A custom score would be a thorough, focused, unique, and specifically tailored soundtrack for the needs of the project. We’d work together, however closely or distantly you may need, and I’d live with every musical nuance and cue until completion. If the project needs it aggressive, serene, ambient, droney, or for whatever mood and emotion, a storyline would be written through music that works with the story and visuals of the project.
Sound Effects (SFX) are a way to make your project and characters come to life with dynamics and customized style. I create custom SFX using a myriad of techniques and tools including synthesis, foley, field recordings, sound editing and design, voice acting and more. If you want to understand how audio is completed for a game the following video shows you all. From creatures, gore, weapons, UI sounds, plus transitioning between my custom interactive music of differing tempos and keys, voice acting and more. It's using the middleware program (Wwise) which is how we integrate interactive audio into video games.
I’ve voice acted in numerous projects including games, albums, webisodes, and I've directed voice actors in-studio for video game VO. I'll use my own voice in a number of ways creating characters, sounds, and SFX including human voices, weapons, creature sounds, cartoony sounds, and more. If you’re interested in voice actors I suggest watching the documentary “I Know That Voice”. Voice actors are rock stars, everyone knows them but we don’t know who they are simply because we hear and enjoy their voices but never actually see the performers.
Middleware, such as Wwise and FMOD, is software used for further sound design and audio implementation into game engines for video games. This is different to audio integration and audio coding, which is done by a programmer. Middleware is a tool used by sound designers which gives them more versatility, expression, and designing ability for the audio and how it’ll function in-game. It takes away some previous limitations that programmers had when implementing audio, freeing up programmer resources and giving more freedom to the sound designer to design. It expands the audio palette greatly resulting in more realistic audio when triggered in-game. Please see the video examples in the Projects page for how I design a game's sound, write the music, create the sfx, and then use middleware to implement them corresponding to in-game events.
Foley traditionally has been the act of recording sounds to moving pictures/film, although it’s also used to record sounds that can then be edited, manipulated, distorted, designed and used for SFX or music. When foley isn't recorded specifically to picture it's sometimes called "wild foley". Those blood curdling splats and fleshy tears you hear in movies or games, that’ll be foley.
Post Audio is any task that's done after the field or location recordings on set have been finished, so when the audio is given over to the sound studio and the studio cleans it up and creates other audio needed. This includes but isn't limited to recording dialogue/ADR, dialogue/sfx/foley/music editing, SPFX/sound design creation, foley performance, audio restoration, re-recording mixing, and more. In the Sound Effects playlist on the homepage there's a clip of some set dialogue cleanup. Listen to the pops, crackles, and drips, then hear how it was cleaned up. When you have a large amount of audio tracks being mixed together it's crucial to have every track sounding as clean/perfect as possible.
Recording sounds from the real world is necessary if you need to recreate an exact environment, but recordings are also made that can then be twisted and designed. Recordings can be made of anything you hear whether that’s a background environment, animal, machine, action, whatever, anything you can hear can be recorded and used. I’ve also made my own contact microphone which is a microphone that picks up vibrations through solid objects (see photo in gallery), not sound vibrations through air. I’m then able to take these recordings and design with them.