Headlander: Discovering Modern Methods in Sound via 70's Sci-Fi

[Music] so we're gonna start my name is Camden Stoddard of Double Fine productions and I am David Earl of David Earl productions and we're the sound and music team of head Lander brought to you by Double Fine and Adult Swim so we just wanted to show you a little bit of head Lander in action to start so you get a chance to see in full game mode [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the tranquility of the stones is yours [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] right [Applause] sooo bad [Applause]

all right so what is head Lander head lander is a retro futuristic side-scrolling action adventure game it's set in a world inspired by 1970 science fiction it's a world of automation which all of humanity has transferred their minds into robotic and posture bodies and it's a utopia gone wrong which is run by a deranged computer head lander was inspired by the science-fiction movies and media of the 70s and when I say that we're not talking about star wars we're talking about the more experimental and fringe movies of the 70s movies like the black hole silent running Logan's Run and Dark Star among others these movies had some things in common they were experimental with heavy themes a bit of dark humor and most importantly they were not a hero's journey another common theme in

all the science fiction of the 70s was that many of the protagonists were full of doubt the character would start out with a purpose in life and solid conviction which is then disrupted by a shattering doubt as the truth of the system that they're involved in is revealed this gives an unparalleled sense of discovery in these stories what we are talking about today the approach of music and sound 4head Lander was our attempt to mirror the approach of the filmmakers of seventy sci-fi now we aren't knocking Star Wars even though we just Brant aligned to the Death Star we love that movie and many of the movies and media following it you know we're just emphasizing that our influences for this film are firmly rooted in the weird and experimental aesthetic of 70s dystopian sci-fi one of the most experimental aspects of Hedlund er is its core mechanic you're a human head in a life-sustaining flying helmet that can detach and attach to other

bodies machines and vehicles and when we asked about the inspiration for this crazy idea we were able to get this little clip from Lee petty who is the creative lead for the and he had this story to tell us so sometimes inspiration comes from really strange places and I remember thinking about a car accident or New York car accident I was in the sin once and my girlfriend the time was driving and we were going on the freeway and the car suddenly break and she like pulled the wheel really strong to the side and I just remember the whole car skidding sideways like all the way across with fast lane all the way across all those lanes of traffic and I remember that sensation a lot of people have in those sort of tense situations where time seems to slow down I remember like reaching my hand over there grabbing the wheel trying to straighten the car out we were heading right off the road into a ditch and we corrected right at the last moment and didn't go into the ditch

as the car stopped and I remember yeah that feeling of weightlessness almost like I was in zero-g and there was that sensation that like maybe my head was accelerating or blasting off and I remember remembering that when thinking about this game for some reason and and then the other piece of the puzzle that actually happened at that same time was she had a crystal hanging from her rearview mirror and I remember her reaching up and thanking the crystal for saving us right wouldn't would of course look the fact that I grabbed the will but there was also something about the idea of a crystal this like faith in this strange inanimate object or this artifice that was somehow connected to that for me and with crystal power in the game so maybe that so for our creative brief we're told that head Lander was going to be 70s sci-fi exploration of a story that's not a hero's journey the player becomes less sure of themselves as the game progresses and the game is like really

personal and orders yeah in fact according to Lee head Lander is an exploration of identity in summation really weird unusual game so as lead sound designer working within these parameters I had many challenges today I wanted to focus on just three of the biggest and how I approached them and some of this they came up with but these challenges were dialogue profiles for multiple multiple characters evoking the memory of 70's sound design and then the relationship of the sound design and the music in head lander you interact with over 25 different characters and they are all robots when 25 different robot characters and sometimes all of them are on the same on the screen chattering about how do you separate their voices how can you tell them apart especially if gameplay relies on it to start I broke the characters of head Lander into groups the differences between the groups were determined on a spectrum of

absolute machine to almost human Shepherd's are weaponized and fully mechanical the citizens are robotic with human personalities but they've been compromised it's like they're in a permanent daze rebels are like citizens they have robotic bodies but are fully alert and cognizant global applies to only a few characters the deranged computer that runs the whole world the security system that speaks to the player through the door and then a benefactor character that speaks to a player through the helmet yeah the door is a character in this game yes very rude one my solutions to creating unique vocal profiles for these character groups fell mainly into three techniques processing editing and spatial placement for the Shepherd's eye full evoke coded the dialogue using an EMS 5000 vocoder plug-in and the reason I chose a specific vocoder plug-in is because out of all the others that I tested like the orange the mouths evoke 20 the EMS came the closest to the

original 70s vocoder robot sound that I was looking for this is because it's modeled on the original hardware very similar to the one that created the iconic voices of the Cylons from the original Battlestar Galactica I don't think any voice of the 70s could be more iconic than Cylons here's some examples of some of the Shepherds I have a dry example and then vote code and vote coded wet citizens are also advised that prolonged eye contact with chef will result in immediate termination citizens almost supplies that for long time contact with shepherds will result in immediate termination citizens are also advised that prolonged I love The Hideaway Shepherd's will result in immediate termination citizens are advised that prolonged eye contact with shepherds will result in immediate termination I love cry not on the destruction is to be expected there's a little explanation

here so there's a certain part of the game that's based on chess and all the characters were speaking Elizabethan like Shakespearean lines so it got very difficult processing Shakespeare through a vocoder yeah trying to make Shakespeare happen when they sound like a robot or a castle in this case this was a really specific hunter Shepherd it was almost insect like so we asked the actress to enunciate all of her s's and really really hard pronounce them and we got this result sleep mode very

fun for the citizens and rebels my approach was slightly different because I wanted some of the humanity to poke through citizens and rebels are closely related in the game the citizens are being controlled by a behavioural dampening circuit there they're kind of out of it like they're in a trance the rebels on the other hand are fully aware since they have removed that circuit the removal had consequences though in the form of speech impediment robotic stutter if you will the process tones of both these characters are actually the same it was basically a heavy chorusing effect but it occurred to me the best way to show the difference between these characters would be in the editing for citizens I chose to show the loss of their humanity by editing out the breaths of the voice actors that were portraying the citizens now any good dialogue editor will tell you that keeping the breaths in are good for motion for showing how the character is

feeling but it was this kind of vaguely disturbing feel that I was going for so I took them all out the rebels on the other hand I kept their breaths in to show that they regained some of their humanity but they also had a digital stutter due to the fact that they had slightly damaged themselves when removing their circuit this also had the benefit of making them sound like they were struggling which added to their story arc in the game now I gave the rebels the stutter roughly every 5 lines and I had to do it manually so as you can imagine this was a little bit more than trimming tops and tails and in all it added another 2 to 3 months of extra dialogue editing and here's some examples it reminds me that it's what's inside the cat there are also very 70s

we're headed to the Luna Citadel soon I hope you'll be with us you know what I'm talking about Michael before the next set of characters they need to sound like they were coming from everywhere these voices were actually coming out of the world around the player including the players helmet on occasion this differs greatly from the robots they're just walking around in the environment these characters are the environment every room every ship every vehicle had these omnipresent characters on occasion these characters would morph from 3d to 2d depending on the game state and in order to give these characters the kind of weight and power that they possess I used heavy heavy compression with a lot of Drive and phasing techniques when I'm talking about these characters and how powerful they are I'm literally mean they are filled with electricity and energy it's like the

whole world is talking to you when they speak here's some examples incorrect color no admittance this is the rude door yeah that's the door incorrect take your little costume and go play somewhere else take your little costume and go play somewhere else look down he's open like the game good video this is the queen in the chess world as a very Eastern European before this character the actor was very very good but he kind of still felt like a little bit of an old man so I added a lot of weight through him through compression and sub so here's what he sounds like

dry it's time for I reminder on the importance of waste management from your friendly neighborhood refuse captain electro sucks is therefore it's time for a reminder of the importance of waste management from your friendly neighborhood refuse captain services so what is sound design from the 70s if not Star Wars inspired sound design when I was studying sound design for head Lander the movies they studied like Dark Star and West world and Logan's Run actually had pretty lackluster sound design I wasn't really that impressed but I was surprised that my memories of these movies did not match up to the reality of how they sounded when I saw them later and I actually had a similar reaction recently David music but I have all kinds of reality but that's another story I did appreciate how the sound designers of these movies worked within their constraints constraints and the approach

they took I noticed that the sound design was not taking wildly different sounds and blending them together to get a bigger sound if there was to be something like an engine it would be an amalgam of engine it's not an elephant roar or dry ice on a cymbal or ball peen hammer hitting a cable sound designers on these movies would take a single source or only a couple and then process these few sources with very strange delays hyper pitting and massive compression in the black hole the engines of the ship don't sound like new technology or particularly futuristic they just sound really really big the transport in Westworld which is a sort of futuristic hydrofoil just sounds really really loud my favorite is the guns and lo Coons run it's like the sound designer was more concerned with the energy being output by the weapon rather than being concerned with how the weapon was creating the energy now this all changed radically after Star Wars where folks like Ben Burtt would open the door to

layered sound design for head Lander though I was interested in pre Burtt sound design where constraints played more of a role in the results a lot of the sounds of 70s sci-fi were more mechanical later on sounds of robotics and chips and doors and other elements would be based on hydraulics and other more efficient futuristic things but I wanted to approach things in head Lander like they were all mechanical in nature even the computers and I received this creative direction from Lee who said in this world in head Landers world digital was never invented here are some of the examples that I did just love that sir Buckley [Music]

[Applause] [Music] just maxed [Applause] this is feedback being played through an eight-track players speaker had a really weird property that 8-track was crazy tape delay four days [Applause] this is actually the inner workings of a clock

what a period at the universe is so the other part of 70 sound designs that I notice was the use of synthesis the appearance of a synthesizer in early 70s cinema especially it was not blended in with other sounds it was usually a cue for the listener denoting a special event like an evil robot arriving a large ship taking off or teleportation and I realized my sound design and use of synthesizers and head Lander would need to be particularly mindful of the soundtrack which Dave was making it was wonderful I also noticed something about the story arc I realized over the course of the game the separation music and sound design need to become less and less obvious as the character becomes more and more confused and the situation becomes more unhinged the sound and the music needed to blur this would enhance the effect of being uncomfortable and unsure for the player and Dave and I were both given instructions for the end

of the game to be very very psychedelic and as we put it to take the gloves off here are some examples of our psychedelic sound as I am blurring into music [Music] this was all made by the voices of people who work at double fine by the way [Music] this next example is made entirely out of guitar feedback [Music]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so as you can see it had to get very unhinged and I would like to now turn it over to Dave and the wonderful soundtrack and synthesis work that he did no thanks man I mean it was it's amazing we work on a game where it's only you and one other person making all of the sound like all of the sound it makes it a very personal thing so I started working on the music for head

lander in 2013 when Lee petty was doing amnesia fortnight which is this sort of pitch that everybody everybody in the company is like pitching a game and so I was able to work on it and the original aesthetic for the game was to be sort of John Berry in space so John Berry does like you know the James Bond scores and like the original black hole is John Berry and when Adult Swim swooped in the aesthetic change they shoved it into the 70s and that made me pretty happy because the the new idea was to draw up on the electronic music of the 70s and I was beaming ear to ear because as a kid I was absolutely crazy about electronic music I was really entranced with the worlds of Vangelis and Wendy Carlos and jean-michel Jarre and is out to Amita and tangerine dream he knows what I'm talking about and the idea that I could create music from my childhood like something that was just gonna be this pure nostalgia fest had me really excited but there were some challenges and I just wanted to explore you know

three of the sort of things that I had to deal with as Camden said before the game was taking place in a world that existed without the microchip and it's also noted that it had a bunch of robots instead of humans and even the protagonist didn't have lungs so it was gonna make things kind of interesting from the very beginning I was told that the score for head Lander needed to sound as synthetic as the world that it was set in this meant that I was gonna find myself some analogue sense yeah there's some great software out there but my goal was to get knobs and sliders and a real tact sort of writing process there wasn't much in the 70s as far as like digital recording was concerned not sort of mass-produced some music was recorded to tape so I'm like ah I got to get my hand on some table Oh it'd be great tape so you know talk a little bit about that

science fiction of the 70s also had the kind of classic themes that were expected of film scoring they were still kind of throwback to the 50s and 60s and there was still those kind of expectations placed on the composers just with the different palette and I knew I was gonna need to create some themes for head Lander but I didn't want to get all John Williams you know like light motifs and like opera you know it was gonna be much more simple and I knew that I needed to make the score sound really personal sometimes cheesy yep and definitely sentimental the soundtracks that inspired head Lander sometimes conveyed an almost naive sense of the future and these you could hear the composer's tinkering around with synthesizers don't ya this guy Nicole and they were trying to like pull emotions out of synthesizers and sort of failing you know so it's a lot of fun to listen to these composers experimenting with what they've considered new technology and in integrated in with their you know composer tendencies so I wanted to try

and capture that as well that kind of sense of experimentation that naive sort of childlike sense of experimentation so I already had an sh-101 by roland and I had a cord monitor on the monotron is this big it's like 50 bucks and it's awesome every sound designer and composer should have one yes and then the Dave Smith prophet 8 and I was like oh you know I could do the whole score on these three cents yeah that wasn't gonna happen so I ended up leaning on I did cheat a little bit and I leaned on you know monarch by ni and a whole bunch of reactor ensembles like I have a really amazing Celina string ensemble in reactor that I really enjoyed a lot and then of course I had a sampled Buchla system 100 Buchla that helped a lot yes so I'd originally envisioned it envisioned riding all the music at home and then going into the synth museum in Emeryville because the synth museum in

every bill has everything that's the yamaha cs-80 i mean they have all these like really rare analog synths and if you ever want to go and just play with analog sense that's the place to go that's an amazing amazing joint they're all taken care of and ready to record and everything but after a couple of days of recording with my sense I knew I was gonna have to get sense in my studio because the immediate gratification of having the sense right there I could wake up walk in my studio and just go for it well and kind of infected me with the sickness so Jeff cross is a friend of mine who works over at Apple and he's a great electronic musician and I remembered his collection of analog since I went over to his house we were hanging out and I was drooling all over them so I drove a van to his house and I decided to ask him after I drove the van to his house if I could borrow his sense and he agreed so I immediately loaded

them in the van before he could change his mind we ended up with the Yamaha CS 15 we had a mug prodigy and an ARP Odyssey and the original korg ms-20 and a lot of the soundtrack was written on these devices so I'm eternally grateful to Jeff but I wasn't done there so another friend of mine Frank Garvey I remembered he had this huge collection of cents and I'd call him up and I'm like hey Frank you know those since yeah could I can I borrow them well if you get them out of hock they were all sitting in a in a pawn shop off of sixth Street here in San Francisco and if you know sixth Street in San Francisco not a great area so that said Candida and I made a deal and we got those and we bailed them out yeah bailed them out rescued them and that included the Moga Voyager XL we had a Dave Smith mono and poly Evolver and another

another arp odyssey and then of course you know i had all of my sense so as you can see got a lot of sense going on in this car it was kind of ridiculous and you know this is one of the one of the things that was important about this was just to realize that i have this community of people that i've put a lot of energy and time into and i try to really help everybody i possibly can anybody who knows me knows that I will like give you whatever I can technically to help you out and it came back and that was just really nice they feel that reciprocity was really really cool so on my first date I mean night with the mogh Voyager XL I ran it through Valhalla DSP shimmer reverb and it was just a total revelation I mean it just changed everything and I just hit record and started going with it and ended up with stuff like this

[Laughter] [Music] it's quite a night no man was a helluva night [Music] [Music]

[Music] look people walking now they're like what the hell is going on [Music] so the all of that that you just heard there are excerpts from a single improvisation an unbroken improvisation

that went on for about seven and a half minutes and it's on the head Lander soundtrack it's called Methuselah game and there's no editing there's no like live play no quantize no nothing it's just it's just a synth and a reverb and that's it so the creative direction for the for the game is also to have this kind of polished and slick sound but have some cracks in the veneer showing the decrepit and broken innards of a world that was being held together with spit and glue so I really thought that using tape was gonna help me get there you know I was like and I was really excited about it you know like I remember recording on tape barely and I I was like okay we're gonna saturate the tape and we're gonna call this taping goodness and all this great stuff and there's gonna be this you know dirt and Wow and flutter and all this cool stuff I even had a wire recorder set up and I had cassette players and all this stuff and and in the course of using it I remembered something

I hate tape I hate it I hate almost everything about it and I just my nostalgia took me over you know I don't like loading tape machines I don't like waiting for the transport I don't like maintaining the machines there's some engineer out there like a gun but you know some of the tracks on the soundtrack ended up staying that have the lay back from tape but honestly it was such a pain to work with and and it was it was an important revelation for me you know Camden was talking earlier about how he'd watched these movies from the 70s and was like you know it's not really great and I had a similar reaction when I was using tape so it was it was kind of important cuz I remembered you know using tape I remember hitting the vu meters I remember trying to get it as loud as possible so and and saturating tape like I I remember doing that but and it was fun like my memories were fun but when I actually started doing it again I was

like this is a pain so I went back and I started listening an old soundtrack watching old commercials I even checked out the like really crappy color palette of the 70s you know where everything's like beige and brown and yellow and orange even the wood trend technology like you know you'd have this like really awesome piece of tech or synth and it had like wood on it you know which makes me laugh like when you open garage band has wood paneling on the sides and so you know going through all this stuff I realized that I had to put some ugly in the score you know I needed some stuff that was just ugly and gross like the 70s were to properly show you know this this fabricated world that this computer was trying to think up you know all the way down to like Adobe and lapels so tape reminded me of all that and that was kind of important to go through that whole series of hating tape but I did also find out that I love tape emulation so I ended up leaning a lot on you ad

for there stood or 800 and roll in space F echo and EP 34 tape delay mcdee SP I used their AC 201 and 101 which do a really good job of emulating that sort of hardware I also used waves Eddie Kramer tape and that stuff worked really well it gave me concise control you know my loops would come out correct I could play something back twice and it would sound the same it was a lot of fun to use that stuff and I also used console emulation from Steve slave which helped me not only get these emulations of you know the sort of non-linear sounds of these of these analog channels across my mix but I could also some as well which was worked out pretty well now one of the funniest things and most memorable things about head landed when we were talking about the score was no

drums for you in the first meeting lee was pretty open about you know ideas and things about the score and like where we were gonna go with it but then out of the blue he goes oh by the way I don't want drums I hate drums I don't want them at all no drums anywhere couldn't believe it yeah I mean my eye was twitching and I'm like you know as you can imagine that's a huge limitation you know it's pretty big deal because drums do so much they drive the soundtrack they add drama they transmute they can even transfer you to a decade of choice if you're using like a drum kit and I was really looking forward to that the 70s 30 dead drum kit you know like Fleetwood Mac or something I was like looking forward to that kind of thing and maybe going towards like Led Zeppelin or something and no nope no drums for you so I'm like what am I gonna do I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to drive things along so I ended up using sequencers and arpeggiators and and using more of synthesis to try and drive things some of my sense like the sh-101 that I brought with me have an on-board sequencer and an on-board

arpeggiator and I was able to use those and and help use that to drive the score and create motion one of the things that's funny about these old sequencers the the simple sequencers is that they go beat to be it's like that and it it does so I came up with this solution of taking you know they take control voltage right it's not MIDI it's like you're you're literally taking a guitar cable and going click and sending voltage to make it do something and the clock on here basically is looking for control voltage to pulse so what I did is I took a cable out of my audio interface and in logic I have this drum machine playing a really really really loud stick clack and I would be able to use the sequencer within ultrabeat to program these kind of disjointed patterns so the clock in here that was coming in was no longer this steady thing it would be and it worked really

well it was actually really cool I also used the mobile age or excels MIDI beat clock to cv control as well to UM to help facilitate that and it worked out really well so what I wanted to do is just show you a little bit about my baby this is the sh-101 that you see on screen is the same as the one I have except it doesn't have that awesome you know I thought about getting the handle just for this you know talk engagement and I was gonna get a little headset mic and start you know this app and rogering all over the place but decided against it so what we have is we have a modulator VCO you know that's the oscillator we've got a mixer for all these different waves and we've got a filter and an envelope monophonic I can play one note at a time but what's beautiful is the note sounds [Music] for a little tiny synthesizer that can run on batteries you know this thing can sound pretty amazing to give you an

example but I can also drop that down a little bit [Music] and when I talk about the immediacy of sliders that's what I'm talking about like you just sit there and you grab something and make something happen so I really have a lot of fun with that so with the envelope on the right hand side of course I can shape how the sound propagates [Music] if I make it very short decay now load up that sequencer that I was talking about so I have an internal clock that's running this right now [Music]

[Applause] [Music] that's basically had that and like the arpeggiator work yeah I gotta say as a sound designer I was really easy to be inspired with the stuff he was sending me this wasn't fun and speaking of sound design so I'm not allowed to use drums right right you know I'm gonna cheat so on these old synthesizers they always had a noise generator you know it sounds like it's what you get when you're television used to turn off at night which it doesn't do anymore and so I've got noise but what's cool

about noise is that if you add a resonant peak on your filter it's it's it's singling out some of those frequencies [Music] so you end up it does self oscillating which is pretty neat and very handy because if you start adding an envelope to your filter you know you have something that sounds a lot like I mean all that reverb but it's like a kick drum right especially in old video games and things like that the usual tricks like this all the time then if you wanted to get a snare you just turn that resonance down turn the frequency up and then you have this cool thing where if you hold it down it dies but if you turn your release up [Applause]

so it's just so much fun for sound design oh and you have the huge bass drop you know like if you go into a club and you like anyway so anyway I just wanted to show you some of the things that this synth could do and kind of how I have fun with it you know I definitely have an illness so when I create a cue for head lander I would think really vertically in and what I mean by that is I would stack like I'd make a saw I'd make a composition but then stack it very deep with stems and give them over to Camden so that he could mix these stems together in different ways you know it's essential to do that sort of thing so you can get as many cues as possible as

many as many rooms and things covered with a single cue as possible yeah I think a final count was 143 tracks yeah yeah it's a sickness in the score would change like you'd get more stems if you're in a large room less stems if you're in a small room things would be filtered a certain way if you're outside can we throw a lot of reverb on it and things like that and there's even one room where you walk over these lasers and Camden pulled out this sequenced noise and just push that up in the mix and it really gave you a feeling of lasers which was cool and that was that was really unique for me I mean cannon had this amazing this amazing ability to remix my material without pissing me off and you know I never let people kind of mix my stuff but Camden just really had an ear for it after after a couple of levels I knew that I could trust him implicitly so I think it's explicit sure

anyway so I knew I could trust his judgment and we were on the phone every day talking about this stuff and that was new to me as well like having a team and feeling part of a team when you're an external contractor doing music I was invited to meetings every week from the beginning before levels were designed when we were talking about concepts I was I was in there with them talking to you know people who are building levels and brooms and art you know people are making art you know is it was incredible and because of all this you know I I was sitting in a meeting one time and I just kind of piped up because I saw that they had this one level in in head Lander that was calling back to this movie silent running and silent running is this movie where basically they're flying the last forests of Earth through space to save them and Bruce Dern falls in love with these forests and

essentially murders all of his crewmates to save the forests and then there's the scene where he's like walking through one of the forests you know thinking about killing his crew or whatever you know it's very serene and this Joan Baez song comes on you know and and it just this like morose Joan Baez syrupy folk song comes on it was surreal and I'm like we have to do that yeah we got to make that happen and I mentioned it to Camden and then we brought it up at the meeting and they were like oh yeah yeah we're gonna do that so not only did they include the song which I had my wife sing the Joan Baez part and I wrote this song that was like just a total ripoff of you know I'm sorry oh my of the song and silent running and they not only took the song and put it in there they changed game mechanics they slowed the level down they like ducked all the sound at all the dialogue and we ended up with this seal the entrance fired off so rostro

[Music] [Music] it's [Music] there's more and more lasers mass carnage okay well you get the idea when I go a little bit later on a little bit later on the full band comes in and there's of course a flugelhorn solo and you know I went there but you know that's

incredible right that somebody's gonna let you do an idea like that you know that was bad II so working on headliner got Camden and I experimenting in a really unique way and and by creating the sound design with these boundaries and limitations set on us I think it pushed us to create something really special yeah so what did we learn from all this when Dave and I were first introduced the ideas behind head lander we both had a very visceral reaction to the content when I first saw the trailer where the head Landers head lifts off his body I literally got creepy goosebumps so the strength of the initial idea and the core of the game's story was something we need to keep in our sights over the course of production and sometimes when you're working on a game for a long time you can forget where you came from so Dave and I had come up with some ways to keep that initial powerful idea intact and we wanted to pass it along to you today first of all distill the

inspiration of the game down to its essence think of it like a funnel where you put all of your influences at the top and at the other end you're gonna get the building blocks made up this of the sound profile of all those influences in head Lander we put all of the sci-fi movies of the 70s into a funnel and came out with a palette for sound music and dialogue based on what was common amongst all those influences and that technique can be used for anything any genre yeah we then took that palette and we put constraints on it in terms of sound source tools and techniques and this put us in a similar position of those who are experimenting with in sci-fi cinema in the 70s and those experimentations resulted in some very creative solutions we encourage you to occasionally use constraints in your projects to foster experimentation remind yourself during the course of the project of where you started when you first took the project on you know that initial spark and inspiration get it from yourself and how you felt about it

when you first heard it and also talk to the team about it and and always reinforce that initial spark that got you going you know if you're an external contractor make sure that you engage with the developers as much as you can if you're not in house if you are working in house talk to everyone on the team and avoid isolation the perspectives and ideas of what the game is about and where it's going will change your approach enrich your perception thanks for joining us today it was really fun to talk to you about this game please rate the presentation yes please rate us and we hope you enjoyed it thank you and we'll we'll take any questions if you like if anybody has any questions can I eat my banana now I had a serious question actually 70s aesthetic versus modern

audience expectations so it's so rad that you guys went there with the sound design especially just getting that like you were talking about the prebend bird era kind of stuff I'm sorry my voice is shot but there is a certain level of audience expectation for the for the tambour and totality of what to what they want to be pleasing so how did you end up balancing that well I remember I while I was studying for sound design anyway when I would go in and look at these old movie ideas and likely would bring in something we'd watch as a team I remember looking at two different ways which was like what was actually happening and like what I remembered when I first saw it like I would kind of design to the memory as well so that was one thing because I I remember when I was growing up and I and I first saw the black hole and everything I was like super inspired by it and when I came back I was like it's not what I thought at all so I started like doing a journal of how I actually remembered it and I

would like kind of combine that yeah you'd go on your memory not what's real yeah yeah I mean I had a tremendous I mean stranger things came out at the same time as head lander yeah and it's just a trip to be sort of in the flow of that particulars aight guys I mean Anna and I feel that I mean I did definitely in the score I cheated a lot by layering things in such a way and using reverbs and stuff that you never hear back then and hopefully you know the low-end and some of the ways that you adjust Tambor for modern expectations I think you know we we sort of inherently we sort of did that without thinking about it I think I really for me it resonated with the memory of the skeleton wow I was great man it was great that's also the layered feedback element that you played sounds exactly like a

son song oh yeah yeah thanks and canden last question for me and this is on the serious tip when he delivered the music to you on reals was that a challenge for you like I would ever deliver to him on reals that's funny that's a trick question it was easy I just delivered the whole machine yeah right well where is hi great table thank you very much I think where is this synth museum please oh the synth Museum in Emeryville I will find it for you right now because I have it in my contacts yeah the synth Museum is fantastic well which city even Emory Emory bill Emeryville yeah across the bay okay and also about the the feedback thing did you record the feedback and then sampled it and and like you know played it or

how did you know did you pitch it actually I didn't do any sampling in this entire project what I did is I me and my senior sounds I don't know if he's here or Paul but we basically took my guitar in my office and just beat the hell out of it and made it feedback for like two hours and then it was all editing I literally just did everything by edit okay yeah all right I guess technically it's in Oakland so it's 11:45 65th Street okay I'm sure you do Jesper Kyd so could you have and you have any recommendations for someone who's not into analog since to start the sickness to say having one synth to start my Mikey into that deep hole was the court monotron yeah in any and the core Korg has done a fantastic job of sort of reinvigorating I felt that they were

really on the forefront of reinvigorating the synth move the analog synth movement and they have these little boxes that are really inexpensive the volca series that you can chain together and they have like a sequencer and they have the monotron which is it has a little ribbon on it that that you can play you know the keys on and but it has real analog filters on it and stuff and that kind of juiciness that you get out of real analog you can pull out of those even the ms-20 is only about 700 bucks but you can get in on the ground floor using the volca series yeah if you want to get really sick well now I'm not gonna start you down there the eurorack stuff is pretty interesting pretty cool stuff and it all depends you know I'm talking about analog synthesis but to be more specific I'm talking about subtractive synthesis yeah I'm doing subtractive synthesis and maybe a little bit of sync you know hard sync synthesis and things like that and I think that subtractive synthesis is a really great place to start because you're taking

waves that are rich with content and then you're pulling out harmonic stuff out of them using really interesting filters go for the volca series first I think awesome thank you yeah absolutely anybody else thank you thanks you you