Sound Design Workbook
- Callum Collins
- Mar 2, 2021
- 4 min read
The Idea:
For this year’s sound design project, I wanted to create a sound-piece for my major, Game Design. At the beginning of the year I had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to work on for game design, having created a fantasy world of my own as a setting for a game. I envisioned my game being set in a fantasy steampunk world with airships and sky pirates.
This became the focus for sound design as I wanted to learn how to use digital sounds like FL Studio and various third party VST plugins to create believable orchestral sounds, focusing on stringed instruments such as violins.
I had originally planned to use old sea shanties and similar works to find the “pirate motif” which I wanted to base my piece off. There were several references I ended up using which I found invaluable for creating the soundtrack:
Howard Goodall’s Big Bangs:
In this series, the lead composer at the BBC, Howard Goodall talked about music through history and the “big bangs” that changed music forever. I thought this would be of greater influence to my work than it actually was. The series itself was very interesting and there were definitely a few points I needed to consider in my own work such as equal temperament and the political effects of Opera. Overall I feel like this did not effect my development.
In Praise of Sailors by H.W. WARDEN
This book is quite a large reference filled with art, poems and most importantly songs used by sailors on boats. Sea shanties were common place on boats for two main reasons; The first was for moral as sailors would spend much of their life at sea constantly fulfilling their assigned jobs on the ship and song helped keep spirits high. The second reason was so everyone on the boat would be able to keep time with each other as they performed their jobs. In ancient times when boats were driven with oars, the songs or drums on board were used so that everyone rowed at the same time, keeping the boat on course.
One of the main things I noticed about the music in the book was that everything had a “bounce” to it, much like folk music. The songs gained moment slowly and dropped only to rise back up again several times in a verse and the rhythm is constant and easy to follow with a clap or a stomp.
I knew I needed to follow this pattern for my own piece so I set my piece to 6/4 to help with timing and then built out a melody. My brother had previously explained the different scales and their sounds to me and I decided on Em.
After creating a few melodies and drum tracks I thought would work, I started looking into some more relevant pieces, namely game soundtracks. The above link is an interview I found with the sound designer for one of my favourite game companies which I found helpful and lead me to look into the soundtracks directly for inspiration, starting with Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire which is set in a pirate themed world.
I figured it was time for me to try and find some new plugins to help me create my soundtrack because after going through this work I decided I wanted to create something more orchestral than folk. I wanted to use a full range of instruments and sounds like the examples did, rather than just a few small instruments you would find on a ship.
Additional Videos:
Here is a list of other videos I watched and used as influence for my piece but weren’t important enough for comments:
The Practice:
After coming up with a few simple melodies and a few chords, I needed to pass them through some plugins to figure out which ones I would use for my project.
DSK Overtune
This was the vst plugin I decided on using for my piece because it had the most control and the clearest sounds out of the list I tested. The plugin gave complete control over a large range of instruments and actually allows for automatic layering of up to 4 instruments. This shortened my development time as I was able to play my melody on repeat as I made tweaks to each of the instruments individually and then together at different levels and mixes.
The Mix
While I was creating this piece, a friend of mine showed me his storyboard for the animation he was working on in his major and it featured a short pirate scene. I said that I was working on something similar and asked if he wanted to use a piece of my soundtrack for the scene and used his storyboard as a base for mixing my piece.
The animation was quite short and so there would be no space for the whole track so I decided I was going to build my piece into a few sections with bridges rather than use a more common verse/chorus structure. This meant we could use any section from the soundtrack and it would hopefully fit in.
Like my game, his idea for the animation changed and so he didn’t need the soundtrack.
The Editing
I started editing the piece about halfway through development and the while the piece really needed the work done, (especially the drums which were a little flat), my computer was starting to struggle with all the instruments and now the effects on top. This problem wasn’t as big as I originally expected because my new computer arrived and I spent a few days setting it up with FL Studio and my custom settings and plugins. I was able to continue development without the playback crashing.
Creating The Video
I spent a few weeks sketching out an A3 still for my game for the presentation and when finished decided it would be nice to animate. I added that to my Premiere Pro project and animated in using After Effects. I added a screen recording of my FL Studio playback and put it all together with my exported track. The final piece was 1m22s.
Comments