How twisted, this life of mine. How wonderfully poetic it is...
Heartbroken, realizing that many of my dreams had turned to ash as I reached for them, I solemnly slid my feet into my running shoes.
"Maybe they weren't my dreams after all" I told myself to alleviate the sadness choking my heart. Accepting to let go of things is one thing but it isn't automatic, a journey needs be undertaken, the thoughts must be faced, not ignored or evaded.
I thus headed out the front door for another one of my thought-processing walks. Heavy rain clattered on the pavement as I poked my head out. I refused to stay inside despite the cold, despite the rain. I put on my gloves, confirmed the strength of my grip on my travel mug, filled with freshly brewed coffee and I headed out onto the streets.
In the early 2000s, after my first foray into the games industry, an experience from which I still bear the scars, I've started traveling down the rabbit hole that was fusionanomaly.net. FusionAnomaly was (and still is) a weird, hand-made version of what could best be described as a prototypical Wikipedia of sorts.
One quote from my journey through that meandering hyperlink hell spoke of the Sumerian culture and how to them, there was no such concept as discovery. Instead, all knowledge already existed and those whom our modern culture might refer to as pioneers and discoverers were simply remembering forgotten lore from the seas of knowledge. While the accuracy of this cannot be verified, as with most of the content from fusionanomaly, I simply fell in love with the concept thus depicted. I stored it in my own memory as nothing more than a cool quote and forgot about it.
Like most proverbs that one may be subjected to in their early years, we often learn these sayings and grasp their meaning in a superficial way. Most children would be able to recite "A rolling stone gathers no moss.", "A stitch in time saves nine." and so on but it is only after being subjected to the harrowing storms of life that the true meaning and impact of these mnemonic marvels truly sinks in.
When I woke up this morning, I felt battered and bruised. After a day of heavy lashing from a close relative who felt cornered, fueled by rage. I did the same thing to a close friend of mine recently as well. Almost destroyed the most meaningful relationship of my life in the process. When someone screams at you and tries to break you, you`re rarely the intended target : They are screaming at themselves usually. Letting out rage and anger feels good and, in the moment, it feels right. So this time I took it, standing up. I couldn't help but think : "Ah so that's what it feels like to be on the receiving end of this!". For my friend, it's the least I could do, even if it doesn't excuse my action.
Before I headed to the shower, I opened up the front door and looked at the rising sun, which was still below the horizon. The color of the late dawn of an autumn sky reminded me of rusted steel, bands of ochre, rust and orange, fading sharply to the purest shades of blues and whites. It's a gradient in some graphics package, can't remember which. The sky wasn't just rusted steel, it was bruised flesh as well. Red, leads to purple and black, leads to this sick, brownish rainbow. At that time, we might feel like staying in bed, calling in sick, cancelling the whole day.
Dear reader, make sure that your movie references are in order before further reading : I seem to be unable to explain most images without referencing a movie or a game.
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I was in what I imagine a university might be like (never been!), several departments for various disciplines with a few common areas where students would gather.
It was a weird mix of a high school vibe, a bit of college attitude and yeah, university as portrayed in movies : dark movies, Dead Poets society in particular. While there's nothing particularly dark about the university rooms themselves, it's the contrast between the meaningful activities of the students, which took place at night, in secret and the brightly lit halls and effervescence of the dorms that struck my reminiscing, dreaming mind. As always, my memory of the film has meshed with several other movies and imaginings of mine so maybe (very probably) I'm remembering it wrong...
I wandered the different rooms and there were props in each one, most notably a sculpture-themed classroom, lots of storage/warehouse type rooms as well. The feeling evoked when I recall those images reminds me of La double vie de Véronique. It also makes me think that this was closer to what an Académie des Beaux-arts might be like.
The way in which I moved from room to room was very similar to 90s-era Sierra adventure games. Thinking back on it, the Dagger of Amon-Ra stands out as the closest one in terms of atmosphere. Maybe that is the key : maybe it all harkens back to a period of my life where I was transitioning from childhood ( I was 14-15 years old at the time ). I don't remember hallways, just specific rooms, all empty of human life except for the common areas.
After spending long stretches of time exploring the seemingly abandoned rooms and classes, I eventually came upon one of those common areas. It felt overcrowded and that sensation was not simply due to the contrast with empty rooms I had just traversed; it was crowded. Students hanging from the railings, piles of them everywhere there was space : one could barely walk through this room.
I walked by a couple of laughing students. A girl from that group casually reached into my pocket and pulled out my keychain, never even looking at me in the process, as if such an act was trivial and meaningless, like when you scratch yourself pensively. So casual was her demeanor about it that she didn't even interrupt her laughter.
Multiple Keychains - A single Key
One thing that struck me was that it was exactly the keychain that I have now, whereas dream imagery is usually a bit more hazy and generic.
In these situations, I usually turn violent : my dream becomes a long shot of me beating up someone. It never ends well. This time however, I simply grabbed my keychain out of her hand immediately, looked at her as she turned her disbelieving gaze upon me and frowned. Didn't even say a word.
I then ran into a guy who was like an amalgam of every school-friend I've ever had. Shoulder-length ash-blond hair, goatee, almost a jock but with a "secret" passion for videogames, which, for the nerdy kid that I was, meant protection : a valuable ally. I'm not exaggerating, most of my friends from school, at every imaginable grade, had followed this exact pattern. I remember him talking but I didn't bother listening to his words as his tone sent a message to my brain which categorized it as meaningless drivel : A friend who speaks because he's afraid of the silence, foolishly thinking that he was exteriorizing some important thought when in fact, it was just an assortment of words which came to his simple mind. I've had this conversation so many times that I knew at which points I was supposed to laugh and at which points I was meant to say something comforting.
At first, his interactions with me felt hostile, his image was skewed towards that of a high-school bully. He didn't threaten me physically or verbally but there was definitely something in my perception of him which made me uncomfortable.
Nell Campbell
At this point, the dream became hazy and rushed, as if scenes were played in fast-forward. All I remember was that me and jock-guy had met a girl who looked like Nell Campbell, from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with the makeup and garb that the actress wore in that movie.
I remember her laughing as well, as someone often does when enjoying their youth with a level of insouciance that will most probably come back to bite them in the ass later. Young people radiating joy and exuberance who later become bitter and joyless, like Claire in Scrooged. She wasn't the girl from earlier, the one who had stolen my key, but she had a similar way about her. Eventually she stopped laughing and started listening to my words. I haven't even a remotely coherent idea of what I was saying but I'm guessing it was pretty compelling, or maybe deeper than what she was used to. In any case, she completely changed her expression and posture into that of an attentive schoolgirl, the poise of a stereotypical Japanese anime schoolgirl. It is at that moment that I realized that it was a dream, and my jock-friend had transformed into...Tuxedo mask from Sailor Moon? He was hunched over as the Faun from Pan's labyrinth, a character I've always identified with. Was I playing myself in this dream? Was I seeing it through the eyes of another? What this all means, I leave up to your interpretation as I am very confused about all of it myself. When I dream of school, the feeling I have is usually one of dread and helplessness, isolation and loneliness. This time however, while these general overarching themes were still present, there was a new flavor in the mix...something like...power over my own destiny and the choices I make. I then woke up abruptly coughing up chocolate. Note to self : Smarties do not make you smart, they give you fucked up dreams.
In my last Reaper-focused article, I skipped over the details of how to clean up the tracks.
Listening back to the samples I had thus cleaned, I noticed that even though they were passable, most of the sounds were plagues with several mistakes.
I have thus undertaken the extremely fun task of extracting and editing all samples once again, using new techniques that not only produce better-sounding results but also make the entire process a lot faster and even slightly enjoyable!
As such, the asset pack I've released yesterday was updated and now contains an entire folder of footsteps which I am quite proud of, to be honest. Feel free to grab it on itch.io!
Reafir
After noticing the horrible (ok not that horrible but definitely amateurish) quality of my work, I immediately tried to see if there was a "smart" way to eliminate the background noise other than EQing it out.
Thanks to Kenny Gioia's video, I have learned of ReaFir, a plugin that has been included with Reaper for a few years now.
Reafir is a FFT(Fast Fourier Transform) EQ and Dynamics processor.
What this basically means is that, like the Spectral EditsI've previously mentioned, one can affect the audio signal not only by standard subtractive EQ techniques but by modifying its frequency information in a direct way.
Darkened line shows "real-time" signal, while bright yellow line show resulting signal.
Not only is Reafir great for monitoring frequencies during playback, it offers several modes, most notably EQ and spectrum-based Noise reduction. You can train it to a certain noise signature and it will magically remove the noise from your signals. While the resulting sound is a bit denatured (no way around it, really), it is by far the cleanest noise reduction method I've heard so far. Followed by proper EQ (trust your ears!!!), it makes room acoustics ***almost*** irrelevant. Try the sample pack linked above and judge for yourself!
As a side note, never underestimate the plugins which are provided with Reaper. While they might look deceptively barren when compared to high-end VST plugins, they are quickly finding their way into my workflow, making several powerful, pricey plugins almost useless by comparison.
No Mo' Normalizing
Bad Audio guy : no!. We're not in 2001 anymore, normalizing is a treacherous tool. It always kind of works but it mostly serves as an audio mangler. Sure, you get volume but unless your sounds are simple and short, chances are that unwanted hisses, noises and hums will infiltrate the sample. Listening to the samples at low to medium volume might sound decent but once you really crank it up or repeat the sound several times, garbage.
Instead, a simple compressor, with an adjustable ratio, will still kick up a sample's volume while allowing way more flexibility to how the frequencies are boosted. Why I didn't start with that? Who knows.
Subprojects
In the last articles, I simply used subprojects as a convenient way to isolate a wave file and edit it by its lonesome. It turns out that subprojects are absolutely insane, allowing you to use full reaper projects as tracks in a master project. Whatever edits you make to the subproject will be reflected in the master project when you switch back to it, allowing you to gain an insane amount of flexibility in song creation and sound design.
One quick example is to use a "dummy" audio clip when scoring a scene in a video or song. Usually, you would drag a random sound file and place it at several spots across the track, just to get an idea of the timing, without focusing on the actual audio content. Instead of using a static sound, you could use a Subproject which would contain a track with the static sound on it, as a take. Once your "dummy" media items are in place, you can edit the contents of your subprojects, which will immediately update all instances in the master project. The alternative would be to select all clips and replacing them one by one : a tedious, time-consuming wasteful method.
Simply drag a .rpp project file from your computer into your project and choose Insert project as media item. Alternatively, you can insert a new, empty subproject via the Insert Menu.
Conclusion
Those simple changes have turned my passable sound pack into something that I am actually quite proud of.
Here's hoping that you will change your ways as I have changed mine, in an effort to better your audio game and make kick-ass sounds and songs.
After completing a course entitled "Computer-assisted sound design" in 1999, I landed my first job in the video games industry as an Audio engineer, joining the ranks of Strategy First, a Montreal-based video games company most well-known as the creators of the Disciples series.
Back in those days, our weapon of choice was Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge and as most of our peers, we used sound effects library from Sound Ideas. It was actually my job at one point to store all of those CD's onto the hard drives of our custom-built server. I also had to tag all sound effects to facilitate our work. I wish that job upon no living soul.
In those days, if you wanted to get decent audio from your PC games, a proper sound card was required. The ubiquity of today's on-board, 96khz surround sound chips was but a dream. As such, the end result of our work was often compressed to hell and ridiculously downsampled. One also needs to keep in mind that VST plugins were still extremely pricey and often required system specifications which forced studios to shell out an insane amount of money just to obtain something equivalent to today's cheapest android device.
Fast-forward to November 2017...
I have to keep my mind occupied whilst my life undergoes its umpteenth reboot. I need to find something new to learn, ideally something that would not require additional monetary investment. "I know!" exclaims the balding wreck of a man that I had become, "I will record sound effects around the house and build my own SFX library! For fun!"
I will skip the details of the actual operation in order to focus on my technically-focused journey using Reaper as my Digital Audio Workstation in the context of sound effects extraction. Maybe you'll learn something!
Fear DAW Reaper
I've been using Reaper for over 4 years, mostly as a way to try out new VST plugins and compose little ditties. While I have done some voice recording from time to time, I've mostly used it so far for its MIDI capabilities, rendering the final Master mix to audio files; nothing too fancy. With that in mind, let us embark on a wonderful journey of discovery and wonder!
Disclaimer
This in no way reflects the "right way" to do things.
This is merely the path I've cleared for myself in order
to achieve what I consider to be acceptable results.
Fairly warned, be thee.
Step One : Track Templates
In less-than-ideal recording environments, such as a busy, creaky house, it's always useful to have some sort of noise reduction plugin or system to minimize unwanted ambiant noise. I use the standard one that comes with Native Instruments' Guitar Rig 5 and will avoid boring you with the details of its settings : to each his own. I will however take the opportunity to talk about track templates.
Let's say you always use the same FX chain when you record a microphone input. Instead of going through the manual labor of creating a new track, setting up the inputs, adding the FX and tweaking them just right every single time, you can simply save that track as a template!
Right-click on the track header and choose "Save tracks as track template...".
My use of templates is pretty bare-bones but you could choose to include envelopes and even track items (midi or audio) in your templates. For complex Midi mappings, this can literally save you hours of work.
Next time you want to add this track template to a project, you will simply need to right-click in the empty area of the TCP (Track Control Panel, see docs) and click "insert track from template", selecting the desired template from the contextual menu.
Want to save even more time? Create a template project where all of your tracks are already set up! To do so, select "Project templates" from the File menu and "Save project as template".
Step Two : Bounce
Once my recording track is set up, I can hit record and go nuts hitting, swinging and banging various things against one another. When I am finished, I drag the recorded audio clip to a new track.
Simply drag the take into empty space below the existing tracks and a new track will be created for you. I then name that track, Mute it and move on to my next recording session.
Plenty of tracks to go around!
Step Three : Editing
Now comes the fun™ part!
While it would be possible to work on the sample directly inside of this project, I prefer to isolate each track in a new project before getting dirty. To do so, I simply right-clicked on the track header and choose "Move tracks to new subproject". As you can see in the image below, this creates a new tab (just beneath the File, Edit, etc. menu) containing just the chosen track or tracks.
Note : There is probably a quick way to reimport the subproject into the main project but it was not necessary for my purposes here thus I have not pushed my investigation in the matter.
From this point, the process is relatively simple. Play the track back and split the take before and after any sample you want to isolate.
To do so, you can press S to split the take in half at the precise point where the playback cursor is at that time. Another way of doing so would be to Split at previous zero crossing by pressing Alt + z.
The isolated take will be highlighted, allowing you to copy, paste and move it around as you please. My preference is to move it to a new track, just below the original.
From this point on, several techniques may be applied, several paths can be taken. Here are just a few highlights from my own process.
Cleanup on aisle 10
This step is the one where you can be the most creative. Should the audio signal be normalized? What do you cut? How long do you make your fade ins and fade outs? Do you modify envelopes, apply VST FX to the track?
That really depends on the desired result. I chose to keep it simple as my goal is simple extraction : I want a relatively clean sample that I might use for sound effects creation, music or whatever else. Adding effects might be overkill at this point.
In most cases, I normalize everything. The result will often reveal "hidden" irregularities in the sound that might have slipped under the radar at lower volumes. Sometimes, these cannot be helped and the sample will find itself buried in the Recycle bin but most times, it can be saved with creative EQ and Spectral Edits. Speaking of which...
Spectral Edits
As far as I know, this is a feature that debuted in Reaper 5.50. What a feature, though!!!!
Disclaimer
!Work on a copy, not the original!
This is completely different than usual audio manipulation.
It requires trial and error.
It may also lead to a severe addiction to spectral editing.
Spectrogram - unmodified Take
Right-click any take and choose Spectral Edits -> Show spectrogram. You should see something similar to the above picture.
If you feel adventurous, you can once again summon Spectral Edits and Add Spectral Edit to Item.
Spectrogram - Spectral Edit of the same take as above
I will not go into the details of how to use spectral edits; I will instead direct you towards ReaperBlog's video, which will make it instantly clear.
If you are using Reaper in any capacity, do yourself a favor and follow ReaperBlog on your social platform of choice : it is thanks to his insights and hard work that my love of audio has resurfaced.
Rendering
Once our take has been modified to our liking, we need to render the result to a file.
Select Render... from the File menu or press Ctrl + Alt + r and render it in the format and location that you need.
Just make sure to select the appropriate options to render just the selected take.
Remember that if your sounds were recorded with a standard microphone and you haven't added stereo effects to the file, you might as well render it to Mono.
Action(s)!
Any audio professional will tell you : "It's all about the shortcuts".
If you want to be efficient and work fast, there is no way around it : you have to memorize the keys assigned to each function that your software can perform. Menus are nice and all but over the course of editing, you will lose hours if every task you accomplish involves pulling down a menu and selecting an option.
Most of what Reaper can do will not be available from the get-go as a button on the interface. Every action that can be made in Reaper can however be found under the aptly named Action list, accessible by pressing ? on your keyboard.
From this list, search for what you want to do and learn the associated shortcut. If there is no shortcut assigned, you can easily create one. If you must have these actions mapped to an interface button, you can customize toolbars easily from this deceptively simple window as well by clicking Menu Editor....
As an example, for this project, I used the normalize action extensively (defaults to Ctrl + Shift + n) and Zoom to selection (defaults to -).
I had to create a shortcut of my own as well, Loop points: Set loop points to items, which allows you to easily single out the currently selected take and bring the playback cursor to the precise start of said take. No more haphazard clicking or dragging to get almost to the right place : mathematical precision!
Zooming and navigation shortcuts are also amazing time savers : I suggest learning the ones linked to actions that you find yourself using the most, whether its zooming, scrolling or rendering.
Once you start using actions, creating your own shortcuts and toolbars, Reaper becomes yours and you can start seeing how incredibly powerful this amazing piece of software can be after a few customization efforts.
Conclusion
As the cherry on top of my personal project, I chose to pack up the useful samples thusly created and release them on itch.io.
- Centered, bold text such as this reflects Winamp's track selection as it comes up during my writing session. - RadioHead - ScatterBrain
I woke up today, looked at the notifications from my various social platforms, poured coffee in a travel cup which my dad bought at Kitt Peak (he was really big into astronomy at the time) and went for a walk.
Yuzo Koshiro - Streets of Rage OST - The Last Soul
It had rained, it would rain again shortly but for the length of my walk, the only wetness I could feel came from scattered water droplets riding on the back of random gusts of cold wind. It could have been pouring or sunny, it didn't matter : I need to take walks, for my body and mind's health.
RadioHead - Just
Ah, dear WinAmp, sometimes you're the only one who truly gets me.
This past July, I was graced with a diabetes diagnosis. I immediately took measures to get it under control. Metformin was prescribed to help with weight loss but I still bumped up my occasional walk to a daily (twice per day, actually!) routine. I also completely cut off alcohol consumption and reduced the size of all meals to reasonable proportions.
In just one month, I had managed to drop 25 pounds (~11.38 kilos). When I visited the doctor again, she was stunned. Apparently, most people usually dismiss the recommendations when first diagnosed with diabetes. They just feel scared and adopt an attitude of self-pity but they rarely take necessary action. She was ready to simply prescribe more medication. It felt like I had broken through the wall of professionalism as I could tell she appeared genuinely relieved to see someone listen to her for once. The tone of our conversation became friendlier, I asked for scientific explanations and she gladly spewed out most of her very advanced knowledge on the subject.
(Now is the time where you cheer for me : You may applaud.)
Racer X - Technical difficulties
This behavior of mine was strangely uncharacteristic as I am usually a cynical fatalist.
I accept this disease because I know that I was the one who's ignored the warning signs and willingly drove his health to this level through years of abuse.
Chrono Trigger OST - Underground sewers
This past week felt like all my eyes could perceive were the ways in which friends and family dealt with similar condemnations.
What I extract from these observations is polarizing.
On the one hand, some, like me, choose to adopt a slow-burn suicide. Thinking that it's never going to get better, they just let themselves sink, favoring instantaneous, shallow and ultimately self-harming gratification because the long-term is simply not an option to them. Oh how they will love it when their ability to choose is taken from them. I call this "waiting to be saved", something that I think is borne out of a life spent playing videogames and watching movies. Maybe it has something to do with a catholic upbringing as well, a belief system which many end up renouncing in their later years yet underneath their self-serving words, the secret hope for redemption and forgiveness can clearly be seen.
The second attitude I've witnessed is just as fascinatingly bleak. It is the option chosen by people who, in the face of their impending doom, choose to mend their ways in what is usually a violent and abrupt way. This 180 degrees usually begets a toxic attitude towards others as a way to justify their choice to themselves. I call this "Self-appointed martyrdom". Haughty and righteous-sounding, it is as if these people haven't understood that life has more surprises down the line. It might work for a while though, at least until the next big obstacle comes up.
I've been in both camps, sometimes simultaneously. Every single time, it turned out to be a temporary solution, spawned from the immediate necessity to avoid the proverbial sky from falling on my head.
Now I go walk, rain or shine and try to appreciate the situation, as unpleasant as it might seem.
Funny how balance is almost always sought when it has slipped beyond our grasp...
