sonofableep

like comparing apples and other apples.  six of one, six of another.  the evil of two lessers.  so anyway.

at one end of the spectrum you’ve got an orchestra in a room, playing a piece from start to finish, with it all going down to HD.  you (hopefully) end up with a big beautiful organic performance…that you can’t do much with implementation-wise other than play it from start to finish.  as soon as you muck with fading it out, crossfading it with another piece, or maybe layering it with other musical elements, the immersiveness of your big beautiful organic performance kinda goes out the window.  b.b.o.p.’s are great for soundtrack compilations and trailers, but they’re also big chunks of fixed audio that don’t really lend themselves to integration.

at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got an orchestra in a box, rendering out music track-by-track, instrument-by-instrument, note-by-note if need be.  you (probably) end up with an artificial sounding result…that’s infinitely malleable and implementation-friendly.  pour those rendered bits into any kind of dynamic or interactive scoring environment you may construct, and the music is bound to come out sounding as good as it sounded going in.  that is to say, “clearly canned, yes.  but seamlessly responding to runtime instructions!”

somewhere in the middle lies El Dorado…a mythical land where human ensembles play together in a big room without a click and with enough mic bleed to render multitracking all but pointless, and yet somehow those multitracks turn out to contain perfectly isolated captures of each instrument, not only soloable vertically (isolating it from all other instruments) but horizontally as well (allowing for individual notes & their tails to be edited without affecting prior / subsequent notes).  La ciudad de oro!

and where lies the road to El Dorado?  does one rent out 70 isobooths, wire ‘em with phones & mics, stick ‘em in a hall, track the outputs to HD, feed some of that back to the hall to get some room, and track that too?  ah, no.  how ’bout waiting for the world’s greatest FFT algorithm to explode the 2mix so i can pitch & time correct individual elements transparently?  i’d be waiting awhile, methinks.  what about asking the orchestra to play one measure at a time, letting the tails decay fully before moving on to the next measure?  after three hours, and half of one piece in the can, the podium would run red with the blood of the conductor.

well, i’ll figure something out, and i’ll be sure to jot it down when i do.  and if i don’t make it to El Dorado, there’s always Taco Bell.

(too small for a blog, too big for a tweet, i call my pithy musings here “bleets”.  in my head.  to myself.  and now, i use it in a sentence.)

bleeting about work this week has been pretty spotty.  cuz work has been pretty spotty.  cuz days without ridiculous-for-virginia snowfall levels have been pretty spotty.  and when my driveway looks like this, and the email comes in that the office is closed (thrice this week), i stay in my footed jammies and play “Double-Lightsaber Evil Villian Battle!” with my three-year-old all day.  and that’s pretty much all there is to report.  :)

we flipped the switch on “environmental audio” the other day, which is a fancy pants way of saying we turned on the game’s reverb.  prior to doing so i hooked up some presets for a small room and a bloody huge one, so that during testing we could run back and forth between them and see how things sounded.  i was eager to see how this would turn out, since this is my first time working with environmental processing sophisticated enough to handle obstruction & occlusion, blending of adjacent settings as you move through the gamespace, and all sorts of other DSP voodoo.

now, none of that stuff is actually hooked up yet.  we just had a couple basic verbs set up, and were going to run around listening to our own footsteps.  in those two rooms.  that are not made of metal.  at all.

so we did that, and got this.  i think we must’ve divided by zero somewhere…

the other day a fella found me here and was looking for some old drum loops i had posted on a previous version of my site, and i got to wondering myself…yeah, where the hell are those things?  i haven’t used ‘em / heard ‘em / worked on ‘em in years – not much call for alarmingly lo-fi beats in my music these days.  sure enough, they’re right where i left ‘em: in a folder labelled “2008″.  as in, “in 2008 once Warhammer has shipped and i can breathe again, i’ll get back to making music for myself”.

except that folder is no longer called “2008″.  it got renamed “2009″ at one point, then “2010″, and now takes as its name the year in which our current game will ship.  but who am i kidding…i should just rename it “Recycle Bin” and walk away.

but before doing that – all those loops can now be found on the audio page, in big ol’ zip.  behold!  hundreds of versions of the same dude playing different beats on different kits in different spaces at different tempos over a decade.  stuff like this (i think the picture and the beat actually came from the same session)…

back when i was in sustained crunch mode on Warhammer, i did a good deal of work at home on nights and weekends. it was telecommuting, but ghetto stylie. i could log in and play the dev build of the game from home, but i wasn’t on VPN, i didn’t have perforce access, i couldn’t use the dev tools, etc. etc. that being said, i still managed to plow through lots of grunt work that had to be done – yer basic intern-type-stuff that fell to yours truly cuz that’s another thing we didn’t have: an intern. thousands of audio edits that were juuuuuuuust specialized enough that they couldn’t be batched, spreadsheet work without end, and things like hopping around the world placing / “painting” sound regions with tools juuuuuuuust back-asswards enough that the process took days instead of hours (leave alone the possibility of automating it).

now that telecommuting really is the next best thing to being there (i’ve finally got VPN, perforce, dev tools, etc. etc. all up and running flawlessly at home), i’m curiously more psyched than ever to do all that intern work in my free time. the possibility of spending my nights tagging up hundreds of animations, needledicking sound event logic trees, and painting the world silly with environmental audio is downright titillating. sad, yes. but true.

part of it is surely the control freak in me. after all, i was a one-man audio department for almost a decade before i grudgingly took on a wingman once it became aparent that no, one guy canNOT do all the sfx and music for a triple-A MMO. but the other part of it is the sheer joy of getting down to the nitty gritty – the thrill of putting a “pain” tag on a mob’s flinch animation, then hopping in-game and whacking the sucker and hearing him go “AARRRGGHH!”, and doing it again and again and again. joy without end!

maybe after this project is done, i’ll finally have had enough of this sort of thing, and be willing to oversee the entire process from 10,000 feet, with a stable of young & hungry soundfolk banging that stuff out. and then i’ll learn PowerPoint. and start tucking my shirt in. shudder. but until then, i’ll be absolutely wallowing in my hands-on / off-site access. hell, maybe i’ll go back to being an army of one. ya hear that matt? ;)

i’m sitting here looking at the “career day” form i’m supposed to fill out if i’m to speak at my kids’ elementary school.  given the chance to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with doctors and lawyers and such, and come off as the Cool Dad Who Makes Video Games, i have to say it sounds like fun.  but as to what i’d actually say in such a situation…hm.  let me review the steps of my particular career path and see how they fare as an example to others…

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i go to college and start majoring in whatever all the other sheep are majoring in: “business”, in this case.

i fuck that up righteously as DRINKING and ROCKING OUT in local bands takes priority.  i get a 0.9 GPA one semester.  i drop out for the next semester in order to “regroup” (read: “drink and play NES all day”).

now fully regrouped, i start working towards a music major.  that makes sense, at least.

still playing video games and ROCKING OUT, i discover the computer-as-musical-instrument.  unbeknownst to me, a seed is planted.

i stumble across the finish line, graduating with a music major and no life plan other than to continue being a musician living at the poverty line.

i discover that if i enter the graduate music program, a) it will be on a full scholarship, and b) i’ll get *paid* to be a TA.  i begin my Masters In Electronic Composition ™ program solely to support my lifestyle as a slacker-drummer.

once again, my inability to adhere to the norms of the academic life jeopardize my future, as i miss & fail classes with alarming regularity…so much so that at one point one of my professors puts out an APB on me, asking other students, “if anybody has seen brad, or knows if he’s still taking this class…”.

i stumble across the finish line, graduating with my Masters In Electronic Composition ™ and no life plan other than the one i had *last* time i graduated.  dammit, jim.  why am i not a rockstar yet?

in the waning days of my academic career, i bump in to a fella who had graduated from the same program the year before.  “did you get my email?”, he says.  “what email?”, i says.  “the email where i offer you a part-time job doing some sound-editing stuff at this little company that makes video games”, he says.  “no, i never got that”, i says.  “oh, well it’s a good thing we bumped into each other…you want the job?”, he says.  so i take it, but only because the cash and the flexible hours will allow me to pursue my *true* calling – ROCKING OUT.

shortly thereafter, i have a little sitdown with myself and decide i should have a new true calling.  that was 15 years ago.

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hm.  maybe i’ll just answer “so you wanna make video games?” with the standard “start in CS or QA and work your way up” speech.  i’m sure Miss Miller will appreciate that one more than the “be a fuckup until something lands in your lap…it worked for me!” one.

between the end of productivity and the beginning of sleep comes the Hour Of YouTube – that special hour when the mind is too frazzled to do anything worth a damn, but is too lit up to call it a day.  it is a lovely time, pissed away with things beautiful, things surreal, and things nostalgic.

nostalgia.  mm hm.  here’s some Legends Of Kesmai footage that captures the game as it looked & sounded around 1996 or so.  the sound doesn’t kick in until 0:32, and be warned – when it does, it’s loud.  AND AWFUL.

i think i’d been making sound effects for less than a year at that point, and it’s obvious to me which ones came out of my mouth, which came out of the other soundguy’s, and which are straight off the overused library CDs.  hey, there’s nothing wrong with humble beginnings.  it’s just that those humble beginnings are on display for all to see.  :)

i can only imagine what i look like when i’m MMO-ing some nights.  not…not *me* – i know what that slackjawed drooling fool looks like.  no, what my *toons* look like running around WoW, AoC, etc.  see, i don’t so much play for the sake of playing.  more often than not i’m playing for the sake of keeping up with the joneses – reverse engineering the particulars of a given MMO’s sound & music implementation as i bounce merrily along.

the first 10 levels or so i’m just running around kicking the tires.  checking attenuation curves & distances, triggering and retriggering music transitions, sussing out 3D/2D positioning details, sizing up the scope and quality of the VO, etc. etc. etc.  and though this tapers off after a bit, it picks back up with each gameplay milestone (mounts, travel, dungeons, all that).  this makes for a very Mentally Challenged looking player, i’m sure.

dude walks up to a torch.  dude walks around the torch.  dude runs away from the torch, circles the torch, and commences jumping up and down.  dude runs by the torch at top speed a few times.  dude turns 360′s on top of the torch.  dude afk’s for five, then starts doing it all over again.  dude finally gets totally pwn’d by a passing level 80 who’s wondering how Rain Man got a WoW account.

it’s even better when matt and i are working in tandem.  two level 3 prats who can’t seem to get out of the starter area because they’re too busy spamming each other with emotes and listening to each other’s feet.  i can see why ganking those two would seem like a mercy killing.