Castle of Illusion: Starring Mickey Mouse

Latest project has hit the (digital) shelves!  Castle of Illusion: Starring Mickey Mouse.

It was a lot of fun to work on. For a good chunk of my career the first line of the audio style guide was 'don't make it cartoony', but for once the style was very much 'make it as cartoony as possible!' which was an enjoyable challenge. I love gritty realism as much as every other sound designer but there was a private little burst of glee when it came to making cute mushrooms sounds and deflating flowers. It also involved a lot of thinking outside of the box! What would a dolphin made of jelly sound like? Or a bouncing Letter A?

For a nice change, too, we had enough time to do a lot of original recording as opposed to relying on library sounds. In many ways though, I think it might often even be a time saver - all that time you normally spend trawling the library for the closest appropriate sound, and then trying to get enough variations or massaging it to fit better, whereas when you're recording it yourself it's so much easier to match what you need and have twenty variations of it!

I shall also fondly remember this as the project on which we ruthlessly abused the shepard tone.

It was a fantastic team and the project has a lot of good memories. I've worked in teams both good and bad, but when the team gels and communication flows and everyone is on the same page it all goes so much more smoothly. Sadly, this was Sega Studio Australia's last project, and I already miss everyone terribly. Hopefully we'll all cross paths again in the future, perhaps at other studios, or perhaps the indie scene! Some are already having great success in that arena.

In the meantime, I would recommend everyone who enjoyed the original Castle of Illusion check it out! It's already out on Steam, PSN and XBLive.

Taking Care of Cables

I've recently been trawling the rich minefield of Youtube for tutorials on making your own contact mic, since it is apparently both cheap and easy to make your own. That post will probably come later, after I get my hands on some piezoelectric transducer elements.  But Youtube Recommended Videos threw up a classic that I thought worth sharing here.

How to properly coil an audio cable, using the over-under method.

It took me an embarrassingly long time in my professional career to discover this technique - I wasn't even aware of it until someone observed that I obviously hadn't ever been taught to properly wrap a cable, which sent me scurrying (again) to Youtube to fill that void in my knowledge. One of those small things that's surprisingly easy to miss when your knowledge is a combination of self-taught and learning from other professionals who assume you must know something so basic already! Maybe this post will spare someone else the embarrassment.

New Toys

It seems like it has been hardly any time at all, but my trusty Zoom H4n was simply no longer cutting the mustard for my portable recording wants and needs. So the time came to upgrade! (...Before the end of financial year.)

So after much deliberation, I chose a Sony PCM-D50.

These have actually been on the market for a while, and don't appear to be in production anymore (?), which is a crying shame because from the looking around I've done this is still the best handheld recorder on the market. When I bought the Zoom it was both a great deal cheaper and had XLR inputs, which tipped the boat in its favour at the time, but aside from the occasional planned field recording trip the XLR inputs didn't get much use and my growing dissatisfaction with it prompted me to go searching for an upgrade.

I'm absolutely in love with it. Having both the monitor and record levels on such smooth-turning dials was the first thing I noticed and appreciated. The buttons as well are fantastic and near-silent - one thing that was always very annoying with the Zoom was how every button press was massively amplified, and how incredibly sensitive it was to any sort of handling noise. The start up time is a smidge faster than the Zoom, and the menus themselves nicer to navigate given the button layout. It also feels sturdier, despite weighing roughly the same as the Zoom with the batteries in. The benefits of an aluminium casing instead of plastic.

In terms of size it's about the same, although half the width, which saves space. It's about the same size as a Nintendo 3DS XL actually, so if you're in need of a case, they're cheap and easy to find. It also has 4GB of in-built memory which the Zoom lacks, although the tradeoff for this is being stuck with the Sony Pro Duo memory cards which are a lot pricier than the standard SDs.

The real value, of course, is in how much better the Sony's microphones sound compared to the Zoom's. The first and most obvious improvement being the significantly lower noise floor, which alone is worth the upgrade.  The microphone quality is really great bang for buck here, you would have to pay a heck of a lot more to get something better.

This is definitely supplanting the Zoom H4n in my bag. I'm hoping to at some point in the future to purchase another portable recorder with at least four XLR inputs for the more heavy-duty planned field recording sessions, at which point I'll retire the Zoom for good. Super excited to go do some spur-of-the-moment field recording with this thing!

Pitch Correction Shenanigans

Since I've specialised in sound design more so than music, I've actually not needed to do much in the way of pitch correction in the past, since most of the time of any music mixing or composition I do tackle is usually of the synth and midi-sequenced variety, so tuning concerns and pitch problems very rarely come up.  The occasional sound effect has been nudged into key but that's usually been something fairly simple and easily accomplished by ear.

However, recently I wanted to sample a steel tongue drum, with one of the goals to make a VSTi of it.

(This magnificent bastard)

It's a lovely instrument, a slightly lavish Christmas present to myself last year. It's fun and easy to play, and quite meditative, but as you might expect, its pitch varies dramatically according to ambient temperature, by up to as much as a semi-tone sometimes.

This is okay so when you're just jamming for fun solo, but for the purposes of a VSTi some pitch correction is necessary - especially if you ever want to throw it into a composition with any other instruments. Which is where my adventure into the world of pitch-correcting plugins has come in.

Here's a small snippet of the session recording, to get a feel for the sort of sound a steel tongue drum produces:


For the steel tongue drum, the vibrato and overtones from the resonance - which is a huge part of the drum's sound - rule out pretty much anything other than Melodyne, which after some fairly exhaustive research appears to be the only polyphonic-capable pitch correction plugin floating around. It's tough to swallow, though - $300 is a big investment for a plugin, especially one that you would have need of infrequently. It would definitely be a must-have for anyone more heavily involved in recording and mixing music though.

This is probably to the surprise of absolutely nobody in audio - Melodyne is fairly well known as the gold-standard, standing head and shoulders over Auto-Tune. But in looking for alternatives, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of WavesTune! It can't handle polyphonic, but based on my admittedly limited experimentation with it, with vocals and a lot of other instruments the result is even smoother and more natural-sounding than Melodyne!

VariAudio in Nuendo (and Cubase too, presumably) wasn't too shabby either, although its analysis was somewhat spotty and required a great deal of intervention. Still, considering it comes with the program, I was also pleasantly surprised by it. By controlling how much you want to flatten the pitch on a segment-by-segment basis it was very easy to preserve the vibrato, which is something a lot of the pitch-correction plugins stomp all over.

I gave Audition's pitch correction tools a whirl too, for curiosity's sake. The Auto Pitch Corrector actually wasn't too shabby with basic tasks, but like any automatic process is prone to blowing up in your face horribly and spazzed out at the slightest hint of vibrato.  The manual pitch correction is a bit better and more versatile, but nice as the interface controls were, you would need to either have perfect pitch or pair it with some hardcore analysis, and its tolerance before it starts sounding horribly processed is extremely narrow. Still, it's a feature that could eventually catch up to Steinberg's VariAudio... if Adobe spends any time on it. The pitch manipulation tools in Audition took a massive step back after 3.0 and have never quite recovered.

For now, though, Melodyne and WavesTune get my votes of confidence! Urgh, now to decide how much use I'll get out of Melodyne in the future... $300 isn't horrific for a plugin of that calibre, but when the money is tight... maybe I should have bought it instead of the drum!