The site LIVES! After a hiatus from blogging for a while due to school, an internship, and a job, I have finally returned to the updating world in a rather exciting and unpredictable point in my life right now.
I graduated from Pyramind…well for the first time. I plan to return next year picking up Logic certifications and very advanced Pro Tools certifications.
(I’m the head in the very back, middle on the right)
Until then I will be throwing myself out there in the sound world, doing small projects for independent and indie developers of games and short films. In the meantime I will be doing a lot of my own personal sound projects and game implementation.
Some cool shit I learned this year:
Reversing the sound of a balloon popping is an excellent gun noise
Best way to get a juicy guttural squelching sound? Either plop your hands into some Mac n’ Cheese (using a U87 of course) or take a sledgehammer to a pumpkin and play with the guts after.
Using reversed reverb is a great way to make a normal voice sound unworldly or monstrous. Reversed reverb wouldn’t ever exist in our world, so to hear it is indicative of monsters or aliens.
Xform is a godly plugin.
Actually using sounds from field recording is incredibly satisfying. It means you get to say “I made that sound,” rather than “I processed and manipulated that sound,” not that there’s anything wrong with that either!
Accurate footsteps are harder to create in Foley than I excepted. Running sounds on concrete? Don’t actually run, STOMP on that concrete as hard as you can!
Clip gain is both very dangerous and very enticing in Pro Tools, use with caution.
The pencil tool zoomed in up really close actually changes the shape of the waveform in Pro Tools, and is a lifesaver for clips, blips, and pops within sounds. I treat it as a video game, finding something irregular or wrong in the audio, pinpointing it, and DESTWOYING the incorrect transient by smoothing it over.
Stay tuned for more frequent updates! I’m going to try and go for a monthly basis at this point.
Happy New Year! See you 2013, you were awesome. May 2014 be ever open to new discovery.
~MJ