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Interview With Jamey Scott
Organizing your sound effects palette for a project must be a chore. How do you go about it? I use my Emulator E4, and gather together sounds that I think will work well in the game I’m working on. Since every game uses a different palette, I basically start from scratch each time. I’ve been building my own source sounds for years and I like to have them in the tool bag just in case. It’s kind of like shopping for shoes, to use a bad analogy. You decide on which outfits you want to wear and plan which shoes to buy from that. You just don’t go out and buy every shoe. I’m not a big shoe shopper. (laughs) Putting together that initial palette is the most important step, getting together the sounds that will mix well together. Layering these sounds internally in the E4 works very well for me, more so than doing it on the computer. That way I can save my banks as a palette rather than having sources in various folders all over the computer. They are all looped, EQ’ed and noise filtered all to my specifications. That is basically how I do that. Alot of times I’ll need extra sounds that I just don’t have. If I need a good rock thump sound, I’ll go outside, throw a big rock against the wall, take the recording back inside and pitch shift it down. With the technology we are dealing with today the sky is the limit, but you can’t use everything in the world all the time. You narrow down your objects and find it becomes easier to work with. One of my college professors in an improvisation class taught me to try a different approach. Instead of using the 88 options in front of me on a keyboard, he limited me to just 5 notes to see what I could do within that limited range. It taught me a very valuable lesson. In the end, you can do more with just the 5 notes than 88. The smaller your palette, the more forced you are to be creative and to stretch yourself. I assign that concept to sound design too. Even though I keep every sound available, I usually limit myself on purpose. Right now, my world bank for Beneath is around 200 source sounds. I don’t load everything in the world. I use a very well-defined catalog of just what I need. By keeping to the palette, you guarantee a type of homogeny to the game and in turn the sounds are believable and appear like they are meant to be there. You can’t just grab a sound library and hope the sounds fit. It has to all be consistent. Besides that, how else do you ensure this consistency? Do you run everything through the same effects processor patch? Yes, exactly. That is one advantage to doing it all on my sampler. I have my specific presets in my hardware reverb that I am very adamant about. I’ve used Lexi-verb, TC Megaverb, all the very high end reverbs and I have yet to find anything that sounds as deep and realistic as my Lexicon PCM90 hardware reverb. It may change in the future but for now I use this unit. Do you set the delays and decays dependant on the size of the space you are working within? Exactly. I’ll have 3 or 4 presets I’ll use for everything, depending on whether the sound will be going off in a large or small room. What if the sound is a character sound that repeats in different spaces? How do you make that sound believable using that method? The way I’ve done it with Beneath, I knew in advance that we would be using a software reverb in the game so we trigger that as the character moves within different sized spaces. But just in case the player isn’t using compatible hardware, to keep the homogeny, I put a very low mix layer of reverb in the sounds. Now, at this point in the development process, they could change again, but because I have them all saved within my sampler, I can re-perform them easily with or without more environment processing. What sample rates do you recommend starting out with? Definitely the highest you can go, depending on the amount of storage space you have available. I generally stick with 44.1 kHz, but staying consistent is most important whether it’s 44, 22 or 11 kHz. 48 and 96 kHz are a waste of time, I think. Nobody even has speakers that can handle that kind of frequency range. Now, I am pretty adamant about using 24-bit because of all the processing and filtering I do. At 16-bits, after all the requantization, it starts to chop up the sound. With 24-bit you can go through alot of processing before you’ll have any degradation of sound. My sampler is only 16-bit, unfortunately, but when I stay all digital, through Pro Tools, I use 24-bit. I’ll keep it at 24-bit until I actually export it into the sound folder of the game. I’ve heard horror stories of people starting in 22 kHz and then having to start from scratch when they need 44 kHz to do a commercial. That’s a problem alot of older game sound designers are dealing with. They are not able to go into TV and film work because all the sounds they’ve built up over the years are in a low sample rate and they just don’t fly. How do you keep all this sound from competing for the same sonic space within a game? Ambient sounds are always kept pretty low and they aren’t much of a worry. I don’t really labor too much over that, I guess I’m lucky that one sound doesn’t play when another is. The real major sounds are usually played very isolated. The sounds accompanying an earthquake, with pieces falling everywhere, are usually played in a very controlled moment of a game. One of the problems I do encounter, and I’m still learning as I go, is dealing with the music and effects competing. The music can’t be as complex as I tend to make it. The soundscape is already complex and what I now try to do is to remain mindful of places where the player will be exploring for awhile. The music mixes well in these cases. Otherwise it gets too intense with everything happening at once. You don’t want the player reaching over and turning the volume down. You want them listening. Yeah. I’m learning to give and take. Being the sound designer and the composer has forced me to deal with it. I want everything to be great and to stand on its own.
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