2019-05-07 08:56:46

@187
Awesome! I loved the flavour sound - you said you didn't like it but I thought it was fine. I guess that's the thing about magic missile, it's not quite fireball is it where it's the same in every story universe? Your sound choices sounded great to me.

I saw that you gave a nice wide EQ on your flavour sound. I experimented and raised it by half - it brings some more of those wavy trebly bits in, experiment with that. EQing is great but once we get good at it we over-EQ everything for a while.

Also, your whoosh sound ended before your impact sound began. I think we might need to look into stretching that whoosh sound slightly, or moving it backwards a bit in time.

Great work, really well done!

2019-05-07 09:05:52

@186 I can't download this file.

2019-05-07 09:09:54

@194 Really cool ice bolt going on there.

EQing is great, file selection is great.

The only thing I would change is - your flavour sound is a bit long and not too active. I would cut it into 3 parts and layer them.

Try this: add two new tracks. Slice your flavour sound up and layer them on top of one another, all starting at the same time. It will be a much denser sound, and have them end right around when the impact fades out.

Great work!

2019-05-07 09:22:12

@190
I can't believe I glossed over that in the video. Moving things is simply , and . again sorry that's my fault. I mentioned all the shift and alt combinations but not the simple move function!

Really great layering going on in this track.
You layered a hissing sound over your whoosh and that really kicked it up a notch. You EQ'd this extra texture with a +12dB gain at 1kHz, but all those awesome scratchy textures are really more around 4kHz. Try moving your EQ up to get the most out of that sound.

You also EQ'd a lot of lower frequencies. We almost never do this because it makes for very muddy sound.

Try this. Remove ALL of the low EQ bumps you gave to the tracks.
Then, mute track 2 and 3. You have a kind of double explosion going on - when you mute track 2 and 3 it sounds much more like a traditional spellcast. Flavour is a great trailing out, also, by the way.

Something weird is happening at 2.799. It's a pop in the sound. I think you had a lot of tracks selected and his the slice button because there are a lot of breaks in tracks. The pop is happening on track 4 - your "wooshHissing" track has a great natural fadeout - I recommend just dragging the track all the way to its end and letting its natural fade take care of things.

Great work!

2019-05-07 09:25:48

@189
It's true that I may have brought up shifting contents inside an item too soon, but I'd rather people stumble through it now than struggle through it later.

The main skill this course is building up to is the most coveted sound design skill: creating incredible ambience loops. That is the most marketable and useful thing a sound designer for games can do and I want people to be ready for it.

Also, a lot of the flavour we get from sounds is the reverb tail, or the fadeout sound. I want people to be able to shift around to find the best part of it, viewing the items they import into a project like windows. They can use these buttons to shift around what is seen through the window.

I want people to stumble so I can help them back up, instead of get overwhelmed by this shifting notion later on. I'll go over it in more depth in the next video though, thank you for the feedback.

2019-05-07 09:27:43

@193 I'd have to agree. I don't touch healing or gluing because they change the basic elements of the audio. I'd rather undo or make a new track and experiment, and not touch what I'm trying to fix. It just isn't worth it. It's like that with most functions in these programs that try to auto-fix things, they change the file in ways you may not have wanted.

2019-05-07 09:31:24

@198
Can you please upload this with your files used in a zip or rar? I can open the reaper file and see what you've done but the files are missing.

Thanks!

2019-05-07 11:05:29 (edited by Tissman 2019-05-07 11:13:50)

Hmmm, strange, I shared the link again...
https://cp.sync.com/dl/c8c2f4620/3gy8gh … n-vd2pyfxv

I'll upload it to dropbox if the problem will still occur...

Here is it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wfgc3k23gcut2 … h.rar?dl=1

check my sounds on
freesound

2019-05-07 15:41:53

Thanks for the feedback Brian, that is very helpful. I was using a crappy set of headphones, because my good ones had met their maker. I now have a good pair of Studio headphones, and I think one problem was I was trying to boost the low end to make up for the poor headphone response. Lesson learned there.
I have been using "s" to split, which apparently splits all tracks, so I should be using "a" instead, so that I only split the one track, is that correct?
Also, I sent you a private message a couple of weeks ago on the forums here, not sure if you got it, or if I did it correctly. Was hoping to get donation info. If you didn't receive it, could you email me directly at: [email protected] please sir?
Thanks again, I'll be re sculpting and resubmitting my fire spell when I get off work.

2019-05-07 16:42:53

@daisyalesoundworks: Did you miss my file? It's in post 197.

Errare humanum est!

2019-05-07 16:56:00

Okay. Here's everything in an archive.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/x5lktypcwcsix … es.7z?dl=1

thanks,
Michael

2019-05-07 20:57:16

hello
ok i'M confused with this one
this, one got totaly screwed, i tryed to do just what you done at the second video but it didnt gone like i expected
here are the problems
i tryed fading with alt ctrl ı, it failed, i have selected the item using shift s, and it did, when i do the ctrl alt ı, well nothing
2, for some reason there are 4 items in the first track, no idea how they came to that
3, this one feels like a bomb explosion, rather then a lightning but yeah
well here is the crappish thing
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xogthpj6rtl7m … l.rar?dl=1

2019-05-07 21:19:22

For fade in and out to work like you'd expect, the item needs to be selected first. You then position the cursor at a point where you want the fade out to start, or the fade in to end, then hit the keystroke. There is another way to do fades if you don't want to do it that way, or that way makes no sense to you. You can select the item and hit shift F2, you see two boxes for fade in and out, along with curve shapes. The time for each is the length of the fade itself, and the button lets you select a curve shape.

Next, going into it, shift S doesn't *just* select an item, it selects and splits, that's how you ended up with 3 or 4 items. If you merely want to select an item, there are generally two ways to go about it. Control left and right navigates you along the items, deselecting the one that you were on, if any, and selecting the next one. SO, you could use that method, which is more common. The second one actually consists of making sure the edit cursor is within the item, then hitting shift A, which selects it, and only selects it, performing no other action. Shift S is more useful when you have a time selection, because it makes a split at either end. If you wish to make only one split, hit A, which is a custom osara action, it first selects, then splits the item at the point of your edit cursor.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2019-05-07 21:33:35

Ugh, crap, I won't make this lesson, everything in real life was just to stressfull. Hope that I can jump in next lesson again.

Greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2019-05-07 21:34:41

well, thank you 213, seems i have to do it all over again, haha

2019-05-08 00:32:37

@204 Ok, I adjusted EQ, and took the splits out. I think though that maybe something got mislabeled when you brought the project in.
It looks like tracks 5 and 6 had the popping problem, which I took care of by reimporting the media and letting it fade on it's own as you suggested.
I played around with muting/volume on 2 and 3, as well as 4 and 5, but it didn't really work, perhaps I misunderstood what you were getting at.
As an experiment, I resplit 4 and 5 after reimporting, and the same popping problem came back up at that split. Why would this be? I've done many other splits with no issues before. I'd like to know how to avoid this if possible later on.
Also, to widen the feel, I built a Haas effect using a slight time offset between tracks on tracks 3 and 4 together, as well as tracks 5 and 6. Do you feel this is effective, or should I have saved the time and gone with a simple delay/reverb?
The feeling I wanted with this was an initial cast that causes a fireball to be formed above the caster's head, then flies from above and away to the unfortunate target, where it then explodes, leaving us to listen to the remnants crackling.
Kind of a WOOSH, swoosh, BANG, burn out feel... Hope that makes some modicum of sense.
Thanks again Brian.
Here is the revised version:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2ao9i93iromgq … 6.zip?dl=0

2019-05-08 04:01:37

@210 I did miss it! I didn't see that you linked the file in two words. Sorry! It's downloaded, I'll get to it today!

2019-05-21 11:21:41

@210
You did some really subtle work here, it sounds good. Technically, the only thing I would fix is that you EQ'd the lower ends up on two different tracks, to give them a gain bump.

We generally never want to do this. It makes the track peak (distort) and it also rarely needs to be done - if you need more lows, maybe give a 3db boost at most but not a 9 db one. If you don't have enough low punchyness going on at +3db, you need to layer more sounds underneath it. I know, this wasn't part of the assignment, I just want to get the message across that we rarely, rarely bump the lower frequencies in EQ.

If you render your work (ctrl+alt+R, then enter) you'll probably find the beginning heavily distorted due to those lows.


So technically, your work is excellent with one thing to fix.

Aesthetically, it sounds more like fire than ice to me and I recognise that we're entering opinion territory. Your idea of an ice sound might be different to mine but I picture not a lot of "boominess" in the sound. I'd bring the lows in that impact sound down. I also picture a LOT of crackling sounds, which you have in the sound files you chose but they fade out before we get to enjoy them. I'd also give them a nice EQ bump on the higher ends, I'd experiment between 3,000Hz and 20,000Hz.

I'm very impressed with your global fadeout. I didn't know Reaper could do that, so thank you for teaching me something.

2019-05-21 12:15:48

Hey everyone, super random post: I just found a great sound on Freesounds that is CC0 license AND pretty rare. It's a howling wind from indoors sound. You would be wise to grab it!

https://freesound.org/people/Refrain/sounds/265538/

2019-05-28 12:56:57

Hey everyone, third lesson is uploading now. Sorry for the big lapse.

While it's uploading I wanted to post a guide that will allow us to know when our sounds are peaking - or distorting due to too high a gain setting.

I'm still learning how to apply this to Reaper so I don't have it yet, but if anyone has already figured it out, holler at me. Thanks to Kristijan for reaching out and helping me with stuff like this.

https://reaperaccessibility.com/index.p … the_meters

2019-05-28 14:07:07

@212
You're really down on yourself and you work and you shouldn't be. This work is great - it's just 2 steps away from perfection!

You're right in saying your whoosh sound doesn't lead up or line up properly. Create a fade in in the whoosh sound, and take all of your high EQing off of the first track - we lost the impact sound because you wanted the low boom to come out but we need those highs too!

That's it. It sounds amazing now. You could take it a step further and add a fade out in the third track.

Great alignment, great file choice, it sounds fine mate you just need to do those few steps and this is a AAA game sound.

2019-05-28 14:10:19 (edited by daisyalesoundworks 2019-05-29 05:53:51)

Here's the next lesson: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2ge64vuplnivw … 3.wav?dl=1

Here is the required file pack, large zip around 2 gigabytes: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yeghc6x14825i … s.zip?dl=1

Here is the portion of my voice, unprocessed for the other assignment: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0gj4fcmpgiq46 … t.wav?dl=1

Your assignment is to create a spell or attack sound from the sounds I've provided, using a compressor on your impact sound to make it nice and thumpy. Then, to use EQ and compression on my voice to raise the quality of the recording.

Experiment with ratio and threshold mainly, with a low knee. For EQing, raise the highs somewhere around 3,000Hz - 10,000Hz, experimenting until it sounds good to you. Only raise slightly - maybe 3-4dB maximum. Also slightly lower the low mids, around 200-300Hz. Again you'll have to experiment, perhaps it will sound better higher or lower than these numbers.

2019-05-28 19:31:08

Something here I'm not getting about the Peak meter.
I am setting the master for the 1st monitored track, and my impact track for the 2nd. When I solo the Impact track, I have a peak value of exactly 0 db.
When I solo my woosh track, I get negative 3 db or so.
When I have both tracks active, the peak meters show 1.6 and 2.0 for master and impact tracks, respectivly.
I am resetting both tracks with alt f7 and alt shift f7, then playing the audio to get the peak reporting, this after using control shift w to set up the peak meter monitoring.
Also,, I have included the beginning of my lesson 3 reaper project here, as the compression doesn't seem to be doing what I thought it would do.
Shouldn't the db go up as I turn the ratio down, in other words it is squashing the singal less the lower the ratio?
I am trying to get the volume to zero db peak just with the compressor, but it doesn't seem to be getting there no matter what I do with the compressor values.
Obviously I am missing something basic here about compression and/or the peak meter, any help greatly appreciated.
Also, a big time saving tip here: once you have an effect added to a track, you can simply hit the P key on that track to open up parameters in an easy to navigate interface and adjust your values. A huge time saver when needing to adjust, then check peaks and back and forth.
For instance, on my impact track, I hit p, then arrow to my ReaComp effect, hit enter, then I can left and right arrow to the various parameters, and tab down to adjust the actual values.
Hope that saves some of you all some time, I know I find it way more efficient than hitting f, then having to tab all over the place.
Thanks for any feedback, here is the project thus far:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hx4ydxm66b94a … 1.zip?dl=1

2019-05-29 05:59:11 (edited by daisyalesoundworks 2019-05-29 06:12:18)

@223
Thanks for the additional info!

UltraLeetJ wrote:

parallel compression is a procedure on its own, its not an included feature right out of reaComp but its probably much easier to achieve using reaper.

No, sorry. Parallel compression is when we have access to a mix of both the wet and dry signals. We may not have an additional channel dedicated to it, with duplicated sound files but we have all the functionality of traditional parallel compression, and right now any discussion beyond that is just splitting hairs. ReaComp has the ability to mix both signals simultaneously.

2019-05-30 08:59:58

Hi!
Thank You also for explanation. It is very great explanation of this thing with Spectrogram.

Ja volim samo kafu sa Rakijom.