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Interview with Joey Kuras
What equipment do you use for creating Foley and other sound effects? We have a Sony portable DAT and a Sennheiser, self-powered shotgun mic we use for effects. We use an AKG microphone for the voice overs. Samplers and synthesizers I’ll occasionally use for beeps and stuff like that. What we use mostly are organic sounds, either from libraries or ones we do ourselves, and I edit it on the Mac using Alchemy. They don’t even make that program anymore. I think the company is out of business now which is a shame because I think it is the absolute best program out there. The funny thing is it’s a tool for samplers. You import a sound, set your loop points and then send it to your sampler. I’ve never used it for that. The one thing it was made for, I’ve never used. It has some great features for editing samples. You can mix samples together with the blend feature, it has pop and click removal, time compression, pitch shift, all sorts of great things. It works great, plus it sounds very good. I have every piece of audio editing software that I can find. I use Digital Performer mainly for cinematics, and it has some great effects too. Arboretum’s HyperPrism II, Sound Forge, Waves, and Alchemy are my main tools. One thing we don’t have is Pro Tools. A lot of people say we need it but we don’t. To me, it doesn’t seem viable to spend that kind of money on something you don’t need. Digital Performer works just as well, has built in effects, you don’t need TDM cards and all that expensive extra hardware, it has a sequencer that lets you run MIDI and digital audio simultaneously, and it’s only a few hundred dollars. The best part, if you want to cut out, say, measure 8 to 12, it will remove everything, all the midi and all the audio too. We weighed back and forth between the two and thought DP was a better overall tool. I’m constantly on the Internet downloading shareware audio programs, too. If they do one effect well then they are useful to me. Cool Edit and GoldWave are great. One has a good doppler effect and the other has a robotic effect that I use often on voices. It sounds like the X-Wing fighter radio transmissions from Star Wars. I love that one. I have about 10 programs that I use almost daily to create sounds. I mainly do all the sound manipulation within the computer. I find the sound I want to start with and take it from there. By the time I get done with the sound, it is usually unrecognizable from the original. I’ll use effects libraries but never the sounds as is. I’ll always change them somehow, pitch shift them, time compress them, expand them, layer them. Pitch shifting is something every sound designer uses. You have to make it bigger and unique, create something weird. I’ve taken a one second sample and extended it out 20 seconds just to see what it sounds like. Sometimes it works out great, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s all about experimenting, and using what sounds good. There are a lot of great programs out there that make my job easier and better. Back when I started, I only had Alchemy to work with and I was very limited. With the technology now, you can do practically anything. Which particular sound effects libraries do you use mainly? All of them! Plus we are in the process of making our own. We are coming out with the Tommy Tallarico Sound Effects Library with audio, .wav, and .aif files available. This will hopefully appeal to people in TV, movies, and game designers. In alot of sound effects libraries, you will have something like three minutes of a wind effect. You can’t fit three minutes of wind in a Playstation sound driver, maybe only five seconds of it. We will have two, five, and ten second loops of things that are very usable, that you can just plug right in, no editing necessary, just use them. That will definitely appeal to people like myself. Instead of having to listen to an entire, long-playing sound for a good, usable section, it will already be available. We will also have the three minute version of the audio, just in case you need longer ambiance in your project. We are also covering a lot of things that are not included in the other libraries. In most sound libraries, there are sounds of cars passing by, starting up, idling, driving away, and pulling in. But we need steady motor loops as the car drives along. In a driving game, you have to hear the constant purr of the engine. Some libraries have driving sounds from inside the car, but they aren’t dynamic enough. Others have driving sounds from outside the car but the wind noise is too distracting. So we are doing these types of sounds for the library. There will also be a lot of sports sounds, grenade bounces, weapons, and various Foley sounds that I’ve done over the years. There will be quite a variety. When a new project begins, how does the actual sound effects design process start for you? Sometimes I’ll get a rough copy of the game and a list of needed effects. I need to know the basics, like how big the object is, and how long the action is I will be creating it for. If it is a splash in water sound, I need to know if it’s a rock, a person, is he 400 pounds, is it a cannon ball, a building, whatever, I need to know. If I see it in the game, I know what to do, but if I don’t have that luxury, then I need more specific information. I also like to see what I’m working on before I start it, or at least get a description from Tommy first. If you just give me a list of sounds, I’ll do them but I won’t know if they are right and then the revisions start rolling in. The cinematics usually make it through in the first pass. After I do it and Tommy takes a look at it, we send it to the publisher or developer and they usually say that it is great and put it in the game. There are rarely revisions with cinematics because I’m looking at it. With in-game effects it’s harder to get right the first time. After the programmer puts it in and we take a look at it, that’s the first time we get to see it in action. The best way to to do it is to have a working version of the game running, and then I just trigger sounds until I find the one that fits. Recently, Tommy and I both met with part of the development team on a new project we are doing, and I got to see the game right away and create from there. But they usually don’t start with me, they start with Tommy. Because he is the one that meets with the publishers and developers, he brings back the ideas and direction, and I take it from there. He’ll see it, make his notes, figure out what we will need and then we talk about it. It usually works out better than me seeing it anyway, because he has such a colorful way of describing what we need. I’ve been to movies that he had told me about and was disappointed. It was better the way he described it! He has a great idea of what he wants and translates it exactly. That’s usually how it starts. Do you have a particular formula to maintain consistency through an entire project? That can be a tough one. Sometimes you have a game that is in and out within two weeks. That’s easy. I spend that time working on just that one game, no other project, and everything has the same feel. Other projects I’ve been doing for over a year now and those are a little bit more difficult. It’s not entirely difficult to stay consistent because it is still just me working on the sounds. A musician, say like Ozzy Osbourne, sounds the same throughout his career, regardless. The same with me, except as my tools have gotten better, the sound quality has gotten better. Occasionally, when a project has been under development for awhile, the change is noticeable. For Tomorrow Never Dies, they gave me huge list, I did all the sounds and gave them everything they needed early on in the project. Well, now 90% of that isn’t in the game anymore. They now have all new levels, and the sounds that remained seemed a little dull compared to the new stuff, so I recreated those sounds to match the quality of the newer stuff. I think any sound artist, much like a musician, develops their own unique sound. Even though the sonic quality of my sounds may get better with time as equipment gets better, the overall feel of the sound is the same. How do you maintain a believable ambiance? Do you add more reverb to the effects you know will be in larger space? Occasionally I do, but because there is not generally a lot of space in the game, I don’t as a rule. There are some games and hardware that have a reverb effect that can be switched off and on. In Bond, there is a skiing sequence, and when you go into a certain tunnel, the reverb is turned on. It turns off again when you come out. The same in driving games. It is very effective. As far as putting it on the sounds itself, I have at times, but I don’t make it the rule; indeed, because of the space limitations, because the labor of getting the ambiance just right then having it get lost behind other sounds, and because what may work in one room may not in another. I usually just keep them pretty clean and pretty dry. Having the programmers place something in the sound driver for that, I think, works out the best. The biggest part of what we do and what I believe makes the sounds in the games we work on good and why people like them is because we don’t just create sounds and give them to the programmers. I create them, put them in the driver or convert them to .wav files, make a list explaining the name of the sound, what it is for, and whether it is looping or not. After the sounds are put into the game, Tommy and I will sit down with the programmers and listen to how the sounds work. They might be too loud, not loud enough, an octave too high, things like that. We listen to every one of them and tweak them until they are right. If we didn’t have that chance to sit down and implement all this stuff, we might be disappointed when we hear it in the finished product. You can’t expect the programmers to put them into the game the way you expected them to unless you are there during the process. Being the audio guys, our expertise is used wisely. You can’t have footsteps going CRUNCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH. They are supposed to be barely discernable. We ensure that. Implementation is a huge part of what we do, and it allows us to make certain that everything we have done sounds great in the game. Do you make it a point to exercise this type of quality control on every project? Absolutely! Right around Beta time is when we do this. Everything seems to be fairly well set in the game by that point, and we don’t have to worry about levels appearing or disappearing. On RC Stunt Copter, though, we were there at the last minute with 3 programmers doing this the night before going gold. No pressure there! Our logo is usually on the box or splash screen, so we have to make sure the sounds are good, as our livelihood depends on it. We care about every game we work on, and we want to make our end of things the best it can be. Going that extra mile is worth it. How about music? Do you get involved with any composing for games? I have. I’ve done so little, though, I can name off every one. Usually, the type of music I write doesn’t fit the gaming environment. There have been times that Tommy would be off on a trip, to England or something and call me up and say we need a song by tomorrow. We did that with NHL FaceOff '98. We needed a 30-40 second looping ambient type of thing for the menu screen so I wrote a piece that worked really well I think. I’ve done a couple tunes for Aladdin, FaceOff '98, and Jungle Book. I also co-wrote one with Tommy for Earthworm Jim 2. We wrote it for one project, tried to put it in another, but it ended up on EWJ2 and Tommy’s second album. I wrote the guitar part on that one. I get to write occasionally, and I love it when I can. I do have one complete song I did for Sega’s Terminator, and it ended up on Tommy’s first album. If I never do anything else, I at least have one song out on the market. And I’m happy about that. Do you enjoy doing that or would you rather stay strictly with sound effects? I like composing. The more I can get my music out there, the happier I am. Unfortunately, the music I write, there is no vehicle for yet. A lot of stuff I write is either slow or rock. Everybody nowadays wants techno and stuff like that. I always mess techno up because I’m so melody oriented. What I’ve just gotten into is trance. I just started writing this high-energy piece, melodic but not singable, perfect for that genre of music. Actually, what I’m really good at, and I don’t know if it is something to brag about, is transcribing songs. When I was working on Aladdin at Virgin, we needed a couple screen change songs but nothing from the movie soundtrack was short enough. I listened to the instrumentation and was able to remake the portion we wanted to use. Do you have any TV or film aspirations? I would actually love to do a motion picture, and Tommy and I have discussed this alot. It couldn’t be a low budget film like "Attack of the 50ft Squirrel", because we have already come so far in this industry that we don’t want to take a step back. Although I’d like to do it, I haven’t really pursued it, partly because movies have a much quicker turn around time than do games. That’s why it takes 40 people to do my job. I have lots of time when I’m doing a game, while in movies they only have a few weeks. However, I wouldn’t mind doing one outside of Tommy Tallarico Studios, if the chance presented itself. It would be cool. Plus, some of the films I’ve seen, I know I could have done better. Nothing irritates me more than sitting there, watching a movie and recognizing all the sounds. Hey, I know that door. I know that gun. I know that explosion. All you have is the 6000 series? You couldn’t get creative? I could have done better than this in a weekend. I’d love to do one for the experience but right now I just don’t have the time to pursue it. Maybe I can sneak one in somewhere between projects. The down side to all of this is I can’t go to a movie and enjoy it like the next guy. I’m always listening to the sounds and critiquing them, "Hey, that was a cool sound!", "Nah, I wouldn’t have done it that way." Hazards of the job, I guess. Where do you see game music and sound headed in the future? Definitely towards movie quality sound. With the new Sega Dreamcast, there is four times the room for sound, since 2 megs compressed is really 8 megs worth of sound. We fit a lot of stuff in now by using low sample rates, but we will be able to boost everything up to much higher rates. The sound quality is going to jump tremendously. Already we have jumped from 8 bit to 16 bit. As soon as everything can be 44 kHz it will be great. When DVD becomes a viable gaming platform then we can really go to town. Are you working with any new technologies? Tommy is
a consultant for DTS, and we recently put together five sound effects
demos for them to showcase their 6-channel (5.1) system. We did a couple of others, too, one being chased in the jungle by some panthers, an air-to-air combat scenario, a space ship setting, and a tornado. Just different types of game environments to show how 6-channel (5.1) sound can be used effectively. We’re currently working with DTS to get 6-channel (5.1) real-time interactive sound in Messiah. If it doesn’t get in this game then we’ll try for Shiny’s next project. You can do it on the music now, but to do interactive stuff, you need a card that can handle decompressing the 6 channel code on the fly. One company is talking about putting the chips in the speakers. They have surround sound in a few games that’s effective, like Quake,but it’s not as distinct as DTS. DTS is definitely the best I have ever heard, and I’m not just saying that. (Laughs.) What are your feelings about video game scores now being eligible for a Grammy Award? I would love to see game music embraced by the music industry, and I am glad to see it happen. There is so much great game music out there. Even back in the Commodore 64 days they did some great music. These days even remixes of very old games are being done. A lot of it is very thematic, and you can easily put out video game soundtracks and have them do just as well as movie soundtracks. We will definitely get better quality music knowing that a Grammy could come from it, as more people will get involved. Back in the ‘80’s, video game music was just simple little melodies, but now it is music like movie scores or pop albums or other commercial music. It’s up to that level now, just not getting the same exposure. I think more soundtracks will be released to compete. I would love to pop in a CD of my favorite game. Video game soundtracks are huge in Japan, but are only just beginning in this country. Pretty soon there will be a new category at your local record store. |
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Features
