sound design

i finally finished the video i’ve been working on for my sound design demo reel.  i stripped all of the audio from a video game trailer for assassins creed 2 and replaced everything with newly recorded sounds.  i used music from the movie batman begins, and i had a couple of friends help with the voice overs. i used things like knives, tomatoes, garden tools, drift wood, hand bells, dish rags, and other various household items to create all of the sounds heard in this video.

it was a lot of fun, and a lot of work, and i can definitely see myself doing this for a living.  i think i will start a new video soon to add to my demo reel, and i will keep you updated with any news in the area.  for new enjoy the video (and feel free to leave comments with criticisms, suggestions, and questions):

recording sessions

i just got done with a recording session with an artist named kevin carr today.  we finished the scratch tracks for three songs that we will be finishing up tomorrow and another weekend coming up.  tomorrow we’re planning to finish all of the drum recording and hopefully some acoustic guitar, bass, or vocals as well.  the session went really well today, scratch tracks are generally pretty easy since they don’t have to be perfect.  we recorded the guitar and vocal parts in my living room, and tomorrow we will be recording in the youth room at john knox presbyterian church.

kevin is from couer d’alene, but will be coming out to seattle for the recording sessions.  his music is pretty folky, which is a genre i enjoy recording.  i seem to record a lot of acoustic folk rock music.  the sessions have gone well so far, and hopefully it will go well tomorrow too.  i’ll keep you posted.

household items

during christmas break my cousin reece and i decided to do some recording together just for fun.  we spent a few hours recreating an electronic song we made a year earlier with entirely acoustic instruments, and various household items.  all of the percussive tracks through the entire song were created using household items.  we used and layered the sounds of a book slamming shut, slapping two wooden cutting boards together, shuffling cards, whisks slapping various items, bumping silverware, and a shaker.  it was really fun to walk around my house hitting things together and trying to find the sound we were looking for.  when we were done with the percussion tracks, we layered bass, acoustic, and electric guitars on top of that.  the song turned out better than we ever could have hoped, and it was a ton of fun to make.  check it out:

vinyl

last saturday i bought a record player on craigslist.  it’s a crosley cr49 traveler, and it looks like a suitcase.  when you open the suitcase the lid lifts off and it becomes a record player.  i like the vintage look of it, that’s the main reason i chose to buy this specific record player.  i’ve been looking for one like it for a decent price ever since i bought one as a house warming present for some friends of mine.

the best part of buying this record player though, is that i have inherited my mom’s old record collection from when she was in high school and college, as well as my wife’s uncle’s entire record collection. my mom’s records all have her maiden name written on them.  they both had great taste in music!  i am going to try to listen through the entire collection and see how long it takes to listen to every record.  i’ve also started a collection of my own, i bought five used records and two new ones the other day.

i think something is lost in the listening experience when we download music, or even buy a cd and only ever listen to it on our ipods.  there is something really cool about buying a physical record and seeing the big cardboard album art, the record slip, and whatever else is included in the package.  there is also something really cool about about listening to music this way.  the way it sounds, the way it works, the way it makes you sit and actually listen to the music… it’s something we miss when we make soundtracks to our lives by constantly pumping music into our ears through our little ear buds.  listening to an album on vinyl almost gives it a purity you can’t get any other way.  especially when i think about how i’m listening to records that are over 30 years old.  i think we loose something in the way we listen to music, and i’m trying to get that back with my new record player.

sound design

a couple of days ago i visited microsoft’s millenium campus, where they have their “soundlab”. this is where the sound designers who work for microsoft record and edit audio for video games.  i had the privilege of sitting down and talking with the manager of soundlab about how to become a sound designer and what he looks for in a potential employee.  i also got a tour of the amazing facilities at soundlab.  they have two mix rooms, one studio tracking room with three foley pits, one theater room, four editing suites, and four testing rooms.  for those of you who don’t know, a foley pit is a hole in the floor in which you can put different textures of flooring (like dirt, concrete, mud etc.) and record the sound of someone walking on or interacting with those textures, and there is a floor cover so that if you aren’t using the pit you can still work on top of that space.  each of the rooms has very high quality sound proofing and are dead silent inside.  the theater room has two or three foot thick walls on each side, with multiple layers of sheet rock and sound proofing material. that way if someone wants to use the editing suite next door while there is a producer previewing a game trailer in the theater room, they can both be listening at full volume without hearing each other.  each room (excluding the studio tracking room) is equipped with 5.1 surround sound, and are easily linked together for interaction between rooms with video and audio.

i also got to see some pictures of some of their field recording adventures.  field recording is when an audio engineer goes outside of the studio, into the field, to record different sounds.  this is the hardest kind of recording because there are so many ways a recording could be ruined, like wind, a buzzing fly, a car driving by, someone coughing in the background, and many more sounds that most people don’t notice while sitting outside.  this can be really frustrating because it can easily ruin a recording, or even a full day of work.  the pictures i saw were really cool though.  i saw pictures of when they recorded the tesla electric car with microphones attached to the wheel well with suction cups to capture the squealing tires, and when they went to wenatchee, washington to record explosion sounds, and when they recorded an uzi by literally taping a microphone to the gun.  it looks like a really fun job, and hopefully i can learn enough and improve my skills enough to get a job as a sound designer with microsoft. at least meeting the manager is a good start.  so don’t be surprised if you start seeing posts about my new sound design demo reel.

20 songs i couldn’t live without

In Alphabetical Order:

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Ben Folds Five – Philosophy

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David Gray – Babylon

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Five Iron Frenzy – Every New Day

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Foo Fighters – Everlong

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Incubus – The Warmth

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Kings Of Convenience – Misread

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Matt Pond PA – Fairlee

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Mewithoutyou – In A Sweater Poorly Knit

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MGMT – Electric Feel

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Nada Surf – Inside of Love

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Pedro The Lion – Magazine
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Pinback – Penelope

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Radiohead – Airbag

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Ratatat – Seventeen Years

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The Reign Of Kindo – Needle & Thread

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Say Anything – Alive With The Glory Of Love

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Sherw0od – I’ll See That You Aren’t Woken Up

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The Shins – New Slang

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Sufjan Stevens – Chicago

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Thursday – Understanding In A Car Crash

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subtlety

i’ve found that mixing a song is all about the subtleties of whatever song you’re working on.  i just finished mixing the song “still dream i can fly” (which you can listen to in the portfolio page of my website) that i have been working on with carly henley, a local singer/songwriter.  i had the privilege of mixing on the solid state logic (or ssl) console at robert lang studios where i’ve been interning for the past month or so.  i think the song turned out well, and the mix sounds pretty good.

the ssl at robert lang studios

from the past few projects that i have worked on, especially the ones i mixed, i have learned that the little details of a song are the most important part.  that’s what makes a song sound really great, or really horrible:  the subtleties.  there are tons of philosophies about mixing, like how to mix, what order to mix the instruments in, what to pay attention to, the “five mix elements”, and on and on… but none of those matter if you don’t pay attention to the little things.

this is the hardest part of mixing for me to learn to do.  it takes a lot of time and practice to learn to use the most subtle parts of a song to get it to sound really great.  for example, i was trying to get the right reverb sound while i was mixing carly’s song, and it was really tough to decide how i wanted it to sound.  it is really tough to decide exactly how much of each detail to include, and how much to edit and affect.  on the one hand, a song shouldn’t be edited to death, but on the other hand, every song needs editing in certain areas to really bring out the good and get rid of the bad.  where and when to make edits and add effects can make or break a song.

it’s all about subtlety, and getting each component to the song to sound just right.  think of a song that you think sounds really good, a song with really high production value, and i promise that the more you listen closely to it, the more you’ll hear the small details that really make that song great.  a truly professional, high quality recording is one you can listen to over and over and still catch little nuances and subtle details with each new listen.  that is what i really strive for in my recordings, and i hope it shows.

recording sessions

yesterday i finished recording the song i’ve been working on with local artist carly henley.  we recorded the final guitar and vocal tracks in a tech room that we reserved in one of the libraries at the university of washington.  the recording went well.  we ended up spending about 4 hours in the room, which was exactly how much time i had anticipated.  the setup took about half an hour to 45 minutes, guitar tracking took a little over an hour, and vocals took about two hours.

i took advantage of a couple of widely used tricks in recording guitar and vocals, especially doubling.  acoustic (and often electric) guitars almost always sound better when you record the same guitar part on two different tracks, and hard pan them to opposite ears, so the first guitar only comes out of the left ear, and the second only comes out of the right.  this trick quickly covers any mistakes made in either performance, as well as filling out the stereo field, and giving a fuller feel to the guitar.  it i surprising how much better a guitar part can sound when it has been doubled and hard paned to either side.  the same can go for vocals as well, when used in the right settings.  choruses are often doubled, and sometimes entire songs have doubled vocals.  the only problem with doubling vocals, is that unless you want the doubled sound to be obvious, it takes a lot of work to get the two tracks to sound similar enough to create the right effect.  this is why most of the time that vocals are doubled it is only in the chorus, giving the chorus a distinctly different feel than the rest of the song.  it gives more power to the vocal, giving the chorus more significance when used in that context.

i also wrote a harmony for the vocal part that i think turned out pretty well.  recording vocals is always a challenge, and is always different every time you do it.  new challenges come up every time and each artist needs different encouragements in order to bring the best performance out of them.  it’s always interesting recording vocals for that reason.  carly has a great voice, a very mature tone, and usually stays on pitch really well, even with the difficult melodies she writes, but she had never really sang harmony before.  she is used to singing the melody, and she especially had never sang harmony to her own voice.  i enjoyed working with her to get the best performance for the song.  overall it was a great session, and i’m really excited about how the song turned out.  as soon as it’s mixed i’m sure it will be up on her myspace, and i’ll be sure to let everyone know so they can listen to it.  for now, it’s off to mixing so i can move on to the next project.

paying dues

i just started a new internship last friday at robert lang studios in shoreline washington, and they have really been teaching me what paying dues means.  my first day there i was crawling in and out of a 2 or 3 foot tall crawl space between the studio and the house above, painting tar on the cement floor to stop the leaks that were happening.  i have now spent three days cleaning, vacuuming, and tarring this crawl space, and i’m now done with the first coat of tar.  it’s been a lot of hard work, but i’m hoping it will pay off later on.  everyone that works there is really nice and really hard working, and hopefully i wont have to do the grunt work for much longer.  the studio manager said they will be building a new control room soon, and i will be helping to install the new console and build the new room, so i’m pretty excited about that.  the studio is a great space, and a lot of really great artists have recorded there.  i’m excited to be back in the studio, and hopefully paying dues now will help in the future.

microsoft studios

i had the chance to go back into microsoft studios the other day and sit in on a session and learn to use an important piece of equipment they have there.  the session was for unified communications, a product microsoft released that acts as a messaging service.  it doesn’t sound very exciting, but i always enjoy recording, even when it’s not some exciting new band or something, and i always love a chance to go into microsoft studios.

after the session i had the chance to see how capture tapes and record audio and video simultaneously to a tape, but from two separate sources using the router there.  my friend sam showed me how to use it, and how it applies to me as an audio engineer.  this will hopefully be an advantage to me as i apply for positions at microsoft and other companies.  it was a fun day, and a great experience.  i also got to talk to sam some more about how to hopefully get a job at microsoft.  i’m exploring a couple of options, and hopefully soon i will be writing about applications and new positions. for the meantime, you can enjoy these pictures of the awesome control rooms at microsoft studios.  you should see the rooms in the vidlab there…

the icon console in control room 1 at ms studios