Guest Lecture – Suddi Raval – Game Sound

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Blog post by L3 Audio Production student Barney Oram

Today we were lucky enough to hear from Suddi Raval, a legendary acid house producer and a game sound designer/composer, working currently as the audio manager at the Warner Bros. game studio, TT games (responsible largely for the ever popular LEGO games).

Audio manager is essentially the highest audio position in the games industry – the audio manager works with the upper echelons of the game development studio to create a fully cohesive and well delivered soundtrack. The audio manager is involved with both creating audio for the project (Suddi talked about how he generally likes to work in VO, both recording voiceover for the project and using audio content from an existing IP, usually a film), as well as managing the sound designers that the studio employ. Suddi mentioned the studio employ 7 full time sound designers, as well as up to 2 more on contracts. This is a comparatively large number of designers – even considering TT Fusion is technically a AAA studio, with many AAA titles having 2-5 sound designers at most. Suddi did however mention that the number rises all the time.

I was so engaged with what Suddi was saying (and had a million questions popping into my head) I didn’t make any notes on the actual content of the lecture, so this post is mainly key points. However, I found myself nodding in agreement and hearing so much affirmation in what Suddi was saying in relation to my own work and journey into the industry. I’d contacted Suddi about a month before the lecture, and had asked him a few questions and sent him my showreel. He very generously called me out by name and commented on my work, offering me feedback and advice as well as answering a lot of questions that I posed to him after the talk.

There were a few things Suddi mentioned that I want to draw attention to – as they relate in many ways to my project.

He spoke about FMOD, Wwise, and some of the games engines i’d demonstrated ability in on my reel: he talked about how TT use their own proprietary sound engine for implementation, that they generally taught junior sound designers as they join the organisation. He said however, that learning middleware like FMOD and Wwise was important, both for understanding the implementation process and to show that you’ve taken the time to actually learn something for your work. This is helpful and important for me, as I plan to use FMOD to implement my sounds into the game for my project. As I already have some experience using it independently, spending time using it in a game engine would be hugely beneficial.

I also asked him about junior sound designer positions, and the fact they are rarely advertised. I also later asked about the best route into in-house work, to which his response covers both questions – essentially, through work experience. Suddi said that a number of the people working at TT now came in through work experience: they’d proved themselves to be committed and easy to work with during the few weeks that they’d work at the studio, and they’d been asked to join the team full time. I think that work experience is something I should really look into further.

I’ll probably remember a lot of other things that stood out to me from the lecture, but i’ll leave this post at that. A fantastic opportunity to speak personally with someone high up in the audio world of the games industry, I learned a lot and found much of my ideas and preparations confirmed as being on the right track.

Robert Babicz on Mastering


Robert Babicz  is a Polish music producer, mastering engineer and live performer living in Cologne, Germany. With a career spanning nearly two decades covering genres from techno to acid house to minimal, Babicz has also been known under the pseudonyms Rob AcidAcid WarriorDepartment of Dance and Sontec amongst many others. He has released a number of very well respected record labels such as Kompakt, Treibstoff, Bedrock , Intec Digital and  Audiomatique, as well his own labels, Junkfood and Babiczstyle. He is well known as a live performer, never a DJ, as he uses synths and live equipment and improvises in every set he plays. Watch the video here

In this short interview, he discusses mastering, what he thinks of mastering software,how you should prepare your track for mastering and gives an insight into the kit he uses.

DYNAMIC RANGE DAY

MARCH 16th is ‘Dynamic Range Day”


see: http://dynamicrangeday.co.uk

According to this campaign,”The Loudness War is a sonic “arms race” where every artist and label feel they need to crush their music onto CD at the highest possible level, for fear of not being “competitive” – and in the process removing all the contrast, all the light, shade and depth – ruining the sound.”
(taken from dynamicrangeday.co.uk)

THIS VIDEO EXPLAINS MORE

Big-name CD manufacturers are distorting sounds to make them seem louder. Sound quality suffers.

What is Dynamic Range Day ?

The “Loudness War” is built on the idea that “louder is better”. However this concept is fatally flawed. The goal of Dynamic Range Day is to reveal this flaw and spread an alternative message:

The fatal flaw of the “Loudness War” sound

In a nutshell: it doesn’t sound good.

Research shows there is no connection between “loudness” and sales
People don’t notice loudness when comparing songs
Dynamic music sounds better on the radio – here’s the proof
Modern music players undo loudness by using ReplayGain
Most listeners just turn loud music down !
So – “loud” music on CD has no benefit on the radio, online, on an mp3 player, or in your CD player. That’s why I call it a legend – the “Loudness War” makes no sense, in 2012.

New Releases

Things have been going quite well this year on the release front, with my latest single on Foto Recordings being supported by Dj’s right across the board including X-press 2, Steve Bug, Ame, Chris Duckenfield, Chicago Damn, Harri, Catz n Dogz, Rub n Tug, Jim Stanton (Horse Meat Disco) Milton Jackson, Claude Von Stroke and Jacques Renault. You can check all my releases out here .

I have also recently signed to The Unity Agency