Plan for Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor

Oh, Johnson, I am a man on the edge.

Last week at Mode 7 Laboratories, we finished the implementation of the sound content for Determinance, and I would definitely count this as one of the hardest but most rewarding periods on my part of the project so far.



Here's Ian typing things which end with semicolons and swearing, whilst Tristan renames a bunch of wind sound effects. What you cannot see in this picture is the programming wing lambasting me for my virtually incomprehensible filenames. You crazy guys and your OpenAL. I have a distinct recollection of endlessly typing "iamanidiot(true);" and then staring at the screen whilst NOTHING HAPPENED. I think it was this kind of thing which sent me over the edge and eventually compelled me to walk around the house giggling and repeating a line of in-game dialogue ("Oh, Johnson" if you must know) over and over again. Ian tells me he does this every day (the programming, not the giggling). Just three such days caused me to end up like this:



Since this is a .plan file, I thought I would share something of potential technical merit and extol the virtues of one of the finest pieces of software to grace our humble earth: Ableton Live.



Now from this fascinating image, you can perhaps glean an inkling of the extreme lengths to which we were forced to extend ourselves in order to create something which sounded acceptable. This Live set is my homebrew sword-swipe generator: I can define the amplitude and bandpass filter envelopes of the swipe sound, as well as controlling EQ parameters and giving the whole thing a nice chunky compressed feel using Live's in-built compressor. Live's level of realtime control remains untouched; it's my weapon of choice when I do live gigs in my other life as a dance musician. But for these purposes, armed with my trusty laptop, an old but sturdy copy of Cool Edit Pro, M-Audio's only soundcard that actually works (the Audiophile USB) and Germany's finest performance sequencer, I feel relatively invincible.

I'm just using a burst of white noise for swiping as you can see in the above. I did a similar thing for a water effect which combined pure noise with a strange spraying sample I downloaded from Sonomic. More on that in a second.

And now, a short interlude while you watch this video of a cat knocking over The Orion Conspiracy I made when I was starting to crack up.



Right, we're back, and it's time to talk Sonomic. Now, these people have an interesting sound library at their beck and call; there's some pretty esoteric stuff going on in there if you care to look. But sites like this don't seem to know their purpose, which is providing the raw material for sound designers to recombine into exciting shapes. Their purpose is not to sell canned, over-processed crap at an extortionate price; their purpose is not to sell pre-mixed "sci-fi" synth stabs which someone has made by pressing middle C on a JP-8080 preset and recording it onto a Minidisc; and their purpose is, essentially, not to give me anything I could make on my own. Even if you've never touched sound-editing before, trust me when I tell you that cool, abstract, electronic-sounding sounds (like GUI or menu effects) can be made by you with free software in under thirty minutes. There's a million free soft-synths out there, there's Goldwave and Audacity (we even used Goldwave for some quick processing on Dt's sound just before we stuck some of it in the engine), so there's no excuses any more. Stop buying "electro-wibble-5.wav" from Sonomic and force them to concentrate on what they do well: sourcing well-recorded organic samples us mortals can't/can't be bothered to get for ourselves. We don't all have the tenacity to mess around with big diaphragm mics and condoms to record splashing (and I promise you that has been done in the past, but thankfully not by me, although I did consider it at one point) so we need a company to provide a service. Oh, and by the way, Sonomic, that service does not include resampling your preview sounds to ridiculous bitrates so everything sounds like a fat kid rolling in crisps. How am I supposed to evaluate whether a sample is even slightly worth the price you've allocated to it if all I can hear is the insolent burbling of compression artefacts?

And finally, every sound engineer knows that his reward is another human being hearing his creation for the first time and taking it through his ears and into his heart. That moment when the eyes light up, the first trembles of a smile breaking out across the rigid neutrality of a face in concentration:



Despite this, doing sound in collaboration with whoever is heading up your project cannot be recommended more. Instant feedback is vital; there's nothing lamer than spending a week working on something, having it stuck in the engine, and then realise it sounds like a bin falling over. Also, us creative types need a lot of encouragement, beer, incomprehensible American sports talk-shows, and virtuosic demonstrations of how bad we are at Soul Calibur.

All I have to do now is finish up some more music, which has the potential to be mildly less traumatic, but in this business, anything's possible. Any day now I'm expecting to be called up to make the sound of a seal falling through a multi-dimensional rift heard by a player waiting to join a server, but it's my job, no, it's all of our jobs to be prepared for that.

(P.S. Markup Lite is apparently having an issue which makes it unable to generate either an apostrophe or an ellipsis. I'd like to apologise on its behalf, but I can't, sorry, CANNOT.)