Myself and James, the developer, met 2/3 times during easter to begin putting the first sounds into Taphobos. The process was relatively simple as we anticipated, and a number of sounds went into the game. I won’t go into detail about how we implemented the sounds, as this is something I will look at in more detail in my FMOD write-ups.

We implemented all of the ambience, including some complex parameter based generative ambience, which I am very proud of. As I said, i’ll explain in detail when I blog about the FMOD session.

James and myself worked well together, and although there were a number of issues that we have to figure out, he was very pleased with the results. We spoke briefly about the actual sounds I was creating, and he expressed a interest in realism – although he loved what i’d done thus far. We struggled a little in our communication in regards to the fact we didn’t have a common vocabulary to discuss sound (the age old talking about sound conundrum) but he said he was happy to leave the details up to my expertise.

Some short recordings, made while I was at home, with a Zoom and a Rode NT-4 stereo X/Y mic. The night ambience will almost certainly make it into Taphobos in some form. The noise from the H4n’s pre-amps was manageable in this case, and I think the recordings are very usable.

This is the rain:

And this is the night ambience:

(LO1)

I have previous experimented with bowing various metal objects to reveal interesting resonances, and since buying myself a cello bow, I decided to attempt bowing some cymbals. I decided to do it in the most reverberant space I could access, the stairwell in MHT. I recorded with a matched pair of 414’s in the mid/side config, with the Neumann at a distance on omni. The mixture of the two has made for a great sounding creepy stinger that i’ve used in the ambience of Taphobos. I wanted the ambience in the main church to be a little more hyper-real, so I decided to add in these intermittent screaming metal sounds.

The recordings can be found here:

(LO1)

So I decided to head down to Hartsholme park, just outside of Lincoln, to record ambience for the day. I was using the 664 at the time, and I opted to use a matched pair of 414’s again (as I really liked the sound of them in my earlier experiment). I employed the A – B mic setup, as i wanted more of a broad stereo image, as opposed to the focus of the mid/side configuration. I think the A – B setup is the closest to replicating the human ears as you can get – without using a binaural mic. The stereo bar I used is roughly the width of a human head too, so the recordings come out sounding good. The stereo bar was also ideal in this scenario, as I needed to pack up/down the kit quickly and efficiently when moving from location to location (and travelling to the park initially).

Unfortunately, while the park is fairly far from the road, there was some lingering drones of traffic in the background. Unfortunately this couldn’t be helped, and it’ll take some swift EQ to sort these frequencies out. Hopefully i’ll be able to leave the beautiful birdsong. The ambiences from this day of recording will go into the exteriors of taphobos, particularly one recording that I managed to capture, of an owl. This will be great for evoking the classic hollywood tension of a ‘horror’.

Sound samples below.

(LO1)

This time around we had the 664 in, and I decided to head down the brayford a way, to capture a bit of the ambience there. I was pleasantly surprised to find some lovely birdsong and other riverbank wildlife, which I set about recording.

I elected to record mid/side again, as I was impressed with the recordings i’d made before with the technique. I decided to get a little exotic with my mic choices, and went with a Neumann U87 for the figure 8 and a AKG SE300 with a cardioid capsule, which proved to be interesting choices. I had the pair on two little mic stands – and used two ‘dead kittens’ to keep out the wind.

The ambience is pretty sweet – although I think i’ll stick with two 414’s for next time.

This is a short sample of the recording:

(LO1)