San Francisco has a bevy of transportation systems and all have their own unique sound. Off the top of my head are gas powered buses, electric buses, a lightrail system, the cable car system, the F-Market train, BART, and a few AC Transit buses coming into town. Each has its own unique aural signature. Below I have a few recordings made on the light rail system, both inside the underground stations and on the above ground tracks.

MUNI Lightrail Blog by dsteinwedel

The first section comes from Montgomery Station, in the heart of downtown. Recording in the stations is a bit tough due to constant PA announcements. (Walla is not much of a problem as people have a deathly fear of speaking when using public transit.) However, if you explore a little bit to the very end of the platform, you’ll find utility platforms that are far enough from the PA speakers to get some clean recordings. Venturing into sections like this is can be a little risky. The utility platforms in the MUNI stations aren’t marked as non-public, but from the way the station is designed it’s clear that they are meant to be for employees only. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The train makes a smooth, ghostly sound when traveling in the underground section of the system. The trains can be heard from almost a full station away if the environment is quiet and you listen intently. I’ve used these sounds as background elements in a few games by throwing them through a delay or echo with a touch of feedback and washing the whole thing through reverb. If you want the sound to be indistinguishable, the track clacks need to be cut out first.

The second half the cue is from above ground. While these trains are smooth on a straight, even, underground rail, they are anything but when traveling around corners or on uneven pavement. This cue comes from the corner of Church and Duboce, a heavily traveled intersection by light rail, buses, bikers, and some cars. However, it’s a decent place to try and capture due to the frequency of the trains (2 lines run through it), shelter from the wind, and the relative lack of cars. Also, since the trains completely envelop the intersection when crossing, it’s perfectly safe to cross with the train to perform tracking shots.

I used the clacking bit of the recording just yesterday as a sweetening element for a group of tanks. I needed something heavy, clunking, and metallic to go along with the chorus of treads and squeaks. This filled the hole nicely.

Tags: Public Transportation, Trains, Lightrail, Tracks

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A few weeks ago, my fiance and I took a short camping trip into the backcountry of the East Bay. We visited Black Diamond Mines, which is out in Antioch. While it was a bit hot, the landscape is beautiful and affords some recording opportunities. Being the avid recordist, I packed my gear in for the night. The extra 6 or 7 pounds sucks on a steep hill in 95 degree heat, but getting a chance to be out in the middle of nowhere and never have to worry about vehicle traffic is Nirvana.

Unfortunately, Antioch is up the delta and the whole place is pretty windy. The wind was light enough so as to not cause mic pops through my blimp but just strong enough for the blimp to be the cause of the wind noise. That’s not usually a problem, unless you burnt your windjammer up in a little fire escape and have yet to replace it. D’oh.

I spent a lot of time recording wholly unusable things because of that noise and you’ll hear what I’m talking about interspersed in some of the effects below (especially the gate). I ended up with two pretty cool sets of effects after all was said and done. First was the rustiest old gate I’ve ever found and a next was a night of crickets in an open field.

Rusty Gate by dsteinwedel

This one speaks for itself. It whines, it moans, it ronks and bangs. Someday when I have the chance and a good wind forecast I’m going back to get a set that’s free and clear of that damn wind.

Our campsite was next to a large, open field in the bottom of a long valley. The hardest part about recording the crickets was deciding which direction to point the mic. The chorus of insects was absolutely beautiful in all directions. At points there are also peeps in the recordings. I’m not sure what kind of animal made them although my gut says some relative of a prairie dog.

Night Crickets by dsteinwedel

At 1:42 in you’ll hear a selection of the recording pitched down at about 40% of the original speed. Below is the sun rising across the lovely field in which they live.

Recording geek notes: Neumann 191 -> Fostex FR2

Tags: Crickets, Ronks, Rusty Metal, Insects, Nature

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This week I’m going to try something a little different. Instead of recording I’m going to talk a bit about session templates as they relate to game audio sound design. First we’ll talk about why templates are good and how they help your workflow and then I’ll take you through one of my standard templates.

When I was first starting out, a designer much wiser than I told me, “Keep your sessions neat. If you die tonight, someone should be open it up and start working tomorrow.” It didn’t really dawn on me how true that was until I was handed a session that could only have been created by a complete and utter moron (or someone who just didn’t care/know any better). Mono and stereo tracks mixed together, insert effects all over the place, sends on a few random tracks to an effect track buried in the middle of other tracks, summing buses fed by tracks seemingly selected at random. I found myself thinking, “It would be easier for me to start from scratch than to figure out the organization.”

In the daily hubub of the game world, there’s no time to sit down and figure out what the heck someone else was doing. Even worse is coming back to a session you made 6 or 12 or 18 months later to make revisions only to find out that it was you, you moron, who left yourself a gigantic mess that makes no sense. Having a standard template, or set of similar templates gives you a number of advantages, all of them time-savers. First, there’s the setup, or lack of setup. Also, you can move things between sessions by quickly importing tracks (that will obviously work in your new, templated session). Finally, and most important, is the ability to come back to a session years after the fact and be able to pick up (mostly) right where you left off.

The diagram to the left is what I have come up with over many, many revisions during my last 12,000+ hours of game audio fun.

So how does it work? Rectangles are Audio Tracks and rounded rectangles are Buses. There are four components: FX Tracks, AUX Tracks, Effect Sends, and a Record Track. The signal flow goes from FX Track->AUX Track->Aux ALL->Output. Each FX Track also has a (or many) send(s), and that chain goes FX Track->Send->Aux ALL->Output. Finally, there is a send from the Aux ALL->Record Track. (Aux ALL->Output is not shown in the diagram.)

The FX Tracks hold the actual sounds and are divided into small sub-groups. You can see the A and B groups in the diagram. I have groups set up through E in my template and will import as many as I think I’ll need (usually through D). This grouping allows for easy organization, where similar elements can be placed in nearby tracks. It’s also convenient because insert effects can be applied to small groups of tracks at the same time by sticking them on the Aux tracks. Want to apply an EQ to a group of your sounds? Place them all in FXA tracks and put the effect on the AUX A bus.

At the same time an effect can be inserted on a single track while the Aux ALL bus allows effect inserts to be thrown over the entire session.

Effect sends allow more flexibility than the AUX Inserts. I often use these for an encompassing reverb, where I want each element to have a different level sent to the verb for each sound. Each FX Track comes with sends already set up but disabled (ctrl-command click). This keeps everything ready to go but does not eat into the CPU resources until necessary.

Finally there is the Record Track. This comes in handy in many situations. Once I have finished an effect, I will stick the final version, muted, up on the record track. This just makes things easier from an organizational standpoint. When I come back to the session later, I know exactly which setup belongs to which asset.

The record track also works as a scratch palette. If I’m experimenting with a chain of effects or combination of material, I can quickly arm the track and record the output. This has netted me a lot of interesting sounds and textures that would have otherwise been lost to the void.

The record track can also be used to mix down the final sound. While the debate about whether this method or Bounce to Disk sounds better, I’m not going to touch it. You can do what you feel is best. (And honestly, I can’t tell the difference. If you can, more power to you.)

This basic setup works for mono, stereo, quad, mono to stereo, mono to surround, stereo to surround, mono + stereo to stereo, mono + stereo to surround, almost any configuration you can think of. I use a close variation of it for cut-to-picture projects (more tracks in a group, groups labeled by element such as BG, Hard FX, etc.). I’ve found that this setup, along with a well labeled I/O setup (that matches my track/bus/send labeling) keeps me designing sounds instead of organizing and reorganizing my session. And that’s why we do this job in the first place, to be creative.

I’ve included my basic mono template for you to download and play with. Enjoy!

Tags: Templates, Sound Design, Game Audio

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After the G20 last week and a lively discussion on some sound boards about the ethics of recording such sounds, I thought I’d bring out one of my favorite protest sets. Living in San Francisco, I have no shortage of protests to pick from. Small, large, peaceful, angry, happy, parties, you name it--we got it. The police here are so used to working protests and marches that they have a very laid back attitude most of the time (and will pose for photographs if you ask nicely). (The marches here are also generally very peaceful affairs.) When the Olympic Torch came through the city in 2008 and throngs of genuinely angry people were lining up just a block outside my office, I had no choice but to grab the gear and head out for the day.

I found a very orderly affair along King Street, right in front of the Giant’s ballpark. The streets were blocked off with barriers and protesters of all kind lined the sidewalk. Looking like a member of the press always pays off and, using it to my advantage, I moved right past the barriers and into the street. I walked along the barriers, stopping at each group and letting them lay their chants on me. I got everything from “Free Tibet” to something about healthy eating and veganism. *Shrug* After about 20 minutes a policeman nicely asked me to move along.

Around the corner on 2nd Street, however, was a much more violent affair. The crowd here was starting to undulate and a few individuals were getting into heated arguments. The vitriol was actually pretty amusing (I never have and don’t think I ever will understand how Communists are destroying the United States...but I digress) and I can only imagine nabbed straight from talk radio.Once the torch was released, it disappeared. The city pulled an excellent switcheroo and no one knew what happened to the torch (it appeared well across the city a few hours later). This ended up being fantastic for me, as the news choppers vanished to search for the missing torch. I was left with a crowd that split up in a few directions but remained large and loud. Below are some of the more interesting sounds from the day.

OlympicTorchProtestSet by dsteinwedel

Recording geek notes: Neumann RSM 191->Sound Devices 744t.

Tags: Protests, Walla, Screaming, Singing, Anger