Signal Processing For Sound Design

[Music] welcome to the audio bootcamp I'm really excited to be here talking today about signal processing for sound design my name is Peter Zenda I am a supervising sound designer at Formosa interactive I've been working in audio for about 20 years I divide my time between games and movies although in the last five or so years I've really been concentrating on games and you can see some of the projects I've worked on recently even though the title of today's talk sounds very technical what we have today is a creative focus I really want to talk about how to use technology to achieve your creative goals when you're working on sound design it is not a technical discipline it's a creative discipline our jobs as sound designers are to support a scene they are to tell a story they're to build a world make an item

like a weapon feel real and visceral we are creating performances if we're working on a creature or something like that and so we use technology to do our work but the work itself is actually creative so you don't want to get too mired down in that right now is an incredible time to be a sound designer there are more tools out than we've ever had before our computers are more powerful than they've ever been we're able to process more at one time we're able to do it more quickly there are many tools out there that are very low cost and sound great and so it's really like I'm excited to be a sound designer right now at this time in history it's a lot of fun one of the great things about using plugins and signal processing is it has a transformative power we're no longer

shackled to what's in our library what we recorded what we might happen to have around we're able to use that material as raw source and process it and turn it into something that is perfect for that specific project that we're working on it's a lot of fun to be able to take something and use your own creativity through these tools and turn it into what you intend it to be why do we use signal processing one great use for it is to respond to the team or the clients needs depending on if you are a in-house person or a vendor like I am sound design and game design is an iterative process you're going to be making things putting it into the game seeing how it all works together discussing it getting feedback and having a command of digital signal processing can allow you to

respond to those needs you might get a comment to make something brighter or crunchy or deeper or you know bigger there's a lot of adjectives that are going to get thrown at you and if you can take those adjectives and translate them into something you can do with EQ dynamics things like that you don't have to start over from scratch and make a whole new sound you can also use signal processing to rescue sounds that are contaminated with noise I do a lot of recording and encourage all of you to get out and record as much as possible I don't always do it in a perfect environment not everything I record is suitable to go out and be on a library or you know CD library anything like that it might be contaminated with traffic or machinery there's all kinds of sounds that are out there in the world and they're interesting but they're not in that perfect perfect place and if you use something like

noise reduction plugins or multiband expansion you can actually kind of rescue those sounds and use them in your design you can also take sounds that might be the right thing but it's kind of an old recording and you can shine them up again and use those sounds in your cell design you can also use signal processing to simulate distance I would caution you that that a lot of times is best used saved for later in your process if you're making game assets for a game that could be used in a variety of different environments right like your gunshot or impact could be in a giant Hall or it could be in a tight hallway so the game engine is going to do a lot of that for you however you might be working on a cinematic and you need to create a train crash that's happening in the distance

you can use reverb and EQ and delay to achieve that effect or you might be making a game asset that's supposed to be off in the distance using the right combinations of things can make that feel real and keep your player immersed in the game world another great use of signal processing is to adjust how the various elements play against each other the sounds you make are going to have a lot of competition out there in your sonic landscape there's going to be music combat maybe machine guns explosions screaming and there might be an event that's happening at this level of the game that is really important to get across to the player and one of the ways that you can make sure that event pops out and gets their attention is look for where in your frequency range you've got a little hole some room to work in and boost that frequency there's

a lot of other ways to achieve that also through ducking and mixing things like that and then kind of the Holy Grail or one of the most exciting things about it is creating unique sounds signature sounds that nobody has ever heard before that they are only going to associate with your game I know if I really like a sound or like a game I could hear that audio ten years later totally out of context and I could be like oh yeah I remember that or I remember that level and that's one of the most fun things we can do being sound designers is really create a memorable experience for people so you can see the building blocks for sound design we have a number of different types of processors and these are the fundamentals these are your building blocks you can use EQ adjusting the frequency content of your sound dynamics adjusting the amplitude and how wide

that range is pitch and time shifting become very important for creating a performance if you're making a creature sound the right pitch Bend and they make it really feel like that creature is dying and whether you're happy that creature died or not we can use reverb and delay again a lot of that is best saved for later in the process but you never know and then there's been a real renaissance of saturation plugins that have come out recently in the past few years that affect both the frequency content and the dynamics of your sound the interesting thing about these is you know it used to be you had to use tape or you had to have a tube processor to get that sound and there's some pretty convincing ways to do that now and in a way I don't really care if they're necessarily faithful to the original I just want to know if they're useful for me so that can be very useful for making

things sound bigger or for taking the edges off things the interesting thing about tape compression was that it didn't affect all the frequencies equally so if you have something like Foley that has two sharper transients running it through a tape simulator can be very useful we also have noise reduction I can't stress enough how amazing the tools are that are available to us now to clean things up using software like iZotope rx or even multi and expansion as a noise reduction we can use modulation plugins which are getting things moving and changing over time I think that's a great way to keep people's interest you know anytime something is developing over time it's a lot more interesting to listen to and then we have a broad category of manglers what I'll call manglers or things that are more extreme like morphing and granular synthesis and we'll talk about some of those today

and then you can put these together into plug-in chains which are using more than one plug-in to create a cohesive effect this is where you're going to use all those fundamentals all the other pieces and elements to create something new and I'm going to go over some examples of plug-in chains as a way to do sound design in these next examples so I'm going to call this example metal magic this first sound is dry ice on metal which a lot of you being sound people probably know about but for anyone who doesn't if you apply dry ice to metal it will shriek and scream and I find the best kind of metal props to use for this or something that's thin enough to resonate so a lot of times if we're

working on magic having a tonal element to that can be very useful that's going to be our raw material I'm going to start this chain with a plugin from Tom Irby of sound hack same called spiral stretch this is a time expansion plugin what's interesting about it is it allows you to have multiple voices of that sound going at one time there's a certain amount of randomization to it and what can happen with these tonal sounds that are changing over time and then you have multiple voices of those happening you can get them kind of harmonizing with each other in a musical way [Music] Oh

Oh so the initial sample was pretty recognizable as metal now we're getting it out of the realm of our everyday world something that sounds like we haven't heard it before now some of you may have used absinthe as a synthesizer it's also worth noting that you can process sounds through it this is going to be using the cloud filter in there which is a combination of granular synthesis pitch shifting and filtering so now we've taken that sound and really kind of made it sing it's got got more

tonality to it more harmonics and it's getting outside of the realm of something we've heard before which we can associate more closely with magic and as the final step I'm going to give it a little extra shimmer with the crystallizer you can see this is at a very dry setting not much of this new signal there but I'm adding pitching delays that are going upwards in pitch with a fair amount of feedback [Music] and you could take that sound and use it as a power up for a spell that's going to be cast you can't Doppler it and use it as an attack spell you could attach it to some kind of mythical creature and so the

more you can make these kind of magical sounds and rely on signal processing you'll kind of expand your palate there another salad you're going to have to do a lot of in game design is weapons my feeling about weapons is that microphones capture the sound but they may not capture the experience for example if you go to a shooting range and you fire a 9-millimeter you're looking at about a hundred and sixty DB SPL peak you're going to be wearing hearing protection hopefully and I'll tell you nobody wants to wear hearing protection while they play your game if you see a movie and you played that perfect recording back at the maximum volume you'd be looking at about 105 DB that's about the loudest sound you can playback in a properly calibrated theater louder if you're close to the screen of course in the living room you're looking at about 70 to 100 dB

depending people tend not to play your game at a level where you're there windows are rattling the other thing is you know our sounds are not just conveying the sense of sound if you fire a gun it's going to kick against your hand or it's going to kick against your shoulder it's a very visceral experience and that's what people remember that's what the game design on your team is going to remember that's what the players are going to remember so we need to use sound also to convey that feeling of touch DSP can help you capture that hundred and sixty DB experience at a lower level so we're going to start with a recording of a machine gun and I know we need to be considerate of our neighbors so this is maybe not going to be as loud as we would like so that's a very you know

nice realistic recording sounds pretty good but even if we put music against this you know a lot of that detail is going to get lost so the next step in the chain is going to be some tape saturation a lot of the gunshots are used to hearing in movies certainly going back a few years were recorded on na gross because they had that awesome tape compression characteristic they have as incredible Nagre might freeze and they just gave it something special this is going to compress the high end a little bit more and it's going to let you push the mids and the lows I hope this is going to come across here again this is a little subtle but that effect is going to be magnified further down our chain you'll find that you can make

subtle changes at the beginning that are then going to get magnified by things that are later next I'm going to do some limiting on it I'm using both the waves ultra Maximizer and the Multi Maximizer I like the ultra Maximizer because it lets you choose from a number of different profiles this one I'm using the extreme analog and you can tell the threshold is only at minus two so I'm not really boosting that sound a whole lot and the multi Maximizer will maximize it across all the frequencies so you get something that's more full range overall and louder in all the frequencies again this is not too extreme you don't want to hurt yourself with these next I'm going to apply some EQ why do we as sound designers have so many key cues they all do the same thing right

but not exactly like people are always looking for that holy grail EQ people love the pull tech EQ and you'll see a lot of both hardware and software emulations of that classic EQ you'll see it on Foley stages you'll see it in music recording studios this is my current favorite it's made by Nomad factory they call it a pulse tech EQ I basically use this if I want one of two things if I want more sizzle or less sizzle on something the high-end shelving EQ is great or if I want to add more beef to something it's not a clinical EQ at all now after we're done kind of boosting all this stuff up one of the things about designing weapons for games is a lot of times a gunshot will have a tail on it reflections off of the all the surfaces it was recorded around but we want to have that gunshot

and get out of the way after we're done firing the gun that gun isn't really relevant anymore what's more relevant to the shots that are coming in toward us people screaming explosions maybe us reloading the gun so we can use a transient control plug-in to dial down the tail on that and let our beefier gunshots come out you can see the tail on that is certainly in this environment almost entirely gone the Native Instruments transient master is an incredibly powerful tool with three knobs one of them being gain I had encourage all of you to experiment with that and then if we keep this chain exactly the same and pitch this we can come out with a totally different gun sounds like a completely different caliber the same

kind of processing will work for impacts also here is a realistic stab recorded on the fully staged pretty cool has a lot of nice detail to it a lot of nice gauche some blade in there but again if you are playing a game where there's a lot of Foley and running around and explosions and gunshots and music going on you may only hear the top couple of DB of that sound everything else may be lost so you'll want to bring out that detail with those same kind of plugins now it's almost like you know we can hear the cartilage ripping in there so this is the violence section of today's talk that's so next I want to talk about how to take a very mundane sound that we're all he's so used to hearing that we don't even hear it anymore and turn

it into something totally different we're going to take a refrigerator and turn it into a force field this is like the nastiest picture of a refrigerator actually it looks like you know I'm afraid to open it I don't know what I'm going to find in there so here's the original sound [Music] and here it has like a little bit of a low-end throb to it some interesting frequencies next I'm going to use another of Tom herb ease plugins called pitch sift and I'm not even going to be pitch shifting with it it has a partial gate control on it that's pretty interesting it allows you to let the more dominant frequencies come through and it's going to filter out any of the low-level detail some of that low-level detail is what makes it sound real to us it's like what our ears are used to hearing and if you take that away

already it's going to sound like something we haven't heard before [Music] if you listen this sound has a very strong wine or fundamental frequency to it [Music] you can see what that partial gate is doing here on the left of the original sound on the right is the processed sound now I'm going to take that fundamental frequency that line and I'm going to use filterfreak to notch that out I'm going to put a band reject filter right at that frequency but I don't just want to get rid of it I'm going to actually use that low-end throb that's making the volume go up and down and I'm going to put an envelope follower on the frequency and modulate

that so that part of the time the band reject filter is going to be getting rid of it part of the time it's going to let it go through we do a lot of additive EQ but you can do some really cool stuff subtractive lis as well [Music] next I'm going to apply a pretty simple delay effect these are very short delays which can give you a robotic sound [Music] now let's take it another step further we're kind of getting more into the sci-fi realm now it's starting to feel pretty good you can use a little bit more absence on it this is running through their super comb processor you

can hear as the comb filter is filtering out various frequencies and that's kind of modulating around that you're getting some singing frequencies some frequencies that we're fighting with each other aren't anymore and they're allowing a little more low-end to come through and that might be a really great effect for a level where we are exploring where we're not in combat where we can have some suspense and have a quiet moment but maybe it's not that kind of a scene maybe we need to have something with a little more edge and be able to compete with a few more sounds going on at the same time I'm going to start with the fabfilter saturn it's a pretty useful plugin that allows you to do saturation and distortion in a multiband kind of way what I also really like about it is you can have modulators and what we're going to do here is modulate the

crossover frequencies of the band that I'm putting the saturation and distortion on that's going to allow that band of distortion to sort of move around based on the LFO and after that I'm going to run it through the blue cat mv7 which I'll show you after this [Music] already that saturation and distortion is giving it a more aggressive or edgy err sound what I like about the mb7 is it allows you to use VST plugins' in a multiband way so it splits the sound into four frequencies and allows you to put two VST plugins' on each frequency and the other cool thing is I'm a Pro Tools user it allows me to use

VST plugins inside of Pro Tools what I'm doing here is applying some compression on the very low frequency I'm keeping that low-end Rumble from eating up my Headroom and I'm doing a little bit of chorus on the low mids and leaving everything else alone so just to play that example again [Music] you continued their course thing going on there in the low-mids next I want to talk about focused low-end enhancement it's awesome to have these big hits or singers in your sounds that have a ton of low-end really give you a lot of impact but we don't want that impact to Rumble out and potentially interfere

with something that's going to be happening after if we wanted to stay very punchy so I had an opportunity a few years back to do some train coupling recordings worked with the awesome guy who was with the railroad was able to do it in a very safe way here's that raw recording now I know I'm going to be enhancing the low-end in this so I'm actually going to filter out the low-end after that impact then use a multiband expander I really like ozone 5 and I'm going to let the low-end go through on the impact and then I'm going to let it die out over that interesting metal detail so you can hear I hope how clean the end of that is next I'm going to add some beef I'm going to run it through the waves Multi Maximizer and I'm going to use one of

those saturation plugins I talked about this is the Vox tango very saturator it's a dual band saturator can really be great for adding beef to your sounds and I think we're getting some rumble from the next stage over so it's interesting timing for that I think that means we get to play ourselves ladder right there are two low-end enhancement plugins I like from wavez there's a renaissance bass and low air Renaissance bass actually adds higher harmonics of things to give you more of a sense of low-end through smaller speakers and low air adds a lot of those really really low subsonic frequencies I find it's really useful to use them in series to actually run through Renaissance days first and then into low air and you get these you know harmonizing low-end tones

that are pretty cool and they're great for this they're also really awesome on creature vocals I'm just going to play that one more time since the rumbling stop so you can see there is actually a lot of Rumble all the way through to the end of this one and I'm going to do that same process again I'm going to use multi band expansion to let it hit and then get out of the way we work on a lot of things that are very fast-paced we need to like hit and then maybe a few frames or you know seconds later we're going to have another hit right after that so this can be a useful way to make sure that you're not kind of falling all over yourself with impact running into each other next I'm going

to talk about granular synthesis it's somewhat esoteric but none of us here should be intimidated to play around with it what granular synthesis does is it divides your sound up into grains those grains can be a second of your sound it could be just a few samples of your sound there's a lot of granules and plugins out there they allow you to control how big those grains are where the start and end points are how much pitch variation there is if you want pitch randomization how many of these grains are playing at one time how much feedback there is in that like if you're pitching downward is it going to keep pitching downwards more and more and also some of them will allow you to quantize those pitches so granular synthesis can get really atonal really quickly and the quantize in granular sense can let our Western ears are tuned to something that's more on a musical scale it can be really useful for

creating steady sound backgrounds or anything that needs to loop think we're out of the era one of the first silent first games I worked on we had to create background loops that were one second long and did not sound repetitive so granular synthesis would have would have been a great thing to have at that time it's also great for engine engines for turbines machines we'll see some other examples and obviously you can create Gregg really bizarre sounds using granular synthesis so here's an example where I'm going to take a sound that you could not pull a loop out of to save your life and I'm going to make loops out of it I work with Scott Griffin and his neighbors a pilot and invited us come over and record the jet that he he pilots so we went over to that hangar and we recorded some sounds there were something like this

[Music] you so that pitch is changing all the time there's really there's no way traditionally to loop that I'm going to use a plug-in from grm tools called their freeze and what that allows us to do is load a certain amount of that sound into RAM and then choose how much of that we're going to playback we can be very tight with it so it's just a few samples this is set up to have 16 loops of that brain playing back at one time and there's a certain amount of randomization between them so by kind of piling those layers up together we can create something that doesn't sound like it's repeating and I was able to pull out a number of loops at different rpm it's awesome if we're creating something and we get to go out and do custom

recordings for the game and we're going to get steady rpms that you know various intervals but you don't always have that to work with and here's the way you can sort of pull out those kind of assets [Music] so again that doesn't work perfectly for everything might not be great for a car but for something like a jet turbine it actually works quite well now we're going to kill two birds with one stone and talk about wishes and granular synthesis at the same time you know you're going to be called on to create a lot of wishes in your career a lot of things moving through the screen or attacks that are going to move out of the way and you'll you know it's been happening for years people use animal growls as a source for that you're

probably not going to play this in a way where you can actually hear it it's just going to support another more organic sound so we're going to start with the tiger growl and by using the freeze plug-in I'm actually going to kind of perform with it I'm going to move the grains around and I can create a whole bunch of steady source that I'm then going to be able to run through a Doppler so this still has the characteristic of the growl it has some of that vocal quality but it's steady enough that we're going to be able to make wishes with it so here's my Doppler chain you're going to see a lot of different plugins they're the linchpin of course

is the grm tools Doppler the salty grain is giving me a little bit more variation you can see in the lower right I'm using a plug-in called BMG pitch Punk that just has a long slow LFO moving the pitch up and down I'm doing dynamics processing to sort of bring it out after it goes through the Doppler plug-in because it can be very peaky I'm doing some saturation with the fabfilter saturn i'm using from the plug-in mix Optiplex err it can be really useful to have something that's an octave down so it's harmonically related to your material but supports it with more low end if I'm doing dopplers I really like to have an envelope following filter after them some of that is built into the Doppler plug-in itself but I actually find it's useful to have another one but I have control over it's nice that it makes it feel like it's

further away when it's on the further away part of the Doppler but also that filter opening and closing can have a vocal quality that can just make your material that much more expressive I am using some chorus on this again not appropriate for every project but for something that allows you to be a little bit sci-fi that can get it more motion doing a couple different kinds of low-end enhancement and the other nice thing is if you're using nomads magma plug-in it has an entire modulation page in it so I have eight different lfos assigned to different parameters such as how fast the Doppler is moving how much the pitch is changing I'm varying how much low-end boosting I'm doing and anything you can do to get it moving just get things changing over time you can run that for five minutes and come up with a whole variety of

material very quickly so here's what that material sounds like going through the change is a few different examples of the bushes you could get from that so those be great on a spaceship or maybe things flying past the screen if you're going through a wormhole through space and time that kind of stuff granular synthesis and Doppler can create a whole range of interesting things for you another plugin you can use to create some interesting new raw

material to work with is morphing this is where you're going to combine frequency and amplitude information between two sounds just as a tip I find is really useful to have independent pitch control over those two sources wherever you have common frequency content that's what's going to go through the morph if you don't have much in common between those two sources not that much is going to come out so being able to either have those on a sampler or have a pitch shifter I'm using loopers for this and I'm able to control the pitch of each of those independently and what I like about that is it lets me record for a minute and pull out all these little gems that are going to pop out of there so this is using my voice morphed against itself I'm not going to play the original source because that would just be embarrassing but so you know this is just two human voices at different

pitches interacting with each other so you can create a whole range of things you can use two voices against each other animals and human voice animals and other kinds of animals you can combine it with metal sounds things that are tonal send to tend to sound pretty good when you're using the morphing plugin here's another example where we can take an evil laugh and morph it against some more metal this is just a

metal rock recorded at the Foley stage [Music] to the morph plug-in a lot of times we're going to be asked to work on an object that needs to function like a character whether it's a ship that's going to Creek as a sinking or a door that's going to open or a robot being able to take something that has a human element and apply it to those more organic sounds can give you a very expressive result as I said it's important to get things moving adding modulation to your chain can really catch people's ears any time you can have change over time that's very useful it's great for creating power up and power down sound the other thing you'll find that I do and a lot of style designers do is load up whether it's sense or sound elements going through a

whole bunch of different chains that you're just improvising and playing around with different parameters and sounds you might record five minutes of stuff and 98% of it is totally unusable but maybe two percent maybe you're finding a sweetener for something that's a second longer three seconds long don't be afraid to do processing that's really extreme and then pull out little gems from that you can add modulation in your DAW I find it's really helpful to have a control surface to do that you can also modulate parameters in a host such as nomads magma or vigil from plug I've been using that a lot lately it's pretty interesting I'll show you a screenshot of that later also there are plugins that are just made to modulate like the Doppler plugin so we could use modulation to create comedy not everything you're going to work on is going to be a super like aggressive dark you know world sometimes you might be

working on a kids game or something just needs to have some ecology to it these are some pretty flat sounding raw metal hits [Music] again recorded on the fully staged we're going to add some pitch modulation I actually have two LFO s going here at different speeds that's going to give it more warble and you don't have to just grab from those old overused comedy cartoon libraries you can create your own stuff pretty quickly and easily so that could be you know a character bouncing around on screen or any one of a number of things technically part of what made that funny was the sustain part of it pitching up and down so I'd used some tape compression and transient modulation to bring out the sustain a quick note always save a rendered copy for later that plug-in you're using now

might not work five years later when you're doing the sequel and also it's always good to save an unprocessed copy of what you're doing I'll put a muted region you know nearby in my session in case you need to unwind that always leave yourself a trail of breadcrumbs you can save your chains in a number of different ways Pro Tools will actually let you save track presets that's an undocumented feature you can google it but it allows you to save folders of track presets this is you know I have a bunch of different reverb boxes this will call up the 480 and altiverb you can save chains in something like nomad magma this actually allows you to load up a bunch of different plugins into it both VST plugins and its own and that you could save that as a preset you can use a program like plug vidual that lets you have all these plugins as building blocks and draw signal chains between them and you can also use the sound the

VST rack in sound miner as a way to save things and that's what that may look like I would be irresponsible not to tell you in this talk don't over process if you have the right sound use it the correct organic element is it works just as it needs to be messed with some of the best things you're going to find there coming from the natural world and then what you really need to do is automatize right this is your learning process you need to master the fundamentals until they become automatic you don't want to break your creative flow thinking about how am I going to achieve this they just become automatic parts of your workflow you reach for that right EQ or the right plugin your goal is not to be thinking about technology it's to be thinking about the scene the level the weapon the character all that kind of stuff you want to get the sound in your head or the directors head or the game designers head coming

out of the speaker's whenever you have downtime that's your time for experimentation you're going to find things that surprise you get outside your comfort zone download demos combine things together you're going to find all these happy accidents that you're you know when you're not on a deadline and then the key there is to turn your experiment into something you can use intentionally that's where the art of it comes in finding the happy accidents filing it away for later saving that preset so when you're in a situation where that is the perfect thing for your scene you can call it up and use it that's where your art comes from as a sound designer so that's the end of my talk today and I'll open it up for any questions oh sure come up to the mic if you have a question so we can have it on the on the tape the recording do you have any

examples of how the how your signal flow can change based on where you put the plugins in the supply chain all right oh yeah that that can actually have a huge influence like I was saying with that with that tape saturation plug-in you know putting it at the beginning is going to keep us from having a lot of high end later on down the line the nice thing about Pro Tools or some of the other hosts you might use is you can actually reorder those and it can have a huge effect another thing is you can for example if you're morphing put multi band limiters on both of your sources so you're boosting up all the frequencies and you have more things that are going to interact with each other more frequencies and you'll actually get more out of that plug-in than if you just let them go through and then did that after the effect after the fact maybe you

already said this and I missed it but do you have any recommendations for morphing plugins the examples you heard here we're using the pro sonic morph that's Audio Units only I also really like the Native Instruments voce tur that is not supported anymore sadly it's a really great plug-in there's a lot of Bo coders out there tracks also makes one sound hack is like the mother of all morphing and mutating programs sweet thing hey um so like in that talk you had so many examples of plugins and I guess like one of my issues when I'm sort of approaching getting acquainted with new tech and stuff like that is that it's like when I'm overwhelmed with like 30 things and then trying to like go in there and figure out like okay what are the parameters that like really make this thing work or like I guess how

do you get to a pointer are there any resources available for just like okay if you have you know tons and tons and tons of things that you want to research but it had how do you get to the point where you kind of like know what the sort of thing are yeah I think part of that is you know as you buy things or demo things you're going to find what you like about them a lot of plugins I use like maybe there's like three things that I just go to all the time like my Eventide ESP 4000 I use that for chorusing reverbs like it's just really good at that and I tend to go to other things for other stuff like experimenting and playing and finding what works is the best way just put in the time it you get a lot of just like recommendations from other people are just sort of playing tricks of the trade like oh yeah this thing is really like I'm very lucky that I work with a whole company of other sound designers so we're talking to each other all the time and you hear something coming from somebody's door like hey what do you do and how did you do that and you know the

goal even today isn't to take notes on these chains or these plugins it's to take that information and inspire yourself to do your own thing oh cool thanks what kind of recommendations we can have for portable audio recorders and or microphones for when you're doing what you call field recordings and things like that I have a sound device in 7:44 which I really like we have about we have one minute left you know I really love my son Heiser for 16 if you were buying a first microphone that would be a one that I would pick as a great fully and voice recording mic it's awesome on things like big caps or you know other animals you might go out and record you know there's a lot of handheld stuff out there you know if if you go to gear slots or a lot of the forums you'll find a ton of information there cool thank you sir hi um you mentioned in the beginning of

boosting up holes in the frequencies do you have any tips relating to working with sound with a voiceover artists yeah kind of the opposite to leave a hole in there for the voiceover yes you know a lot of times if you're doing that it's going to be you know in a mid-range frequency that's where most of the human voice is a great plug-in for that is if you have the ability to do it like a multiband compressor with a sidechain capability that will actually duck the frequencies that are coming into the sidechain like like the dialog that can be good and mixing although it's harder to do like you know in real time in a game engine and I would say probably cues that have like a broader suite to it thanks how hard is it I think the cane is coming for me so

I'll take I'll take one more question okay how hard is it to know the sweet spot for like processing like when you don't need anymore because like when you were doing the refrigerator demonstration there were a couple of times I was like that sounds really good and you did something else I'm like oh it still sounds really good like how do you know when to stop you know it all just becomes raw source fit that is kind of putty in your hands as you're processing it that's part of I would say developing your own personal taste level is going to be what makes a supervisor or an audio director want to work with you is just you know listening to what works and listen to movies and games for what's already in them you'll find that simple sounds are what ends up in a mix thank you we need to take a break now lunchtime lunchtime surgeries Peter is going to be in the room so if anyone has any more questions for Peter then you will get an opportunity [Applause]