3 Common Mistakes Young(er) Sound Designers Make –Part 3

Please enjoy the final installment of guest blogger Nathan Madsen.

Construct your sound design like you would a piece of music. As I said in the first paragraph, many composers end up doing some freelance sound design at some point in their career. Most of you already know how to write a great song, but let’s think about what goes into an effective score: harmonies, rhythms, melodies and contrast. Having a piece that does the same rhythm and harmony over and over can get really annoying and repetitive fast if not prepared correctly. Consider Ravel’s Bolero and how repetitive that piece of music is. That’s about 13-15 minutes of basically the same idea over and over again! If Ravel wasn’t careful about his orchestration and moving that ostinato around in various configurations of the orchestra, would it be as effective? Would it still be considered a masterpiece of 20th century music? Doubtful. I’ve found that some young sound designers don’t consider how to develop their sound design piece. I was guilty of this at first and a co-worker helped me realize this flaw. He asked me “how are you prepping this large moment?” The truth of the matter is I wasn’t. So I started looking into ways to make a large moment have more impact. When I started thinking about sound design as a piece of music, suddenly it took on a life of its own. I began to consider how often I am giving this sound to the listener. Should I change it with this other sound? Should I return to a familiar sound passage later on much like you would return to the starting theme in music? What is the orchestration of my sound and how does it change throughout the scene or trailer? Should it remain the same the whole time? It that really effective? Does it have progression? Just as you wouldn’t want to score a piece of music using the same chord or same intensity, try and make your sound design have some ebb and flow to it. Some tension and relaxation. Some development. Sound design is just like musical composition, but you're using different instruments!

Example:  http://www.madsenstudios.com/Case%20Closed%2014th%20Target%20%28FULL%29.swf

(music composition, sound design and voice over production by Nathan Madsen)

Here’s another trailer that has a heavy amount of dialog taken from the show. Listen to the motorcycle rev up and drive off which is followed by a helicopter swooping in then crashing. It was great to have both elements happening side by side in the trailer because this meant I could take aspects from both events and merge them to create a seamless action. This trailer also has a large number of explosions in it. It would get way to monotonous and annoying if the same explosion SFX was used over and over. So if you have a limited library of SFX samples, consider pitch shifting them so that each has a different tone. You could also experiment with taking various sections of different samples and combining them. Let’s say you only have three explosion samples. Try creating some new samples by taking the start of one, the middle section of another and ending with the tail of a different sample. It’s all about maximizing your output. This is what I did in this trailer and it helps make each explosion have its own sound while also sounding related to each other.

Final thoughts: In most cases sound design will not happen by itself. It will be coupled with music and/or voice over(s). There will be times when sound design needs to take a back seat and allow for other elements to shine. The type of music being used in the spot makes a huge difference. Very active, loud and especially distorted music will cover up a large amount of frequencies and make subtle sound design nuances harder to hear. If you can, work closely with the musician(s) providing the music or the music file that is being licensed. This way you can know what kind of audio situation your sound design is going to be put into and not waste too much time or create too much clutter. When voice overs are involved, they must take precedence over everything else sonically. After all, how useful is a voice over if you can’t understand what is being said? My point is there always has to be a balance.

So that’s it, really. These three points are closely related but it can be easy to miss one, or all three, if you’re not considering how your sound design is affecting the listening and supporting (or not supporting) the scene. When possible, always look for ways to make your sound design have more growth, development and depth. I think you’ll find it really does help!