Recording all the fun and weird things

Been feeling a little bit scatterbrained lately!  That's my only excuse for not updating this blog for so long.  It's a poor excuse, I know, and likely to be repeated.

Part of my professional development goals at Sega is to record something at least once a week, and it's been really awesome so far. Back when I was with KMMGames I did make an effort to record when I could, but it was largely a mixture of opportunism and need.  The audio room was in the less-than-ideal position of being wedged between train tracks, a construction site, and the QA room, which meant I was limited to either waiting for a quiet moment or only recording very loud sounds.

No such issues at Sega!  The rooms are very well insulated which makes it extremely convenient to set up a quick recording session, even if only a single mic for five or ten minutes.  It's paid off very well so far, with a rapidly growing library of sounds, many of which have already been useful.

Here's a picture of just last week's recording props:

A bit of soft discarded plastic from a popped plastic ball, a wind up toy fan, and a bunch dried clay bits that were leftover from a sculpture I made when I was in an arts-and-crafts kind of mood after cutting through Lincraft one day (incidentally, the source of all my arts-and-crafts moods).  They sounded kind of interesting when I was gathering them up to throw them out, so instead stored them in a bag and put them with the rest of the junk I packrat for potential recording.

Useful discovery - bits of solid clay actually make very good rattling bone sounds.  With a little bit of processing and layering I think you could make a pretty good sound set for a skeleton out of these.

One advantage to recording your own sounds where possible which has come up with this is not only how many more variations you can record - because however good the libraries are, it's rare you can get more than a couple of decent matching variations from the same sound set - but also the potential to play some of them like instruments.  To drag the sounds out, or make them short or punchy, soft or violent, or use them on or with a wide variety of surfaces.  One thing I've been learning to do better is to not just record the obvious sound a prop makes, but to wring every single possible sound out of it.

Just some of the things we've recorded in-studio lately have been rubber and leather gloves, squeaky toys, paper and plastic bags, balloons, silly putty, soft furry slippers, a vampire cape, and a jaw harp.

It's been a lot of fun, too!  If I were to come up with an art analogy, recording sound is like working directly with paint and clay, as opposed to working in photoshop or 3DSMax.  You can get really great results either way, but there's something very satisfying about dealing with the raw materials, even if it's often more clumsy and uncontrollable.