Performance Based Sound Design

[Music] check can you guys hear me all right before we forget here tiny Panther declawed anymore before we begin is that a sick pet idea hold on we got to amp it up a little bit turtle with ya double turtle double turtle it's like a it's like a double Dracula like whenever a Dracula bites another Dracula weird [ __ ] happens anyway so guys thank you so much for being here and I'm Matt Pierce all I'm gonna kind of show you guys my process and I don't use it exclusively but I'm

working on a game right now for the last few years called prey and 98% of all the sound effects were created more or less in this fashion as like so some more seasoned veterans in here will know that the world of like editing based sound design can be really fatiguing and uninspiring after say I don't know five ten years of your career and what I found is I found my job at one point became a job and what I wanted what I wanted to do well backstory my Pro Tools rig crashed and my computer crashed and so I had and I wanted to travel and I'm and I realized one day I'm like I'm a contractor I don't have to like go don't have to be tied down to my studio and so I grabbed this and this and this and this and I went to Europe for a few months and just worked remotely and it

was really a great way to sort of reevaluate what I find important about game audio and it made me fall in love with it again so the process that I'm going to describe today Who am I I'm gonna talk about myself for probably twenty two more minutes and then we can get into heavy stuff I'm just kidding you know what I like I'm whatever I'm Matt I make video games you can ask me my credit list afterwards backstory computer crashed really really annoying Pro Tools update I'm sure many of you experienced that yeah many crashes anyway so let's just get started so I have prepared I was gonna do something today I was thinking like something that would demonstrate this process really well and there's really two phases to this there is a source creation phase and then there's what I would consider the compositional faith so today our focus is going to be on

creating ice magic so that could just sort of riff on that concept and a lot of what I do is I tend to stay like I tend to look at the visual once or twice try to look at it in-game but I don't actually vid cap it to begin I wait to do that and I just sort of riff on a general concept and then sort of piece those elements together in the game so we have some source here I want to start here it's like this is a way that I would gather source material right here we have this is just a sense but this is a tech death whistle and a wail because I was thinking like wails kind of to me like I just go like stream-of-consciousness so for some reason the clicky wail thing spoke ice to me plus I think a few of them live in

Antarctica where there's still ice for the next couple of years anyway I want to start there something nice and gentle just something that you could you know when you're talking to your mom you could just sort of say hey mom this is how I feel about this I'm an individual mom you don't understand me that's fun that's dope I don't care okay so from there I put these into a drum rack and you guys can see this here I'll lift up the screen a bit and we'll focus on this aspect of it yeah [ __ ] I can't anyway so we've got this sample in the in the bank now and

let's see what we can do with it so my process right now this is what I would consider to be on the top layer here you can see what I have is I would say that's my grounding source that's actual ice but I don't start there and the reason I don't start there is I feel like it's best to explore the abstract before you explore the reality reality is easy when you're fatigued you can always base your sound in reality but when your brain is fresh when your brain is creative you can handle the abstract in a much more efficient way so I'm gonna set a loop point here now I have basically a running loop and I'm just gonna start [ __ ] around so this is some of my source I created about 10 minutes ago all right so [Music]

okay so what I like about this process so we have this and this is just a general concept now from here I'm going to actually switch to what I would consider a more traditional editing mode and let's just take a look at kind of what we have here so I've got this and we're gonna curl down to what I've built this is my template so I always have like a like a SFX what I call sfx group and i like that because i can just open the session and it's always ready to go with no questions so we're just gonna see kind of what we have here and like you know it's it's [ __ ] it's weird but you know maybe we could do something interesting with a few great cool I don't think that's reclaim

properly [Music] I'm going to take that over here and we're gonna put it pull it back to our our drum rack so now we can begin there so in a more clear fashion I'm going to set one loop okay so we got this okay so

I kind of like that so we start there now we have this again we're gonna pull this back in to our more arrangement view and we've got that going on right okay so something that I really love doing and maybe you cats are hip to it

I'm going to like just I feel really naked and vulnerable right now because I'm gonna show you guys something that I use and it's a little hacky anyway let's jump right in so kick this is my favorite kick of all time this is a sound morph kick those of you that are familiar yeah that's it okay so I take this and so for now I'm gonna just slice this tiny bit and then leave the rest okay and I think spiritually and emotionally we can agree that's a decent idea so we're gonna like give it another step here right okay now remember the thing we recorded earlier so I'm thinking like

like like I'm just riffing here but I'm thinking about that that screen II thing you know the whole mom thing and like we that was a journey that we went through together and I could feel so close to you guys so I want to bring that back I want to find that again somewhere in all of this madness that's it okay cool and what's beautiful about this is like these these things can like fairly seamlessly work together when you're not mildly nervous let's see you know what guys I thought about it and I thought about

you know like where how far we've come and I'm just gonna rerecord it it's that easy cool alright let's let's drag this back into our concept here and cool we've got this we'll call this the mom you don't understand me sound we're gonna pop this here yeah now okay I like that so I kind of want to add a little bit more sort of high-frequency content so to do that I'm

going to pull up an operator and what's great about operator is again this is all kind of on the fly here we can go into operator and we're gonna select white noise that's what white noise sounds like in my heart okay filter cool alright so we'll grab that okay cool so once I have this I'm just gonna drag it as MIDI into the sound

right now and it's obviously not working very well for timing so we're just gonna record it make it a fire cool okay [Music] there's a tool that I like to use a lot it's called sy q are you guys familiar with this it's a soundtoys plugin and what it allows you to do is distort or harm on use harmonic distortion only on certain frequencies so we're going to add harmonic distortion in the 900 range [Music] cool is something else that I've that's kind of exciting this sort of off topic

on topic that I've been into and that is this bill built this this it's like a granulator I don't know if you guys know granulator but you can take any sound source and essentially loop it it's a very simple granular tool now if you notice see how the akyüz going wild right now what I've done is add max for live plug-in on this called randomize and it just takes your whatever plug-in you want and just literally randomize it like a crazy person now when you first launch it the preset is sort of set to dude on speed but this is like dude kind of down from speed so let's see how this sounds and it's kind of a cool way to to create some interesting source material let's get off that so yeah so just just one button will allow like has a lot of movement but now when you add in the

file positioning in granulator as well as this diffuse eq which is essentially like a dub style spring reverb so let's record a few of those and try those in the mix you know it sounded really easy to do sound design in front of people [Music] all right I like that last one that has a nice flow to it I thought that again seeing

is how we've been through so much together that one sort of is more representative of us as a couple oh by the way side note pet peeve people that over prove how happy they are in their relationship on Facebook they're like I had a friend and it was he's a funniest thing I've ever seen when everyone maybe I should tell the story not here it's really good though he is trust me it does involve nudity and social media [Music]

okay so for now we're gonna leave that but the cool thing about this is that we can go riff on this and absolutely make a hundred hundreds of iterations the reason that I like the drum rack is because once I have this so for example I'll title is ice magic I can save this rack and instantly pull it up so for things like sounds that you make like consistently you can have basically like a little drum rack library of quick acts quickly accessible things and I think I have a few in my laptop crashed recently so it might have lost some of them but in within my user library um I've got these patches here can you guess - her me okay presets

sounds good okay John Mack okay yeah like this is stuff I've made quite a long time ago let's see this is called thirty seconds left I have no idea what this is oh yeah yeah yeah okay this is all stuff I'll I've recorded actually trying to making some sort of stinger things so it's stuff like you know like really simple stuff but but what's cool

is like you know I could just pull that up and just have that instantly to mess with so I wanted to show you guys one other thing that I really enjoy doing so first we're gonna create some source and then we're gonna a quick concept it creature sound so this could go like this is I want you to guys to know this could go really wrong but we're gonna give it a go we're gonna be better friends okay all right so let's begin let's let's say we're doing some kind of I don't know some typical space-saving type [ __ ] so for now that's not really space satan e-enough but we're gonna bring the evil

[Music] okay we've got this loop going there's a reason for this and the reason is sure you guys already got it but this is our core tone now let's take that core tone we're gonna mute it for right now and this is going to be the mic channel so yeah this is [ __ ] terrifying yeah let's see alright this is gonna be our main channel now cuz the other ones are not working gang right I mean that's

pretty space save me [Music] so you take this and don't do that we're gonna pop it here okay so we're gonna pull up our old friend the vocoder and we're going to use the space Satan tone as our carrier tone or one of the other I don't know I'm not a [ __ ] scientist dudes I'm a I'm a barely functioning adult anyway so audio from and that's

SFX one so let's just see it's not gonna sound great just yeah but listen we'll just see cool that's not as bad as I thought it would be it's a little on the digital tip but it's you know it's I don't hate it that's another thing that can help you as a sound designer is just kind of jet in general just like your stuff you know you know like I mean it like it pays to be a little cocky quite honestly like I'm just gonna say protip but this goes beyond sound design if you don't like what you're doing go [ __ ] yourself seriously why are you doing it anyway but I mean that like a love it it's like a loving go [ __ ] yourself not like a go [ __ ] yourself idiot it's more like a [Music] okay so this is the some whale source

material that I pulled in and we're gonna use a trick that I'm sure you guys all know but I'm just going to show you kind of this is against my process we're going to gate this on and off side chain from SFX 3 which is our space Satan voice okay we're gonna take the attack up a bit and pull the release and again just see what we can get okay right now here's the issue what what is the issue the issue is that you right we're running into that problem where you layer so many things that it sounds like animal choir well that's a great bad name animal choir I mean there's already Animal Collective but I don't it could be like a whole different deal you're

welcome worth the money right okay so we're gonna I'm gonna pull something in to try and make this more cohesive and this is tough you know because honestly this is something that I would sort of sit down and do and like think about and not have to like like I didn't have diarrhea while trying to speak anyway yeah when it went great mom we're all best friends now okay so I'm pulling up crystallizer and I'm doing this because I find that like when when you have a group that sort of pitches together its stitches together it just came up with that that down money money baby okay I will do detune will go doublers on this and we're gonna pull our mix so I want to make up for some of

that high-end EQ that we lost so I'm going to go back to soundToys here and pull up psych you really really in a distortion right now it's something that I used to stay away from but I've been able to get some really good results from it okay I'm gonna say like for doing that in seven minutes it's not the worst thing I'm gonna do something I wasn't sure that I was gonna do but I really love you guys oh do you like this my name of the my session is sick GDC Prezi ice magic dude

recently got a hold of me named ice mage and I was like we gotta be friends so this is a project I've been working on and I'm gonna look through here and I'm gonna find some of the more like I'm gonna find a sound and kind of run you guys through how I did it cool yeah okay I don't know oh I don't I have two minutes nevermind I'm not gonna run you through it does anyone have any questions hey you know what [ __ ] it I'm gonna I'm gonna open a session and just show you guys very briefly oh yeah okay this is the into fear state so basically big monster comes you're like oh man that monster is really scary and then you're like camera start shaking and you can't move your character very easily this is

a very simple Jam here and yeah it's a very similar process this is all based on the drum rack and let's see what we got yeah dude I must be way into space state space Satan stuff okay so I'm gonna just run you guys through my bounces and it kind of like you as you see from top to bottom you'll notice that sometimes they're randomized but typically it's like idea one idea to idea three idea for I put those in a random container see what works best see what sticks so here's fear in I think this is a concept for like the loop at the beginning of right before you get feared it's like to believe to bring tension [Music]

that's just my voice being weird I don't know what this is never mind this dope it's another element that I layered on and that's essentially the final with the additional layers I think I you know in retrospect now that I'm looking at this something time is the biggest teacher something that I didn't do in that final that I wish I would have done is pushed the two elements so that there's a high-end element and there was a low-end element and I wish I would have been more ballsy with those elements because I feel like they got buried in the mix anyway thank you guys so much for having me we can talk after and thanks again I really appreciate it