In contrast to past inFAMOUS games, Second Son was a tricky beast in that our power sets were pretty abstract. Electricity can really hurt someone, but smoke, neon, and video? This was definitely one of the many challenges we faced with the sound design of the powers. For neon, we took a pretty direct approach and then got creative with our source materials.
We struggled early on with making neon sound “neon” and not “laser.” There was some confusion during development in which power we were making as those two words were often interchangeable. (Fetch even refers to herself at one point in the game as “Laser Girl”). Making her sounds laser-y was ok, but at the same time I didn’t want to tread on the hallowed ground of Ben Burtt. I actually cursed his name a few times during production because Andy had made some beautiful sounds that unfortunately sounded too Star-Wars-laser-gun. Andy had a REALLY long spring (originally an induction coil for an industrial kiln we got from a local glass maker named Chris Daly) attached to the ceiling of his office. Whenever he would accidentally hit it, I would hear the telltale “pew pew” in my office next door.
The first element we captured which really felt “neon” was an actual neon tube. We have a couple Sly Cooper neon signs in the office, so I took my Barcus Berry contact mic and attached it to one and got some really nice neon hum. For more variety we captured a bunch of fluorescent lights as well, both via contact mics and using a Sennheiser MKH 8060 to capture various flickering sounds of turning them on and off. I have a very old fluorescent fixture in my house that created some amazing sounds which we ended up using for neon power sources powering down. And Delsin’s neon drain was composed of several tracks of neon hum processed through Izotope Iris with various frequencies cutout and some filter sweeps.
For the rest of Delsin’s powers, Andy got REALLY creative. As you’ll see in the video below no sounds were off limits and we used a broad range of varied sounds to create the final neon palette. Andy used Zynaptiq’s Morph plugin extensively to do some interesting blends of EMF interference and various hits on the aforementioned induction coil. Other tricks up our sleeve included an old signal generator I have which emits square and sine wave sweeps and some very cool power on and off sounds and a crazy electric shocking device from the 50s which would shoot small arcs of electricity at anything you put near it.
Once we got our power set close to completion, it was time for another milestone meeting and thus time for another movie to show off our work. The response from the team from our previous movie, the smoke “Sonic Equation,” was so overwhelmingly positive, I felt compelled to do another. Sure the equation doesn’t EXACTLY equate to the sounds as they are in the game, but it at least shows off part of our design methodology as well as the fun we’re still having.
Next time, we’ll discuss the enemy concrete powers and show some of the abuse we wrought upon varied chunks of concrete!
You know how sometimes you have lofty plans to do a project and then months later you think, “What the hell happened? I still haven’t gotten to that thing I meant to do months ago!” Well that’s pretty much where I’m at. I’ve been meaning to write a few short posts about some of the sound design we did on inFAMOUS Second Son for quite some time, and I’m FINALLY getting around to it. I hope this to be the first in a series of posts with an entertaining movie or two showing off some of the sounds we captured to make our various sfx in Second Son and how those ended up sounding in-game. Since the powers are the biggest sonic show piece of the game, I figured we’d start there.
A lot has already been written about smoke power, but since it’s the first power you gain in the game, I’ll touch briefly on it one more time in part just to show you the movie below.
But before that here’s something which may be of interest that has never been seen or heard outside of Sucker Punch. The first thing we ever did in regards to powers on Second Son was to concept some ideas of what these powers may sound like. We had NO idea what they were going to look like (and as you can see from the video we were even concepting powers that never made the cut into the game). This was merely an exercise to start playing with sound and seeing what kinds of things were resonating with us in regards to these potential power sets. A lot of what we started with helped inform our extensive recording sessions to capture elements to mold and bend to our will. Other concepts we tried here didn’t work and were abandoned. For example, I thought it would be cool if the player’s footsteps had a sweetener applied to them based on your current power set. In the end it felt too heavy handed so we cut it. We played around with the notion of USTV feeds making their way into the video powers sounds (similar to Andy’s Neil Armstrong clip in the concept for what was then called TV powers), but that also just didn’t work in any meaningful way. None of the sounds you hear in this concept made it into the game, but it at least gave Andy, our senior sound designer, and myself a jumping off point to explore from.
Smoke was the first power we worked on, but it was also one of the most challenging: how do you make something as amorphous as smoke sound powerful? Furthermore, how do you make it sound like smoke, and by that I mean NOT like fire. These were the challenges before us. I noticed some steam pouring out from a grate in the ground one day and thought that could be interesting. But it made no sound! We experimented with other air releases from helium tanks and compressed air, but none of it fit the bill. I pretty quickly gravitated towards charcoal. I don’t mean those neatly-formed imitation charcoal briquettes either. I’m talking real burned chunks of wood. I knew from ample barbecuing experience that they made really interesting crackling sounds when burned and also they had a resonance to them when moving around which was kinda unique. After buying a couple bags of charcoal and a small grill I set to work doing most imaginable things to these chunks of burnt wood: moving them around, bouncing them off each other, crushing them, burning them, lighting them on fire and then dousing them, etc. It was a great start. Many other elements ended up playing into the final sounds: surprisingly blowing air through a plastic tube became a very important element in Delsin’s smoke dash and various movements of sand also played a role in both quicker smoke attacks and Delsin’s navigation abilities. Below is a video showing off some of these elements as they were recorded and as they sounded in the game. One quick word on this video: it was originally shown as part of a company meeting. Every milestone during production, each team would show a short video highlighting their work over the past several weeks. We liked to show the team not only how much fun sound design is, but how much fun we have doing it. Enjoy and stay tuned next week for an exposé on Neon powers!
While I’m proud of so much of the audio design in inFamous Second Son, one feature stands out as a testament to never letting go of a good idea. It was a concept, not new or necessarily innovative, that began incubating around 7 years ago. It wasn’t until 2013 that I was able to make the idea work in a title. I thought it’d be fun to trace that feature from its nascent stages through to its full fledged life. To do so, we have to go all the way back in time to a year we called 2007. Ah 2007! There was a palpable hum in the air. The iPhone was introduced by a little upstart company called Apple, Microsoft excitedly released their newest blockbuster (*cough*) Operating System, Vista, and the Nintendo Wii had captured people’s hearts, minds, wrists, and pocketbooks.
I was working at Shaba Games, where we had just finished up the DLC/Gold Edition of Marvel Ultimate Alliance and were looking for a new project. Like many others, we were captivated by the Wii and began working on a concept for a downhill skateboarding game for the platform. Shaba’s other sound designer, Lorien Ferris, and myself began brainstorming ways we could introduce interesting audio to what would ostensibly be a multiplayer racing game. Obviously the skateboard sounds would reign supreme and we came up with an idea of emitters tied to occluder objects such as buildings which would play a quick whoosh as you passed them (an idea I would later harvest for the mobile title, SummitX Snowboarding). Another idea we had was to have music emanating from buildings as you skated by. You’d be going fast and could never go back uphill, so they could be short loops, and once we applied some doppler it would sound awesome!
Unfortunately, while the Wii as a piece of hardware was popular for a slew of years, the software didn’t seem to sell as well, so the project was scrapped before we got very far. BUT after multiple other false starts we were finally given something wholly different and rather exciting: Spider-Man, and what would eventually become Web of Shadows. The goal was straightforward: create a new, unique open world Spider-Man game using the engine from the recently released Spider-man 3. Once again Lorien and I dove into brainstorming cool new features we could implement on the audio front to push the superhero qualities of Spider-man and the real life interactivity of the city. Early on, our storefront music concept was revived. I even added some various loops to embed into some stores simulating dance and jazz clubs and restaurants. Unfortunately we ran into some design problems early on: the storefronts we had in the game didn’t really match the music, they were destructible but we didn’t have a signal to turn off the music when the store was destroyed, and truthfully it just didn’t sound super-convincing to have the sound of filtered talking and clinking dishes and glasses of a restaurant while you’re right outside fighting. You think there’d be screams and hushed whispers. Basically with a tight schedule and a skeleton crew, our storefront music plans would have to wait for another day…
…which came just a year and a half later. We were working on a new superhero title and, with so much of the infrastructure in place now, we spent some time focusing on how to make storefronts believable. We created a multi-stage approach: idle, which would be the default and would play a basic ambient loop. For example some cheesy Italian music emanating from a restaurant. If a fight broke out in the vicinity we would enter a threatened state which would trigger an appropriate one-shot sound effect of screams and maybe instruments falling, dishes breaking, etc. and the music would cease. During high-tension moments (using the same tension meter as our interactive music system) the stores would be silent. Once tension went back down to low, we would slowly ramp up the idle state again until another fight broke out. Perfect plan! Unfortunately the studio ended up shifting gears and we moved from superhero games to music games. The storefront music would lay dormant again…
Fast forward to early 2012. I had just joined Sucker Punch and we were in pre-production on inFamous Second Son. Being back in an open world title, I pretty quickly started to think about my beloved storefront music concept again. Everyone I pitched it to from our creative director to our music team down at Sony HQ loved the concept. So now it was time to design it. The first step was just to get looping sounds emitting from a point in space and figuring out proper attenuation and processing for them. Next it was time to get into the real nitty gritty. I had several challenges to tackle:
A world inside a world
inFamous Second Son takes place in present-day/slightly-future Seattle. It’s not real Seattle, it’s our take on the city, but we still wanted it to be a unique, diverse, funky place, just like real Seattle. We did not want it to be full of grunge music (and that is a story for another day!). I began talking with the environment team to get a sense of the variety of storefronts we would have, and some of what they created helped influence my ideas. Early on, we got an Irish Pub in the game. At which point I thought, man that’d be cool to have it play Irish music during the day and then become a punk club at night. Just like in real life! Then I started to take it further: what if we had traditional Irish music in the earlier times of day, changing to more upbeat, raucous Irish music in the evening and THEN a punk club at night. I was on to something. As we fleshed out the stores my list of music grew and grew. I wanted jazz and Chinese and J-Pop, club, top 40, and why not mariachi music in the Mexican restaurant and thai music, new age music for the yoga studio, and hell even Russian music to put into apartments where the Akulan gangs live? Sure they’re musical stereotypes, but they’re serving the purpose of a low ambient bed, they were never meant to be featured sounds. The result will be filling the city with greater perceived life. I also wanted to reach out to some local bands and get them featured in the game as well. I wanted a lot. So how the hell were we gonna get all this music?
APM to the rescue!
As anyone who’s worked with Sony can attest to, they have some of the most amazingly talented, brilliant people working in their music department. We were very fortunate to have a few of them working closely with us throughout the project. Beyond the game score, we started discussing this source music idea and they carved out some of their budget for a blanket license from APM for stock music. Matt Levine worked directly with APM who would put together playlists for various genres of music we were interested in. He would then send me the lists, which I would review, make notes and approve or ask for more. In the end, we had over 100 tracks in the game spread out over 8 times of day. On the local band side, having been in a band and played with some acts up here I reached out to some friends’ bands and also KEXP, the local college station, and got a list of some potential candidates, several of which made it into the final game. We also started talking to Sir Mix-A-Lot and he really wanted to get some tracks in, too. Now that we had music, we just had to get it playing in game.
Rock Against the Man
As I mentioned, I had earlier rigged up a test playing source music in a test world pretty quickly to help figure out volume, attenuation, and processing. From there, it was on to the challenging part: figuring out how to make it gel in-game. In inFamous Second Son, you play as Delsin Rowe, a rebelistic youth with super powers battling against an evil authoritarian police force, the D.U.P. (Department of Unified Protection, think of the TSA with guns, armor and superpowers). Delsin can clear the DUP out of each district of Seattle as part of the systemic, non-mission open world gameplay. The main theme here is freedom vs. security. The DUP keeps people secure, but Delsin gives them the freedom to do as they wish. To help reinforce this thematically we decided that when the DUP controls a district we’d only hear DUP music. We started with stoic, patriotic sounding cues, but steered the direction more towards syrupy, happy music that provides a wonderfully stark juxtaposition to the menace of the DUP. Once Delsin begins to drive the DUP out of a district, we stop the DUP music from playing in that area and instead let the storefronts come to life with their own individuality. We had a programmer working on the district status rigging, so I asked him to give me a callback signal for when the district status changed. I was then able to use this to determine what district the player was in and whether DUP music should be playing there (it emits from DUP speakers and closed off DUP storefronts), or whether the other storefronts should be allowed to rock in the slowly-becoming-free world. I didn’t feel my initial idea from way back about multiple states work work in this instance. The music acted more as personality for the district than simulating people inside, so I didn’t pursue any kind of multi-state reactive environment. Maybe next time!
At the same time, I wanted some semblance of reactivity and also wanted to ensure the source music didn’t clash with the game score. So I tied the volume of the source music to our tension rtpc (Real-time Parameter Control in Wwise) which is also used for controlling the music intensity. When the player got caught up in combat, the music would fade out, when the combat abated, the source music would slowly ramp back up in volume. As if the owners of the shops were peeking through their windows, and once they saw the DUP dispatched, they cranked up the tunes again. So everything was working great, but now I had dozens and dozens of songs across ten or so genres, how was I going to make it all fit in a shippable state?
Making it fit
Beyond the goal and using source music to bring more life to our fictitious Seattle, I also wanted breadth and variation within the music so you wouldn’t hear the same cue EVERY time you passed a storefront. With a blanket license from APM plus around 20 local musician tracks the content was near limitless. Our soundbank budget, unfortunately, was not. However, every time we change the time of day in the game, we do a load to bring in our new skybox and other time-specific content. In fact, I was already loading all of my ambient sounds with these time of day loads. I devised a scheme to load certain music which could play at any time of day in our core ambient bank, which is always loaded. This ended up being the DUP music and our local acts. For the rest of the store fronts, I would load in 3-5 cues per TOD per genre. This way we have some variation during each time of day, as well as completely new tracks for most storefronts for each time of day change. For the local music, we had all 20 tracks in a random playlist emanating from Sonic Boom Records (a real Seattle record store), Sir Mix-A-Lot played from some of our neon-drainable low-rider hatchbacks (we HAD to have My Hooptie for that!), and the aforementioned Irish punk club featured 3 bands each rotating through a set of 5 songs each. You could theoretically stand by the Irish pub at night and enjoy a whole night of music (if it wasn’t so much fun to run around and use your powers instead!)
My budget for the TOD banks was 7mb, of which I used 2-3mb for source music at VERY low bitrates. We processed them heavily with severe low pass filters and reverb, so we really didn’t need a lot of high end, and the lower encoded bitrates (24kbps OGG) aided in making the tracks sound like they were coming out of crappy speakers inside the storefronts. Most of the cues were edited to around 60-90 seconds since most people wouldn’t really be standing around listening to the music, and we wanted more quantity of tracks than longer songs for this reason.
Here’s a video showing off just a few of the myriad storefronts we added music to. If you have a copy of Second Son, I highly suggest pushing the DUP out of some districts and running around to see how the source music aids in filling in the world without stepping on the score or any critical gameplay. It’s a subtle effect no one would likely notice, but subtlety is often the key to effective sound design.
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!
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.
Unity is an awesome engine for quickly iterating and building game content. The audio features have definitely improved over the years, but it’s still rather limited in many ways. Randomization of pitch, volume, lpf, or even sounds can only be done with a little bit of scripting savvy. Someday, either Unity will fix this or I’ll publish my scripts for these common practices on the asset store :-). One of the features we added at Free Game Games which I’m most proud of was a psuedo-occlusion scheme utilizing trigger boxes and an enum (and enumerated static variable) to attenuate and apply a low pass filter on certain sounds. This feature was used prominently throughout Free Range Games’ canceled skateboarding game, as well as Freefall Tournament, which is playable on Kongregate.com. It was one of the more advanced features we added to Unity on the audio side. I relied heavily on the scripting wizardry of Jeff Wood, a fantastic designer whom I worked with both at Free Range Games and Shaba Games before that, to handle most of the technical scripting. Our solution was not necessarily the best method to occlude sounds, but it was functional, so I’d like to outline the system so that people can ideally glean some information from it and possibly improve upon it themselves.
The core script components of our system were an AudioOcclusionTrigger and an AudioOcclusionObject. All objects the we wanted to occlude would have an AudioOcclusionObject script attached to it. To trigger the occlusion we created trigger boxes and attached an AudioOcclusionTrigger to that trigger box. Since we may want an object to be occluded in multiple boxes, we created an enum containing a list of occlusion “categories.” This list was rather arbitrary and dependent on the level design. I believe we had things like “Hallway,” “ExtAmbience”, and “IntAmbience” So for example in our skateboarding game, we had a warehouse level in which two cavernous rooms were connected by a small hallway. Each room had an ambient emitter which played a looping ambient drone and occasional one shots and a PA loudspeaker which was pumping out our licensed music soundtrack. The hallway had a trigger box around it with an AudioOcclusionTrigger script labeled as “hallway.” The ambience and music emitters in each large room where tagged with the hallway enum with their respective AudioOcclusionObject scripts, and whenever the player entered that trigger, all the sounds which contained an AudioOcclusionObject script with the category set to “hallway” would attenuate and get filtered over time. And when the player exited that box, the reverse wold happen (the objects volume and lpf would be restored to where they were prior to occlusion).
Here is a short video demonstrating the effect on the music and ambience:
We did a lot of safety checks to make sure the sounds aren’t already occluded before attempting attenuation, creating filters if they don’t exist, etc. but it’s still a far from perfect solution. It really only works well with fairly simple geometry and the more occlusion categories you add, the crazier it can get to keep track of your objects and make sure everything is set up properly.
But there you go. If you’d like to download the scripts and check it out yourself, they’re available here.
This is a simple trick I’ve used for years. It’s straightforward, but my designers and interns I’ve showed it to have appreciated it as a quick, easy, intuitive way to create seamless loops every time.
This method is useful mostly for static sounds at least a few seconds in length. It works great for ambiences, environmental effects like fire, wind, steam, water, or lasers, and even for sports sounds like skateboards, snowboards, and car engines at constant rpms.
Also, of course, this method will work in any audio editor or DAW. Sound Forge is just my wave editor of choice, and for me at least it’s the easiest way to quickly make seamless loops. So that’s where the screenshots hail from.
Step one: Design a longer than desired sound!
The first thing to do to make a seamless loop is to design a sound longer than you anticipate using. Basically what we’re going to be doing is hacking off the end of the sound and crossfading it into the beginning, so if you’re planning on having a 4 second looping sound, design a sound that’s between, say, 5 and 8m seconds long.
Step two: Find a zero crossing in the file where you want the end of the loop to be
Again, let’s say we want our sound to be roughly 4 seconds long, so go to the 4 second mark of the file and search for your nearest zero crossing.
Step three: Cut off the tail
Once you find the zero crossing nearest where you want your loop to end, select from that point all the way to the end of the file. Drag this section of the file (the tail) to the Sound Forge window to make a new file from it. Be sure to note how long the tail is.
Step four: Fade the tail
Select the entire tail file and do a -3dB exponential fade out.
Step five: Fade in the head of the loop file
Now, remembering the length of the tail file, select that much of the head of your looping file, and do a -3dB exponential fade in.
Step 6: Mix the tail into the head
Now select the tail file, and drag it to the beginning of your loop file. Make sure the file is set to loop, play it back and voila! A seamless loop.
Final thoughts
Bear in mind that, like any looping sound, what matters most is the design of the source file. If you have a bunch of aspects in a short looping sound that give it “character,” it more often than not will result in a sound that is very apparently looping. Furthermore if your loop contains rhythmic elements such as a skateboard clacking on a sidewalk or a laser oscillating and humming you need to ensure that your loop timing is set up to perfectly match the rhythmic timing of your sound.
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.
