Sound Effects Transcribed

[PhantomImage]

Hello! I'm new here.

 

I've been a sound designer in games for a few years now (partly inspired by a talk djpretzel gave at my university) and I thought my latest project might interest the OC Remix community.

 

I've been deconstructing classic sound effects, putting them into musical notation and MIDI, and analyzing what makes them work in-game.

 

So far, I've put up sounds from Mario, Zelda, Metal Gear, and Pacman, and I've got lots more in mind for future updates.

 

If you've got a second, I'd love it if you took a look!

 

 

[Flexstyle]

Super interesting, thanks for sharing! I'll be perusing this more thoroughly at a later time, I'm sure.

[PhantomImage]

Thanks! I'm trying to add one or two games a week, in addition to other posts on various sound design techniques.

 

If retro SFX aren't your thing, how about robot voices? Or guns? Or DIYing some absorptive panels on the cheap?

[timaeus222]

Or DIYing some absorptive panels on the cheap?

That is actually really useful. Keep it up man!

[lazygecko]

That's pretty good. I hope you'll get into the nitty gritty of 16-bit sound effects as well as that's where it starts getting really interesting. Either through the implementation of FM, or using samples with the same 8-bit design principles (the iconic monster impact/death sounds in A Link to the Past is a cymbal being heavily pitched around for instance). I feel that a lot of modern retro-style games treat these sounds in a very superficial way and doesn't really take into account the amount of thought and craftmanship that went into them.

I think sound design for games really entered this long, uninspired lull from the mid 90's and onwards as this type of sound design was abandoned in favor of recorded PCM samples, which were often the most generic library sounds possible with minimal to no editing done to them. It's really just over the past 10 years or so I feel that the bar has been raised and things have started to get interesting again.

[PhantomImage]

I'm definitely going to move up to 16-bit sounds eventually. The combination of low-res samples and retro melodic sound design has always made the SNES my favorite sounding system, and FM is one of those daunting, tough-to-crack types of synthesis that I want to explore in depth. The article I'm working on at the moment is actually about making seamless loops, which will be important if I'm going to talk about SNES sounds. 

 

I started with NES games because the simplicity of the 2A03 makes a thorough analysis possible, and lets me develop my technique for actually transcribing the individual sounds. The Pacman sounds are the first I've done that weren't based on a very simple set of waveforms, and it was significantly more difficult and time-consuming (though also more rewarding and educational!) Finding ways to mimic the samples used in SNES games or to reverse engineer FM patches for Sega games is going to be a challenge, but I'm excited to see how far I can get with it.

 

And I totally agree that there was a very long lazy period of game sound design. As the industry's gotten bigger and as cheaper technologies and accessible learning resources have emerged, the average level of sound design skill behind development has increased. Hopefully, I can add something to the growing pool of educational material.

[PhantomImage]

I'm not gonna bump this every time I update, I just wanted to say that I added my first Genesis/Mega Drive sounds! 

 

It took some time to work out a method for recreating them in FM8, but now that I've got the technique down I'll be able to add more without much difficulty. I've already gotten started on sounds from Ristar, Rocket Knight Adventures, and Decap Attack, but I'd love some suggestions for more games to look at!

[lazygecko]

In FM8 it probably helps to set the digital slider to around 40 or so. The FM chip in the Genesis has unique distortions in its signal, so it's never really pristine sine waves it's working with and this fundamentally affects the timbre. It becomes very noticeable when playing sounds (especially bright ones) at lower tones where they get kind of smudged out. FM8 cannot replicate it fully, but at least you can get something close with the digital feature (I think it adds some type of mixture of aliasing and bit reduction?).

 

That kind of distortion is also very useful if you want to make more varied noisy sounds. People who designed SFX on the hardware had this very common pitfall where they'd just max out the parameters along with the feedback if they wanted a lot of noise which is the most instant gratification method of doing things, but this mostly just yields this overwhelming static white noise you can't change the character of. This is why a lot of games get accused of sounding kind of screechy and abrasive. If you instead make a bright sound with minimal to no feedback and rapidly play a wide range of low frequency tones, you can get a lot more flexible kind of noise. Listen to things like explosions or the thunder sounds in Revenge of Shinobi which makes good use of this technique. Very smooth sounding.

[PhantomImage]

I've tried doing a few low-frequency noise-like sounds, including Revenge of Shinobi's thunder sound, and I haven't been able to get any of them to translate to FM8 at all. I think I'm just going to set them aside for now. I don't want to include sounds that require accurate emulation, since it limits how effective a teaching tool they can be. Maybe some day I'll do a deep dive into the 2612, but for now I think I have to stick to more traditional FM sounds.

[lazygecko]

Aly James FM Drive does a good job of emulating the 2612 quirks, and even simulates hardware revision-specific non-linearities. The interface is not exactly great though.

 

http://www.alyjameslab.com/alyjameslabfmdrive.html

[PhantomImage]

Thanks, I'll check it out! I can't imagine the interface is any worse than VOPM, which is what I've been using.