few times and not just work in the same session to see if I could uncover something new.
At first I was going very handcrafted and clinical, but I wasn’t generating content I liked, and not at a pace that would get us anywhere. So I opted for a lot of samplers, including the Noise voice within Serum which is always fun to put sounds in, and makes it really easy to spit out a bunch of source with the envelope you need.
S-Layer and Polyplex both have their charms. So once I generated a lot of content, I’d mix and match with throwing different combinations of source and early design material in those and just see what came out.
I’m a really big fan of doing pitch moves within S-Layer for different riser/downer sounds - careful here as it can get really sci-fi really fast.

At this point, I could easily spit out lots of content really quickly, and it made it much easier to curate sounds from here

Beyond this, there was more Tonsturm Traveller and Whoosh when I needed to impart more movement into some static sounds we captured, or just on design source that I had generated from other sounds.
Kilohearts PhasePlant was also another source engine that appeared a lot, their granualar voice was fantastic for retriggering a lot of variations and giving an additional sense of movement.
Ultimately the name of the game here was continue processing and rinsing sounds through this whole chain a few times, until they were in a place that I thought they were interesting, fun, and could be helpful in some context.

I didn’t try make them all take up the whole frequency space, and opted to keep some a bit dark, and other’s a bit brighter/brittle, in hopes that they’ll do their job better in combination with other sounds. But there’s a lot that can be used just drag and drop in certain context.

In the end, I ended up delivering about 143 unique raw sounds (most of these are nice and long with 10-20 variations per sound/action), and then about 183 designed sounds.

To showcase these, it’s just easy to cut them into different musical rhythms. It makes it hard to steal and it’s just a fun way to then throw these sounds into a completely new context and see how they fare.

You can check out some of those examples here: Library Demo

At this point Daniel then took all the sounds, then creates Ableton Live instruments. I think this is such a fantastic way to experiment and play with the sounds, I honestly don’t know why more manufacturers don’t do this.
It’s great when you buy new sounds and get to dig through them, but often that’s a task in itself and unless I have an application for those sounds right away. A lot of great material might pass my by until I hopefully stumble upon it when searching via metadata.
So creating an instrument that some folks will play and make use of right away, or that others can just experiment with to get a sense of the sounds they now have access to, I think it’s a really natural and fun way to understand what a new set of sounds could be used for the in the future.

If you made it this far, you’re a wonderful nerd of a human and I hope you found something interesting. Definitely go check out the sounds and if you haven’t had enough of me rambling. We made a little video to go along with this where we talked about some more of this stuff further, and you can take a look at the link below.
Thanks!

Interview Link

Disclaimer: I did not make these sounds nor work on the Star Wars Battlefront series. This is just some information and resources I was aware of that I wanted to share with the community. All sounds are from the DICE and EA audio teams that worked on these titles.

In late 2015 when the remake of Star Wars Battlefront came out, there were a series of really interested articles posted on various social channels by EA covering “The Sound of Star Wars”. These articles had pretty short and simple interviews, but featured some sounds in context and broken down which I thought was a super cool resource.

Skip a head a few years and then Battlefront II came out, and the links to these articles were changed and now only pointed to a store page where you can buy Battlefront 1. Example below:
http://starwars.ea.com/starwars/battlefront/news/sounds-of-star-wars-battlefront-part-1

So because I knew that these articles existed along with these audio examples, I wanted to try preserve this and share it with folks that may not have checked them out 6-7 years ago.
Thanks to the way back machine I was able to reference the original articles, and the soundcloud page where these audio examples were hosted is still live.
So I just grabbed the examples and put them all into some google docs which are now formatted, and fixed some naming convention issues with the original examples ;)

Hope anyone can now enjoy these, and enjoy the incredible sound design work in this franchise.
Links below:
Part 1 - The Thermal Imploder
Part 2 - The Sound of Shields
Part 3 - Droids (R Series Astromechs)
Part 4 - The Sarlacc

Tonsturm’s “Whoosh” plugin/ensemble is a pretty amazing tool that I’m sure most sound design folks know well by now.
Carlye Nyte put together a great resource a while back that showed how to modify Whoosh so that you could route audio into it in real time.
Link Here

Last week I had a challenge where I was working on some content that was perfect for designing in Whoosh, but I wanted to keep certain layers isolated for customization later in game.

So I wanted to see if you could split it’s output and get each of the 4 “source” layers out to a dedicate track.
The short answer, yes you can. I put together a short tutorial on how to do that here: Video Link
But if you want some more thorough steps, I’ve outlined them here.

There are a few things to note about doing this

1. Do a “Save As…” of the Whoosh ensemble before starting, so you don’t modify the standard instance of Whoosh.

2. Take your hand off the keyboard to avoid hitting “undo”. The undo action is still tied to your DAW, so if you hit that while messing around in Reaktor’s Core interface, you’ll just remove Reaktor along with your work.
   …not that I did that
   ….several times

3. Multichannel output means we’re taking the signals before they are summed, which means the stereo effects (doppler, delay, limting, etc.) inside of Whoosh will not have an affect on these outputs.

Alright, steps to add multichannel output in Whoosh.

1. Add an instance of Reaktor to a track and open the Whoosh ensemble (do your “Save As…” here)

2. Press the Edit button at the top and then in the “Panel” bar that appears click “WHOOSH”

In order to expose the multichannel output from Whoosh, we need to find where those signals are summed. Lets go digging…

3. Double-click the “Source+Mix” node.

4. Double-click the “Mix” node

5. Double-click the “Grain Mixes” node

6. Double-click the “0 Wave” node - Special note here, by doing this modification to just this node it means you will only get this functionality in wave mode. If you want this to work in random (or both) you’ll need to duplicate these efforts in that node as well.

7. Double-click the “WaveScan” node

8. Double-click the “core” node

9. Double-click the “Core Cell” node

Finally we have arrive at the location where the summing of the 4 voices happens inside of Whoosh.

You should see something resembling the image above. On the left you can see the inputs labelled L/R and for the 4 source inputs. On the right these are output to just “mixL” and “mixR”.

We want to make some more outputs of our own. Resembling the image below.

Right clicking in the thin rectangle on the far right will bring up a contextual drop down, You’ll want to select New > Out.
Each new output by default will be an “Event” output. Right-click the new output and select “Properties”. You should see a column on the left hand side of reaktor appear like this image.
Change the Signal Type to “Audio” and I also HIGHLY recommend naming each output here too. In the top right you can see this is the first channels left output “1L”.

Repeat this for the other 7 output needed for our 4 stereo channels until you have a setup resembling the above image.
It’s important to note that the order of those output nodes on the right hand side will dictate their output order when we look at this node from a higher level. So if you want your outputs to be arranged 1L, 1R, 2L, 2R, etc. then arrange them accordingly.

Once you’ve added those outputs and arranged them appropriately, we’ll need to “back out” of this node to a higher level to see those exposed outputs.
Currently we’re in the “Core Cell” node, but you can see on the top panel row the nested path we’re currently in.

Click on the “core” tab to go back up one layer and we can see the outputs we’ve exposed.
On the right you can see that the “Core Cell” node now has the outputs we created (“1L, 1R, etc.”), so we’ll basically need to repeat this step for all of the nested nodes until we expose this audio to the top level where it can be output from Whoosh itself.
In this image on the right you can see that I’ve removed the outputs that were connected to 1-4. For the most part, this should be fine, but be careful not to delete and additional functionality of Whoosh.

To get these additional outputs Right-click on the background of core view and select; Built-In Module > Terminal > Out Port.
Duplicate the output 7 more times, and then hook up those outputs to the outputs you just created from the “Core Cell” node.

This will now have exposed 8 new outputs from the “core” node, you can then repeat the steps of adding 8 outputs and hooking them up for each level. core, WaveScan, 0 Wave, Grain Mixes, Mix, and Source+Mix.

It’s a bit of a process (remember not to hit undo at any point!) but luckily it shouldn’t be difficult, just a bit time consuming and repetitive.
Right-clicking, “Copy” and “Duplicate” will help things move a bit faster. If you’re doing this, you’ll probably notice when you hit the top level you won’t be able to paste the “Out Ports” from the previous level.
At the “Whoosh” level, you’ll need to go back to the right-click menu and select “Out Port” again, there’s some conversion error that prevents copying and pasting here.
So if you see the image below, just right-click on the background and select Built-In Module > Terminal > Out Port. (Yes, even though that’s the same apparent object as before).

Once you’ve finished, your “Whoosh” layer in core should resemble the image below. With 8 new outputs exposed from the “Source+Mix” node.

At this point you can now route the output of the track Whoosh is on to 4 stereo tracks and use Whoosh as normal. Again, this bypasses the doppler engine, effects plugins, and some other functionality. But it will give you the volume, randomization, and other playback engine functions of Whoosh as separated layers.

Hopefully someone found this useful, enjoy!

I realized recently that I had never actually made a stand alone Max MSP application. Done a fair amount of experiments and prototypes, but never an executable that I could easily share with non-Max users.
So I wanted to try fix that with a little personal project.

My goal was to see if I could create some kind of a “Field Recording Auditioner”.
A simple application for playing back multiple, multi-channel audio files, for different locations around a sound source. With basic “DAW-like” functionality for mutes, solos, and volume control for each microphone.

The single “Bang” event triggers the audio files on all 4 players simultaneously and then there’s individual controls for each mic’s audio.
Mutes and solos were really the bulk of the logic, but turning those into abstractions means I’ll never need to think about it again. :)

Big thanks to resources from Sam Tarakajian for their amazing Max videos, you can check that out here.

And also Kiran Bhumber for helping me figure out creation of the standalone application.

If you care to download this and try it out for yourself, you can grab it here: Field Recording Auditioner

Volume warning it plays 3 different microphones around a cannon, it’s loud. It’s balanced, but just fair warning so you don’t blow your speakers.

Myself and other sound designers were asked this month to participate in a beta/trial run for a new challenge called “Source Jam”, which is being run by Hugh Wielenga and Connor Staton.

All sound designers would be given the same original audio files and the challenge is to try and come up with a bunch of new sounds from that original source.

I figured I’d document some of what went into my contribution. I’ve been trying to do more “coffee”/warm-up jams this year as a way to ensure I’m creating something non-work related each day. And as just a means to keep fresh and try new things.

Below is a short example of one of the source files we were provided. These were just EMF recordings of various consumer electronics.

The main thing that stood out to me right away was that these were long extended performances and there was a lot of similar frequency content in them. You can get a lot of really cool source from EMF recordings, but personally I find without the recognizable sounds and without repetitive “performances” the sounds lose context after a while.

So my first thought was to try and create something new from these sounds, not just dump processing on them right away. And see if I could “perform” the sounds in some way to create more interesting envelopes and just get some expression and human life into the sounds.
For this, I created a simple Max patch. This uses a simple XY pad to blend between 4 different regions, these regions are mapped to volume controls for 4 different banks of sounds, and then there’s randomization happening within each bank. So basically as I’m able to move my controller around, I’d be mixing and blending the sounds together in different combinations.
I added some processing at the end (4 layers of EMF recordings still were just building up a bit too much).
After that, I was getting sounds that were already very different from the original files, and I think benefitted from adding a layer of human expression and performance.

Below is an example of what these gestures and performances were giving me out of Max.

After that I had big long sections of unique audio with some more manageable envelopes. Bringing this over into Reaper, I just did an aggressive dynamic split and spaced these random enveloped sections apart and then started processing further just to experiment and have some fun.
Notable thing here;

• Eventide Instant Flanger has fantastic feedback

• RX after OTT to try and reduce the maddness

• NVK Doppler is doing great things (and making all that automation super easy)

So the result after that was …fine. Some turned out kinda cool, others were pretty forgettable.
It was definitely going for quantity over quality. Thanks to the heavy handed splitting of audio files and workflow tools (NVK) I made about 500-600 variations that were roughly similar, but because of the random source, were all a bit different.

Each time I felt I had stumbled on an interesting effect chain or settings, I’d just print big sections of this source through those settings. So I ended up without about 4-5 different versions of processing. But I wanted more modulation, more interesting envelopes, and more layering. I figured Tonsturm’s Whoosh would be a good starting point for this.

I exported the large printed sections and loaded them into Soundminer. Thanks to the Radium update you can autodetect regions within files and then drag and drop them into other tools. So rather than need to dynamic split again, export, and then drag the files into Tonsturm. I can just click and drag from Soundminer straight into Tonsturm, no need to create many different variations.

I’ve been really enjoying Output’s Portal plugin, so while Whoosh was creating further variations and randomizing the source samples, I was playing portal and adding more variation into it. I was also using Reaper’s audio modulation to drive the XY macros as well.
Honestly, I could’ve let this roll for days, there was a lot of great options coming out at this point. The hardest part was perspective and sample selection.

I created about 17 distinct different sound types from this processing, and then ended up choosing the 7 best ones for content submissions.

After this I wanted to try loading these into Serum to see if they made interesting wavetables or noise samples. The short answer is, yes they did.
This was obviously another rabbit hole which offered a bunch more options, so I ended up kind of staying in the same vein and went with more aggressive growl type stingers.

The final sounds are quite abstract as there was no context or direction, but it was a fun challenge to just focus purely on design and going where the sounds felt they wanted to go.
To be honest, I’m not sure how much value a crowdsource like this offers. The intended appeal is that by taking the time to create some variations yourself, you’ll get everyone’s variations and that is more rewarding. But I could see this creating a lot of random bloat in a sound library and potential risks with phasing depending on this initial source given.
This also puts an extra emphasis on effects processors (plugins, eurorack, etc.) which is only one portion of the sound design puzzle. It’s a great excuse to try out plugins that maybe have been collecting dust, but I worry among too many junior folks, it might steer them towards plugins and away from sound libraries, which could be money well spend when starting out.

However, learning how other people approached their sound design offers a ton of appeal and value (IMO), so that’s why I wanted to go through this process and document my effort.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for following along. If you’re interested in the high quality versions of these sounds for yourself, just shoot me a message.

Final Result; 15 files containing 203 variations totaling 344MB.

Over the holiday break at the end of 2021 I was really inspired by a few things.

First, I was playing a lot of moodier, slower paced games over the break; Unpacking, Paper’s Please, Stories Untold, and The Long Dark - If you haven’t played any of these, please do!

Second, my girlfriend did some fantastic concept art! (below).
I really enjoy doing “audio sketches” to concept art in particular, which is essentially just cutting BG sounds that match the prompt and putting them in some kind of dynamic playback system. Sometimes that’s just Ableton Live, other times that’s in a game engine. It’s also a good opportunity to experiment with new tools and tech as well.

I’d been meaning to try out some things in Unreal that I hadn’t gotten a chance, so I figured I’d take a crack at putting sounds to this piece in Unreal. One thing led to another, and it turned into an interactive kind of tech demo in the form of a point-and-click style puzzle game.

If you’re interested in downloading it for yourself, you can grab it here: The Basement - Itch.io (Windows Only)

Victoria Canning’s Original Artwork

A screenshot from my gameplay adaptation in Unreal

I figured documenting this might be interesting or help some other folks out too, so I wanted to put down some information about what actually went into this personal project.
This led to actually creating a whole “commentary” kind of guide in the game itself. It walks you through the mechanics and has some screenshots of the logic in Unreal too.
If you don’t have the ability or interest in downloading the game for yourself, you can check out either a gameplay capture (just game sounds) or a walkthrough capture (with my commentary) at the video links below.

So the end of this year means I bid an official farewell to my partnership in my music recording studios;
Fader Master, Fader Mountain, and Broken Robot.

After 15 years, I’m happy to leave on good terms but I’ve found a new home in game audio and moving away properly I think just made sense for everyone.
Still, it’s a bit of a bummer to have all those years of effort come to an end without the ability to celebrate with studio friends.

This isn’t an official end to my music production work, I still work closely with a few artists. But anything from here on will be either nomadic, or likely back in the same space but as a client.

I just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who was involved in Fader over the past 15 years; Kevin, Brock, Spencer, and all of the assistants/runners we had over the years.
But a massive thank you to Shawn Cole for basically teaching me everything I know and taking some notice in me early on. I don’t think I’d be doing audio if it wasn’t for your guidance.
And Daniel Byrne for actually keeping the studio a functioning business and everything thing he did behind the scenes to give us a place to make noise.
He is still carrying on under the name Subsocial Studios, so absolutely go follow him, he’s already doing cool things.

I have a thousand more things I could say but thank you so much for everything Fader Friends and Family.

Somehow it’s the end of 2021…
I’ve tried to do a better job of documenting what I do, but I think I need to do a better job of sharing what I do.

The Short Version:

• I moved from the FIFA team to the Skate team

• I was promoted to a Senior Sound Designer (!!!)

• FIFA 22 Launched - Despite not being on it for long, happy with the contributions I was able to make. Happier with how I was able to share 7 FIFA’s worth of knowledge with that team before I rolled off.

• Did a ton of sound effect and field recording, contributing to a bunch of crowdsource libraries through the Field Recording Slack (see videos below)

• Continued to keep my little Sound Design Collective alive with monthly challenges and met a bunch of awesome new audio people.

• Lots of internal work I can’t talk about, but it’s super cool!

• Got double vaxxed, survived the PNW heat dome, BC Wildfires, BC Floods, and staying healthy trying to keep moving.

The folks at Sound Particles reached out a while back to chat about all things crowd related. From our efforts on FIFA to the Atmospheric Audio project and what we did to help provide crowd audio for real life matches.
I tried to keep things generic and helpful to as many folks as possible, but stoked for the opportunity to chat and share a bit of insight on the subject. Hope others find it useful, you can check it out here:

https://blog.soundparticles.com/how-paul-boechler-created-live-stadium-crowds-from-fifa-recordings

Field recording has been obviously hampered by trying to reduce time outside, so I wanted to share some other projects I’ve been working on.
I’ve created a small group for sound designers looking for feedback, critique, and collaboration. I’ll talk more about this soon.
The latest design we decided to tackle were these incredible 3D/AR magic trading cards designed by Robbie Tilton*** (https://twitter.com/robbietilton).
He released a series of these different cards and the consistent nature of the delivery with the variety of card faces made them an obvious choice for some redesign fun. So I thought it’d be fun to show some of the though process and design that went into this challenge. If you’d like to join in one a future challenge just shoot me a message.
To start, the below video is a compilation for some of my redesigned card faces.

The initial videos from the artist show the video starting with a reveal of the card face right away. While this works for quick delivery, especially on social media. It’s difficult to establish sounds and create a more compelling story.
So I started with editing the videos to start with a rotation of the back side of the card, then transitioning to the front side. This allows for a generic backside sound design for each card. Assuming these would be revealed to a player this can help us build suspense more. Then transitioning to the card face for a bespoke audio treatment, before returning to the backside for a consistent resolution to the sound.
Essentially we’re taking the “story” of each card from simply be an; “Action” - “Resolution” arc. To a more complete; “Anticipation” - “Action” - “Resolution”. This gives us a bit more time to tell our story with sound, and even makes it easier to create all these designs because we know the “Anticipation” and “Resolution” stages of this design will be the same for every card.
So that’s what I opted to start with designing first, below is an image of the edit for the generic design. Various impacts off the start to establish the sound and then some treated whooshes for the card rotation. A pitched down paper umbrella made for this earth like movement texture which help to find a gap between the diegetic paper sound of card, but not be quite so literal. While the gap in the middle of this stem allows for the bespoke designs for the card face to poke through.
Designing sounds for the rotation of the card helps provide some obvious “whooshes” and transition layers.
The thunder off the start I feel helps to provide an initial impact sound that fits the overall mystical aesthetic, and was a sound I recorded this year. (If you know Vancouver weather, thunder claps are like the equivalent of finding a unicorn. So to record one as well is incredibly rare.)

Once that design was taken care of, it could be copied and pasted to the rest of the cards. This also made it easier to work on the unique sounds for each card, now that the sort of intro/outro sections were taken care of and an overall tone was established.
Taking a look at the health potion design, I found a good reference in “Hades” (which I was playing a lot of at the time). Super simple but effective health design in that game with a breath, bell, and heart beat. So I wanted to try mimic that sound.
A drum hit, and tingsha cymbals off the top help give a rewarding and positive impact. Those elements help to make the cork pull a bit more rewarding too, as the squeak from a cork isn’t necessarily the most rewarding sound by itself. There are two hard panned exhales which help with some natural chorusing and width. As well as some bubbles and water movement for the visuals of the liquid and then some fizzing soda can opening sounds too. Finally, in the background there’s some barley audible voices from a quiet dinner party kind of laughter ambience. Just something to help provide a reassuring atmosphere and the right kind of laughter can do that trick sometimes. Obviously processing on most of these sounds, but I think the one to draw attention to is a bit of tremolo on the sustained bell and drum hits to give them a little bit of movement and help them from becoming too harsh and sustained for too long.
I think all of it combines for a pretty rewarding and (what I hope) makes the player feel more refreshed with their new health potion card.

I won’t do this deep dive into each card, but here you can hear the results when we combine the generic card layers with each unique card face sounds for a final result.

Overall it was a fun challenge and nice to dive into the world of magic a little bit more. I’ve done some trading card design work in the past, but not much with a heavy focus on magic or fantasy type themes. So this made for a fun prompt and it was nice to hear everyone else’s work.

If you think this is something you’d like to try too, shoot me a message (twitter or email are best) and just ask. We have a small group of sound designers at various levels and it’s fun to provide a consistent prompt to everyone and see what the results are. Makes for good conversation, inspiration and way to get some feedback and critique in a casual setting.

Thanks for listening.

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***Sound design, clips, and references here have no affiliation with the artist or their intended final project. This publicly shared content, usage is for educational/experimentation purposes only.

It has been far too long since I was in the forest.
About 3 months to be more precise. I’m lucky in that I don’t need to be in contact with other people that often. Still working and making most thing at home, so I’ve erred on the side of caution and stayed indoors maybe more than most people.
With the second round of forest fire smoke finally clearing, temperatures dropping, and rain in the forest cast to keep the number of other people off the trails, I figured this was a good chance to go and enjoy some of my favorite spots again.

I love the rain, so this was not a disappointment.
Once I got on the trails, the rain was so heavy a lot of rivers were moving fast and I know from experience trying to get any general ambience near a loud source like that is kind of pointless (unless that is your subject). So instead I aimed for some more secluded areas where I could focus on the rainfall on different elements. Most notably the foliage, as well as the distinct sound on the ground which was covered in large soaked leaves.

Stay safe.

Last month Latinx Gaming hosted a Game Jam to coincide with Hispanic Heritage month to give people an opportunity a chance to create a game that celebrates Hispanic and Latin culture.
I was asked by a colleague at work to be a judge specifically for my audio and teaching background and I’m always stoked to get an opportunity to share any knowledge that might be useful to others.

That said, I have zero Hispanic heritage and highlighted this to the organizers. They said that was fine, it’s not a requirement and I was the only white judge on the panel. I suggested some other audio folks I know who are from Latin and South American countries, but schedules just didn’t align with short notice, so I stayed on as a judge.
I’ve already lined up some other options for other judges next year, but I wanted to bring this up regardless. Because it’s tough, this is obviously just a small casual game jam and they’re stoked to get judges who work in the industry. I don’t know how to handle every situation like this, but if the Black Lives Matter movement has taught me anything this past year, it’s that sometimes I need to fight to ensure other BIPOC folks are represented even in casual situations like this. With junior game devs from places outside of North America, I think it’s important that they see people with their own background, heritage, ethnicity, and color in these leadership roles and being better represented.
But I don’t know if that’s the right answer, I don’t know if anyone will care about such things, and it’s really difficult to ask for help with something like this.
So I just kind of wanted to document this process so others can see that it’s kind of messy, and that trying to fight for equal representation in game development and game audio isn’t just standing up against big obvious injustice. It’s also fighting to improve representation even in these fun and casual settings.

All that said, I played 41 games over on itch that were submitted. And honestly, there’s some really amazing games there. Game Jam Entries
I strongly encourage anyone to check out some of the submissions and if you happen to read this in time, tune in to the Twitch stream tomorrow where the winners will be announced. Latinx Twitch Stream

Thanks so much to Latinx Gaming, Unidos, and the other judges for sharing their experience and insights with me.

Behind the glass is a new online audio magazine based out of the UK.
They were interested in asking some questions about sound design and game audio in general and I was lucky enough to share some pages with Ashton Mills who is a fantastic sound designer. I’m always a big fan of articles and books where the same questions are asked to multiple people. I think it helps to showcase how people attack the same problems differently, or where there is maybe some extra focus on particular high priority areas.

If you care to take a read, check out the latest issue here: Behind The Glass

I love the rain. It’s probably one of my favourite things about living in the PNW. Growing up in the prairies we got more snow than rain, and the novelty still hasn’t worn off living in Vancouver for nearly 15 years.

Right now we’re all choking on some serious smoke from the forest fires, so I found putting on some headphones and listening to sounds from better times to be really refreshing and helps take your mind off the current state of things, even if only for a little while.

Audio folks, feel free to grab these for use in any projects if you find it helpful, just not for resale. Thanks.
Apologies for not updating these older recordings to UCS standards yet.

Google Drive Download Location

Hope this helps, stay safe.

Date: August 1, 2020

Subject: Julibrary Crowd Source Library

Notes:
If you’re reading this, hope you’re safe and doing well.
Julibrary is an annual crowd source sound effect library where field recordings and sound designers from all over aim to create or capture a sound every day for the month of July. If you submit a minimum number of sounds, you get everyone’s for the week. So this month of sounds will have netted roughly 160GB of audio, over 3012 files, and covering almost 60 hours of playback.
This was my first year participating and it was a great experience. Each week had a general theme prompt;
Week 1 - Water, Week 2 - Air, Week 3 - Human, Week 4 - Metal, and Week 5 - Friction.

I tried to avoid overuse of synthetically designed sounds, as well as aimless field recording.
Happy to say that I was able to get a sound each day, while still balancing work at EA. It was difficult, and it definitely helps you to fine tune your recording setup and editing. But below is a random capture with a bit of everything from the month of July.

I love audio, but I’ll definitely be enjoying a few nights of not trying to export audio and embed metadata at 1am.

Date: April 25, 2020

Time of Day: Early Morning

Subject: Vancouver Dawn Chorus

Location: Central Vancouver

Distance Covered: None

Notes: You’d think that without the ability to travel I’d be getting more editing done, but unfortunately my work hasn’t taken a break. So I’ve got a bit of a backlog of editing, but I wanted to post something from today’s Dawn Chorus Recording Project.
Apparently April 25th is Dawn Chorus Day, so the Ambient Isolation recording project organized a separate library where contributors from around the world, would try and gather a small recording between 5am and 7am today.
I setup my recorder at 1:30am and let it roll until 8:30am.
In true Vancouver fashion, it started to rain (I’m very happy about this, I love the rain). But with the subject being the Dawn Chorus I opted to focus on a section of louder birds that also happened to get the start of the rain, just shortly after 5am.
Enjoy a bit of early morning Vancouver. Stay safe.

When I saw some videos pop up online of people in Paris and Barcelona applauding the efforts of healthcare workers around the world, I was hoping that something would start locally in Vancouver too. There’s so many amazing folks continuing to work in hospitals or in science and research helping to crack this thing. This seems like a simple but powerful gesture and a way for everyone to make some noise and prove we’re not going through this thing alone, which is incredibly reassuring at a time like this.
It took a few days for the trend to spread out of the downtown area but this is our neighborhood’s humble offering to show support for those trying to help us all through this.

It takes a little bit for everyone to come out, but it gets going.
Given my proximity to both Vancouver General Hospital and the BCCDC it’s nice to think that some folks working might be able to hear this show of support.

Check it out, stay inside, and wash your hands.

(Volume Warning: At roughly 1:35 my neighbor joins in and there’s some louder close proximity claps/cheers.)

Date: March 22, 2020

Time of Day: Morning/Evening

Subject: Ambience for a city nearly in lockdown

Location: Central Vancouver

Distance Covered: None

Notes:
Somehow it already feels like a year since my last recordings, which (oddly enough) all seemed to be based around groups of people. I’m trying my best to stay active and continuing to record sounds, but I think everyone needs to be more forgiving with what gets accomplished this year from a work point of view. I think being alive, positive, and a functioning human at the end of the year is the new goal for 2020.
That being said, Alastair Sirkett posted an “Ambient Isolation” crowd source library on twitter, looking for folks to contribute to a sound library based around the new sparsity of various locations around the world.
So I thought I’d take a stab with what Vancouver has been sounding like as more and more people are deciding to stay indoors, isolate, and socially distance themselves from others.
For the first recording, I was up earlier than usual to try and get out for a run and avoid people (it kind of failed, I won’t be running again outdoors for a while). But it was nice to get the dawn chorus with a bit less traffic.

The evening was obviously much less sparse, traffic is noticeably quieter than usual. Some distant sirens and planes are still landing for now.

Stay safe folks.