Open Arena

.aa - week nine.

One day I was backing up an old cassette tape to digital, and I spent some time fiddling around with the tape player and amplifier before I had them going into my laptop at a useful level. In doing this I made a few scratchy recordings before I was able to just get tape, and from one of these recordings comes the basis of my UI mouse-over button sound effect for Open Arena. The first step toward getting the sound to how I wanted it (in my mind) was by doing some EQing – removing that hiss that seems to always come from tapes. Here I used my “favourite” EQer, particularly for this kind of digital Sound Design exercise, which is just the AU Graphic EQ (in Plogue).



One thing I particularly like about starting in Plogue, is that you can easily loop the file, and then you free to do whatever you want to it in real time – and if that means stacking five of the EQs after each other, so be it. Here is how the Plogue patch ended up looking to create the final sound.

Having created a short 'clickly' mouse-over sound that fitted in with the general Industrial aesthetic that I was hoping for, I then decided to make the selection sound aswell. I loaded my original mouse-over sound into Reason this time and added a 'DDL delay-line' and a 'reverb RV7000 unit'. This allowed me to make a slightly altered, attenuated, version of the mouse-over sound. The delay-line is set to 30 ms, making it sound more metallic and the reverb is set pretty low, using the "healings hall.rv7" algorithm.

The next sound I chose to work on was the grenade explosion, as this is one that be quite significant in Open Arena. This was a pretty difficult sound to come up with, but basically I started with a recording of me closing my door. I then time stretched the recording out to double the size. After this I used Plogue / AU plug-ins to compress, spectrally granulate and decimate the sound. I was left with a sound file of about 10 seconds legnth, which I created a 'best-of' of, in Peak.

Finally, I created a walking sound, which I am not particularly happy with. I have already loaded onto fileden.com so I am not going to be bother changing it, but basically from here I think it will need to be pitched down at the least. I created it using white noise, my Granular Synth patch, Plogue's EQ, Compression and also a cool feature of Peak called "Amplitude Fit..."

jake_aa_wk9.zip (74 kB)

.sources.

Haines, Christian 7.10.07, "Assets (1)," EMU. Adelaide University.