Hi!
I have managed to find a job as sound designer and composer for a new mobile videgame developing company. I enjoy the composing side of it, since I'm familiar with it. But the sound design part sparks some questions for me.
I'm aware of what sound design and folley techniques are, but I want to know how artists do actually approach it; what are good tools for sound manipulations? what mic or tool do you use to record live sounds? ie: knock on a door, crumbling paper & etc...

any other general advice about this job would be helpful, too for example; by getting this job I learned that WAV does not work for mobile game sounds ever. OGG format is what I need to go for.

Thank You

 

Freesound.org is big helper. You can start from there and use izotope iris to change them. Or maybe in RX.
For recording, Zoom H4N is great, but if you have low budget zoom h1 is good too.

 

Just tell em Zimmer follows you on twitter and you`ll get payed 2x as much.

 

Small diaphragm microphones capture transient rich sounds such as crinkling paper and the sound of jingling keys (keys are a make or break test to see if the mic you are using is your go to for this kind of application such as foley), generally speaking. Maybe the "best" small diaphragm right now is the Soyuz SU-011 http://www.soyuzmicrophones.com/buy-soyuz-microphone-su-012.html, and this baby is one totally fucking sexy hand-made high quality goddess of a microphone. Get twins for the ultimate oral, I mean, aural fantasy and you will forever be a giant amongst men. The good news doesn't end there because you can use its full figured sister's SU-017 large capsuled diaphragm coupled in the smaller format body. Save some big bucks that way. Not cheap coming in at 1399 Euro's apiece, but the best current all hand made mic with the finest ingredients both inside and out cannot be cheap. This is the shit if you can swing it.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/images/...11_2_su_011_handmade_match_stereo_1121997.jpg

 

For the price you also get a dancing Russian bear,a case of vodka and a 4 inch sputnik satellite replica made from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor,plus a meet and greet with Vladimir Putin,tax not included.

 

hey tell them i follow you on twitter-- zimmer is busy doin his live stuff!! https://twitter.com/Michatroschka

ok mate you got a job, thats pro! congrats!!
how did you do that?

i did some things with freesound- the big problem is, the quality is not persistent.
but you will find some nice things!

let me tell you: some things are a million times easier to record than to search through a pile of bad sounds and manipulate them desperately.
(you might want to get them in mono)
learn about how to close mike /or when not to closemike (more room sound aka reflections and reverberation) and get like a (small or big) condenser microphone... Zoom is cool for field recording, even surround! But there may be some nature ambience's available somewhere already!

what company is that?

Do they need someone for music, too?

hey let me get all that, but want the mic, too.!

sounds not too bad next to these legendary mics (one day i will have them all)

 

The reason for OGG is that it's small & HQ & open-sores. You could also try HE-AAC or Opus. licences vary.

Much of game composing can be summarized in: make your music modular , so that different intensity loops can play at different areas/scenarios. You can try capturing sounds using compact recorders .

Source: me reading stuff & doing NOTHING related to games.

 

That's another reason for the ogg format as well. You can loop within one file and play different parts of the music according to the given in-game situation.

On that note:
Has anybody else noticed that most, and I'm talking about like 90% of all movies, tv-series and games use the same sounds for doors? It's hilarious! It's like there are five sounds for doors available, and that's it. Is this some kind of sound designer's in-joke?

 

They use sounds from sound fx libraries... Check sound ideas, hollywood edge, boom library.

 

Yes... That was not the point.

 

wow, lotta great answers, so far .thank you all. I've got my research set up for me on weekend, now. gotta do a lot of digging & browsing.
Don't stop. just pour information, if anymore comes to your head :D

 

you're on point. but there are some sounds I can't find them out there, and that also can be because I'm not familiar with many top tier SFX library providers out there. Mladbambuk mentioned some above, that I'm gonna dig some more into them on weekend. If you have any good SFX library sources in mind, plz let me know. As you said, I'm a sound designer later and composer first.

 

I didn't write any names because Mladbambuk already mentioned them. Sound Ideas has enormous collection which alone can cover almost everything. Check their page. Hollywood Edge is also huge. And Boom Library just adds the "other" stuff, they have a lot of sound design material, but also natural stuff, super high quality.

The trick with using these libraries is in good browsing/searching method of audio files, so you can find as fast as possible all relevant material to your search (cause, as I mentioned, these are huge libraries, and you have a lot of option, so managing that is important). We do that actually very simple. All the audio files have descriptions in their filenames. Example : "01 DOOR SCIFI SMALL HYDRAULIC DOOR OPEN OR CLOSE x4" All libraries are in the same folder, and we search that folder with good old Windows Explorer (up/right search box). Explorer search is great cause you can write "door open" and get this example file that I wrote...and all others that have those two words in the filename. Good thing about that is that those two words don't have to be one beside the other in the filename, and it finds ALL filenames with those two words no matter the location of them within the filename. Using two and more words in the search is crucial, cause... when I type only "door" in the search, I get over 2000 results

I hope that this makes sense. I tried different methods... metadata programs, searching PDFs, etc... This turned out to be the best way.

Hope this helps

 

for videogames the SoundMorph Libraries also might be useful

 

Do you guys purchase these libraries or risk getting busted?