Brad's Sonic Musings

Category: Field Recording

  • The Sound Design of Ghost of Tsushima: Crafting the Ambience

    To be honest, when we first started making Ghost of Tsushima, I was probably most excited about the possibility of traveling to Japan to capture ambience. We sent two teams over to Tsushima and throughout Japan but I didn’t get to go. It kinda made sense. These were more sight-seeing tours for environment artists, character modelers, and some of the other creative leads to get a sense what Japan was like. If I was going to go I needed isolation, not driving around in a van with 10 other people.

    On the first trip, I gave Billy Harper, our character and animation lead one of my recorders and a brief tutorial on how to use it in hopes he could maybe get away and record some interesting stuff. I wasn’t expecting anything useful but Billy surprised me. He got some usable recordings of birds including some black kites, songbirds, and of course, the ubiquitous jungle crows. The team went to Tsushima and attended the Komodohama festival which commemorates the Mongol invasion landing on Tsushima in 1274. Our team was invited to the junior high school on Tsushima and Billy and our cinematics team recorded several instruments including various taiko drums and a horagai, a conch shell horn that was used by samurai to communicate in battle.

    Being part of Sony, we have a great team at Japan Studio, so we reached out to them and ask if they would be willing to record some ambience for us and they did a great job. The team there drove out near Mount Fuji to capture all sorts of birds in the wild as well as some rivers and wind. They also went to the Kachoen Wild Bird Refuge and got tons of species isolated. One of the sound designers, Ito-san went on vacation to visit family over in Akita prefecture on the Northeastern side of Honshu, the main island of Japan, and got some fantastic recordings of songbirds at dawn and during the say in some rice paddies.

    All of these recordings were great and totally usable, but we were still missing a few specific species of animals we knew were going to be in the game, so I decided fairly last minute to spend my Christmas and New Years traveling around Japan on a whirlwind trip chasing after more specific species. My partner, Bonnie, joined me as travel partner and documentarian. I had planned a 10 day trip for us. We would land in Tokyo one evening, then fly out to Hokkaido the following morning, record the tancho (the red-crowned cranes), travel to Lake Kasharro to record the Whooper Swans, then back to Honshu. We’d spend New Years in Tokyo, then head up to Nikko, followed by a trip into Nagano prefecture to try and record the snow monkeys.

    The entire trip was absolutely incredible. Japan is insanely beautiful, the people exceptionally friendly, even when there’s a language barrier, and the food was always fresh and amazing. The entire trip was a highlight, but also included some fun surprises. When we were in Nikko, we checked out the temples as you do, but then hiked up a mountain near the Kirifuri Ice Arena. I set up my recorder to capture some ambience and walk a little ways away. A short while later we were startled by what sounded like a piercing alarm chip. It happened again and then once more. Bonnie and I looked at each other and mouthed “What the fuck was that?” Suddenly we saw two huge sika deer run by in the valley below us. The continue to chirp their alert calls for the next 10 minutes. Those recordings feature prominently in Ghost of Tsushima.

    There were some other cool moments that didn’t make it into the game as well. In Kushiro on Hokkaido, the Kushiro River was half frozen with large sheets of ice flowing down the river and crashing into each other. One night I threw my hydrophone into the river, hoping to get some interesting underwater sounds of ice creaking, crunching and colliding, but there was nothing quite so interesting.

    After compiling all this great content from so many people, I made a movie to share with the team as part of one of our team meetings. My attempt to evoke David Attenborough is pathetic, but the video was a fun glimpse into just how global the effort was to capture realistic and accurate ambience for the game.

  • The Sound Design of Ghost of Tsushima: Horses

    One of the first decisions made on Ghost of Tsushima was that our main means of fast locomotion in the game would be horses. It made sense since that was what was used by both Mongols and Japanese warriors in the 13th century. There would be no grinding power lines or zipping through air vents or beaming from one radar dish to another. So of course we knew the horses needed to sound great.

    Surprisingly I think the only other game I’ve worked on that almost had a horse was a Shrek game that got canceled. In that game in a very on-the-nose homage to Monty Python, there were knight enemies that rode around on hobby horses. For the knights footsteps I recorded coconuts and the results were as hilarious as intended. So for fun, when we first got the horse working in game, I re-recorded the same coconut shells and, while still hilarious, it didn’t quite fit tonally.

    We began to research some places to record horses. The most important thing was we needed shoeless horses. While there was conflicting information about whether or not Mongols shoed their horses, we could find no information demonstrating the Japanese shoed their horses with metal, so we opted to keep things simpler and go for natural footsteps. After calling some places that fit the bill and driving around to check out their properties, assess noise levels, etc., we decided upon the Northwest Natural Horsemanship Center out in Fall City, WA. The owner Jim Hutchins, was keen to work with us and seemed genuinely interested in our work.

    Unfortunately between the time we agreed to record there and the date of the recording, my sound designer had left for another position, so I was on my own for the session. One fewer person to operate microphones posed some problems, so I got creative: I followed the horse with a boom mic and strapped a recorder and a pair of omni electret condenser mics (a Roland CS-10EM) to the saddle which we taped down (and taped all buckles on the saddle).

    Horses are amazing animals and when the horse first saw my furry blimp, it was not happy. We got lots of great nervous vocalizations which ended up as the final assets in the game as it got used to the presence of the blimp. From there Jim guided the horse around on various surfaces in their property (grass, tall grass, dirt, mud, wood, gravel, stone/concrete, and asphalt) at trot, canter and occasionally gallop speeds and I chased after them with my mic. We got A LOT of horse grazing because when a horse is hungry and has the lay of the land, they eat when they feel like it. These assets too were eventually massaged by Erik Buensuceso and made it into the game. In fact, the amount of grazing sounds we got and the frequency with which the horses naturally ate grass was the impetus for us adding the grazing animations into the game!

    To get bigger whinnies and neighs, Jim put two of the horses together who were really good friends, and then separated them. Once one was led far enough away, the other would bellow out a very loud call for their friend. I inadvertently recorded a horse fart at one point, but was too far away so unfortunately it was not usable. Lastly, we went into their gear barn and recorded a bunch of sounds of various bridles and saddles, again taping down any metal parts since we wanted to avoid jangling components in the sound design.

    Once I chopped up the assets and integrated them into the game I made this delightfully silly video to show at a company meeting:

    But we were still a long way from being done. The horse had to sound great because it was used SO much in the game and we wanted to really push on the detail of everything about the horse from its footsteps to its saddle and bridle sounds to its vocalizations. I think when all was said and done the assets for the horse were probably touched by almost every sound designer on the project. I can think of at least 5 of us that did some work on the horse, tuning and improving and iterating to make them sound great.

    On the mix side, Josh came up with a great idea we used on both hero and horse foley. We created an RTPC that tracked how long the player was running or the horse was galloping, which we used to subtle mix down the non-footstep sounds after 10-15 seconds. This served the purpose of helping reduce ear fatigue and allow other sounds to cut through the mix on long traversals. With this attention to detail we got some really nice dynamic behavior in the sounds in game.

  • The Sound Design of Ghost of Tsushima: Dogs

    The dogs in Ghost of Tsushima are fun to talk about because, like so much of the soundscape of the game, we started with a lot of research and then recording them was a blast. Let’s just ignore the fact that Jin kills so many dogs in his journey and rewind a few years when we first started talking about having dogs in the game. The impetus for adding dogs was to have a unique enemy type that was also more adept at hunting Jin than the Mongols. Like everything else in the game, we did a bunch of research and found that Mongols did indeed use dogs and that from Genghis Khan on, their dogs were ancestors of the breed now known as the Tibetan Mastiff (which technically is not a mastiff, but I’m not here to get into a discussion about dog breeds). So the art team began working on models of Tibetan mastiffs, which meant we needed to find some sounds for them! We started looking online and these dogs looked and sounded fierce, but also fairly unique. So I started looking to see if there were any Tibetan Mastiff breeders in the area and I struck gold: there were actually a handful within a few hour drive from Seattle!

    We ended up connecting with Debbie Parsons of Dreamcatcher Mastiffs. She mentioned they had several Tibetan Mastiffs and we were welcome to come record them. So Josh and I packed up our mics and recorders and headed out to Graham, WA, just an hour south of Seattle on the way to Mount Rainier. As soon as we showed up, we were greeted by 3 VERY large, scary and seemlingly angry dogs. We started recording immediately and got some terrific barks and growls (unfortunately interspersed with chain link fence rattle as they were pretty excited). Debbie was super helpful and started taking most of the dogs inside and allowing us to record each one individually. We got a good range of growls, snarls and barks. Debbie even ended up putting on a hooded sweatshirt and acting like a prowler to get them riled up. After getting all these great barks, we went into the property to record more and these dogs transformed into the cuddliest, sweetest bears (seriously they looked like bears in dog suits).

    We were able to get panting and breathing and even chewing on bones as they had settled down and got used to us. From there Josh took the recordings, cleaned them up and got them in game. Rob Castro did a final polish pass towards the end of the project to make them even more terrifying. As you can hear from this video we created for a company meeting, the were already pretty scary before the sonic magic was applied.

  • Trip report: Satsop nuclear power plant (Glass recording)

    On October 6th, I had the privilege to join a few other sound designers (James Nixon, Kristoffer Larson, Pete Comley and Andy Martin) on a trip to the Satsop Nuclear Power Plant out in Elma, Washington about a half hour west of Olympia. While we bore a ridiculous number of radioactive jokes afterwards, the plant was never finished and thus never had any actual nuclear material near it. Construction began in the 70s during the energy crisis and in 1983, after falling $60 million over budget, they canned it. It was apparently about 75% complete. The county of Grays Harbor has now turned the complex into a business park, so there’s a handful of businesses out there and various films, music videos and performance groups also rent it out from time to time. James Nixon had wanted to record some large glass breaks, and when he opened up to the group to see if anyone would be interested in breaking shit at a nuclear power plant, the sentiment was “I would be completely insane to say no!”

    We had the run of the place from 8am until 4pm on a gray, overcast Tuesday. I’ve seen the cooling towers from the freeway on the way to the Olympic Peninsula, but it was a completely different thing to be standing right under one. They were huge! We signed releases to climb up the stairs along the outside all the way to the top, but alas, we didn’t have time. We did walk around though, scouted out a space to do our glass breaking and also scouted some areas to capture impulse responses and the like. The picture below shows one of these spaces: what was meant to be a cap to an unfinished containment unit is now a parking garage with some insane reverbs inside.

    Andy walking into the bat cave, aka the cap of a containment vat turned into a parking garage.
    Andy walking into the bat cave, aka the cap of a containment vat turned into a parking garage.

    We burned the morning trying to figure out how to rig the glass. James wanted the break sound isolated from the debris that would come with just throwing the panes on the ground. While he was working on figuring that out, Andy and I did a little exploration into a side alley which had some amazing reflections that changed radically from the entrance to the back of the alley. In the back of the alley were some 15 foot long pieces of rebar that we started playing with. Andy grabbed one and started dragging it along the floor and the sound was insane! So we recorded a bunch of that and some other rebar in the alley fun.

    By then, we had gotten the maintenance crew to bring a man basket lift (a silly, sexist name if there ever were one) and we began figuring out how to get the glass set up so it could be broken safely with a few milliseconds between the impact and the shard fall. The plan was to have 2 people on the roof of the moving van we rented, but the roof was fiberglass with a few metal support ribs. Good thing Andy is a small human! He was volunteered to be the man on the truck breaking the glass. The rig called for a rope running from the truck with 2 suction cups attached to it, going up through the man basket and back down to the back of my car where we tied off so we could easily hoist new panes of glass up for each break. Andy would break each piece with a hammer or crowbar and await the next one to be hauled up.

    We set up a ton of mics through Kristoffer’s Nomad recorder, 4 Sound Devices 702’s and a couple other field recorders. I think in the end we had a Sennheiser MKH8040 stereo pair on the truck pointing toward the impact. James and Pete and I each had 8060s pointed at the impact areas. We had Pete’s Neumann binaural head (aka Fritz) near the impact area as well as a few other close mics. I had a Shure KSM141 stereo pair pointed at a concrete wall just off from the impact zone to capture the reflections and Andy had his Omni M/S rig in the alley we were playing in. We also had a couple contact mics set up in interesting places (attached to a small satellite dish and one to the rental truck) which actually got some pretty decent recordings. Kristoffer ran the main recording area, capturing 8 tracks from around the impact site into his Nomad. Pete and James were both operating their booms, Andy was destroying, and I was tucked into the cab of the truck recording with my 8060 and monitoring Pete’s rig. In between breaks we all ran whatever tasks were needed: Pete would sweep out the existing glass, James would prep the next pane, Kristoffer logged the recordings and helped me with stopping some of the remote recorders, and I would stop the remaining remote recorders, get in my car to lower the rope and raise a new pane, then run around in a tizzy turning the recorders back on and hopping in the cab to do it again. Chaotic sonic fun!

    Satsop is a business park and there’s some other industrial areas nearby including a power plant, so it is not a completely quiet place. We were plagued throughout the day by truck backup beeps, riding lawn mowers, strange radio squawks, wind, etc. But we got some surprisingly clean and diverse recordings of a broad range of glass from mirrors to plate glass to bottles to wine goblets (which made an awesome whooshing sound as they traveled through the air) and lightbulbs which sounded way more powerful and percussive than their size betrays).

    It was a super successful day, but unfortunately we had no time left after breaking all the glass and cleaning up to record anything else. We’re planning another trip soon hopefully to capture impulse responses of various rooms, buildings and spaces (1000 foot tunnels!) and whatever else suits our fancy. Here’s a compilation of some of the breaks I captured with my Sony RX100 camera. The recordings via our Rycotes sound much cleaner (no wind) and as far as those truck beeps, well that’s what RX is for!

  • The Sound Design of inFamous Second Son: Concrete Powers

    It’s hard to believe that inFamous Second Son is a year old already!  I’ve been completely lagging on finishing up these posts about the powers design for the game, so let me use this opportunity to make good and present the first of the final 2 parts of this series. I will hopefully get around to posting my presentation on the Systems Design for the game soon as well so those who haven’t heard/seen it can have the information available to them. Anyway, on to the magic and mystery of concrete!

    For those who haven’t played or seen inFamous Second Son you play a guy who gets superpowers battling an authoritarian government agency called the DUP whose soldiers are all imbued with concrete superpowers by their leader Dana Augustine (as normally happens with government agencies).

    The biggest challenge for us with concrete was how to make it sound unique. It’s just rocks and stone right? We’ve all heard countless variations on rock sounds in everything from impacts to destruction and rubble/debris sounds. We needed to figure out ways to make our sounds stand out as unique, while also conveying the power of the enemies in the game who used concrete.

    The powers ran the gamut from concrete grenades to spawning concrete shields to launching off spires of concrete and forming a concrete balcony on walls. In short there was tons of concrete objects being created and broken in the world. Not only did we need these to sound unique and “powered” but they also had to sound completely distinct from all the “normal” concrete in the world you could destroy or collide other objects with. It was a huge challenge, but one that Andy Martin was definitely up for.

    The place to start, naturally, was by buying a bunch of concrete. I looked into the process of concrete, which is usually just a mixture of water, an aggregate like sand or gravel, and Portland cement (named after a type of stone used in the UK, not the sleepy hamlet of the Pacific Northwest of the US). While the thought of mixing up my own concrete sounded appealing to my construction worker wannabe side, we weren’t in a position in the project where we had limitless time to experiment. So we did the next best thing: went to Home Depot. Andy and I both made trips to the hardware store and bought all kinds of concrete and stone, from paver stones (which were often too resonant) to clay bricks, cinder blocks, and more. They were demolishing a building across the street from my house and I noticed some particularly large chunks of both asphalt and concrete sitting on the other side of the fence. I waited until nightfall, donned my ninja costume (really just a bathrobe with a scarf tied around my head) and absconded with the almost-final resources we would need to make our concrete powers come to life.

    From here, Andy began to run wild and experiment with all kinds of torture he could enact on our various pieces of concrete. From scraping everything against the slabs from metal disks to binder clips to resonating a jews harp against them to, yes, crushing, beating and destroying, he created an elaborate and unique palette of concrete sounds. As a few of the characters in the game developed, their powers also evolved. Some characters now had “beams” of concrete they would shoot out to shield allies while another burrowed underground like Bugs Bunny on his way to Albuquerque, and another sat atop a giant swirling tornado of concrete chunks. We needed something unique here and I devised a way to record a constantly moving collection of some of the concrete chunks we had broken (and wrote up a blog post about it here).

    Andy’s wizardry both in recording these sounds and in shaping them in ProTools and Wwise into the layers of concrete powers was top notch as always and now it was time to show the team what we’d been doing (and that our jobs are more fun than theirs). Below is another Sonic Equation of sorts which we showed at a company meeting demonstrating some of recording techniques used to make the concrete powers of Second Son:

    Thanks again for reading. I hope to get a write-up of the video powers (which naturally entailed a lot of fun creative recording and manipulation) done next week in time for the proper anniversary of Second Son’s release. Stay tuned!

  • Adventures in Foley: The Tumbling Machine

    A few months ago we were recording some sounds for inFamous Second Son, when I realized how challenging it is to get continuous debris recordings in a tiny recording booth. Inspired in part by the ArenaNet team’s field recording journal from Guild Wars 2, I started to think about a way to be able to record long continuous debris recordings and, lo, the Tumbling Machine was born. I call it the Tumbling Machine because that sounds impressive, but really it’s ridiculously simple, yet pretty damn effective.

    I started with a giant plastic garbage can. The issue there is that the molded handles on each side prevent an even roll, so I cut them off with a dremel tool. Now it rolled nice and smooth but the plastic surface would obviously color the sound of the debris. To counteract the resonance of the plastic, I bought a package of eggcrate foam that you put on top of a mattress and lined the bottom and sides of the trash can with it. I tried a few different methods to affix it, but found the most effective was gaffer tape (duct tape would work fine too). The foam did a great job of insulating the impacts so you get the debris, with very little coloration from the plastic. The drawback, is that the foam can trap smaller particles of concrete, wood, glass or other debris you may want to record, but worse off, you could always replace the insulation each time you record a different surface. Here’s a short movie detailing the construction and use of the Tumbling Machine. In this instance, we were using it to record concrete rubble sounds.

    It’s a cheap, effective way to make clean, continuous debris movement sounds. Here’s a capture from the concrete recording session cleaned up, so you can hear the results:

    The one issue we’ve had is that the debris spills out as you roll the trash can. I’m planning on cutting a fairly wide hole in the lid of the can (so a blimp can fit inside without hitting the edges during tumbling), and cover the inside of the lid with foam to prevent coloration and try to keep the debris inside. Hope this inspires someone to make their own Tumbling Machine or maybe even something more outlandish/useful. Happy Tumbling!

  • Adventures in the Field, Volume 2: Snowboarding

    While we were working on the skateboarding game back at Free Range Games, we were hoping it would take off and they’d ask us to do a snowboarding game (it didn’t, but as a stopgap we ended up making SummitX Snowboarding on our own).  Since the project would have likely happened in the summertime, I opted to make a huge sacrifice for the team and spend a lot of time up in Lake Tahoe recording snowboarding sounds during the winter.  I needed to get a gamut of various terrain types from the corduroy and packed powder of ski run groomers to spring corn to the neck deep powder of the backcountry and even loathesome sheets of ice and rocks.

    Fortunately, I’m a much more competent snowboarder than I am a skateboarder, so I would be able to capture the sounds myself.  The challenge here was how to get quality sounds of the board carving through various snow types with minimal (and ideally no) wind. I decided to try two methods simultaneously and see what worked.  First off, I bought some little windscreens for my Core sound binaural mic.  I attached this to an Edirol R-09 stuffed into my pocket.  Over the course of several sessions, I experimented with several mic placements: taping them to the back of the board on either side (facing backwards to minimize wind), strapping them to the top of my boots, and taping them to the middle of the board on the left and right. I coupled this with a Zoom H2 with a windscreen stretched over the mics held in my hand as low to the ground as I could get it. Again, not the best quality recorders, but with a high impact sport like snowboarding I was only willing to risk my equipment so much!

    Between the two, over a course of many days, I was able to get some decent sounds across multiple types of terrains.  (The schedule was a scant 2 months, so we ended up forgoing terrain types.  I experimented with changing the terrain based on altitude from powder to packed powder to ice, but it didn’t work very well without a visual or physical change to the terrain). I found the best results actually came from the mics on the inner (wind-protected) side of the binding and holding a recorder low behind me with the mic facing up the mountain (and thus away from the wind direction).

    The bulk of what ended up in SummitX Snowboarding was from a bluebird day doing backcountry with my friends Sati and Melody Shah on Rose Knob Peak, near Mt. Rose in North Lake Tahoe.  It was perfect powdery spring conditions with very little wind.  We did see some bear tracks, but fortunately, no bears! To get the sound of your board riding over rock, rather than sacrifice my board, I ran the edges over a stone mortar and pestle and the results worked pretty well. The turns, carves, and powerslides were taken from some of my other recordings, and I made soundsets for more of the planned terrains, which have yet to see the light of day. For the snowboarder movement including clothing, boot squeaks and binding creaks, I recorded those in the comfort and relative quiet of my apartment, using Mackie Onyx pres and a Neumann TLM 193.

    Here’s a composite from the game:

    You can also buy it on Android or iOS

  • Adventures in the Field, Volume 1: Skateboarding

    Undoubtedly, one of the most enjoyable, fun aspects of being a sound designer is field and foley recording.

    Perhaps one of the fondest memories of my career was when I was working for Konami in Hawaii.  We were doing a PS2 game called Ys VI: The Ark of Naphishtim in which there was a cutscene with a huge pirate ship battle.  There were a lot of cannonball blasts and splashes, so to get some good cannonball impact sounds, myself and the other sound designers, Jaren Tolman and Stillwind Borenstein headed over to the leeward side of the island where I proceeded to jump off a concrete pillar into the middle of the Pacific Ocean while Jaren held the Rycote blimp on a boom extended out over me and Stillwind ran the session on his laptop.  We couldn’t believe we were getting paid to do this!

    More recently I was working on a skateboarding game.  Unfortunately, due to circumstances far beyond our control, it never saw the light of day. However it was another fun project that afforded me the opportunity to experiment with and record a variety of sounds in a realistic fashion that ended up sounding great in the game.

    When we were first approached with the project, I instantly started thinking about how to get some good skateboarding sounds.  Do I hire a pro and follow him around with a boom and a blimp? Is there a way I could somehow record all the necessary sounds myself? Being that this was a start-up, we had no budget for hiring anyone, nor did I have such necessary equipment at that time like a blimp or even a decent field recorder.  So I opted to try some experiments with a DIY rig to see if I could make some quality sounds on the cheap. For recorders I had an Edirol R-09 and a Zoom H2. I opted for the Zoom because, while the preamps aren’t as good as the Edirol, it was also one-fourth the price, so if it got destroyed, which seemed likely, I wouldn’t be as pissed. To capture the sounds, I wanted to affix the recorder to the board, but needed a method that wouldn’t cause noise. I started with a piece of foam I found, that I believe came from a hard drive package. I cut out a hole to wedge the recorder into and duct taped it to the board.  Ghettotastic!

    And the results turned out really well!  While I can’t show off the game for legal reasons, here’s what the audio content, all recorded in this method, sounded like:

    Now, I’m no pro skater, so the only times I was actually riding the skateboard was to capture all the rolling sounds and a few of the ollies and landings.  Most of the ollies, landings, power slides, bails, etc., were all recorded with the recorder firmly tucked into the foam and me “simulating” the movements as if it were a giant finger board.  I would apply ample pressure so it sounded like there was some mass on the board and eq things when designing the actual sounds.  But every skateboarding sound you hear was captured with the skateboard above and that magic piece of foam.