How To Get Better At Sound Design
The Hard Truth
There are no shortcuts that will automatically make you a great sound designer. To get better you have to put in the work and practice. The good news is that you can get better faster if you follow the steps below.
Consistency
This is by far the most important aspect of getting better at anything in life. By creating a habit and putting in dedicated time consistently over long periods of time we can achieve monumental goals. The hard part is to create habits that are easy to stick to and then actually do it.
James Clear the author of Atomic Habits has a great article on his website on continuous improvement and how to get 1% better each day: https://jamesclear.com/continuous-improvement
From a game audio viewpoint if our goal is to “become a better sound designer” we will never reach it as there is always more to learn. So a better idea is to create smaller goals that are then split into even smaller habits.
Below are a couple of examples of how you can create habits out of your goals:
Goal 1 - Creating a sword sound library.
Habit 1: Record a single source that fits the library every 2nd day
Habit 2: Edit, process, clean, name and tag the files on the days every 2nd day (day after recording)
Outcome: By focusing on a single source sound you can focus on getting a large variety of sounds of just this one item. Editing, naming and processing the files on the days after recording lets you experiment further with the sounds you recorded with a pair of fresh ears. Additionally, you’ll never fall too far behind with the tedious metadata tagging and naming process as you’re dealing with the files little by little rather than waiting until it becomes a mountain of thousands of files.
Goal 2 - Redesigning 1 gameplay clip per week
Habit: Analyse the redesign at the start of the week and split it into the most important elements. Then divide them up into the different days of the week and finish one of them each day until it all comes together.
Outcome: By targeting the most important parts of the sound and splitting them into smaller pieces we have more direction and it will be less overwhelming.
Take a clip from Horizon Zero Dawn where Aloy shoots her bow: the elements in that would be the foley (movement of her body, clothes and feet), the string of the bow, the bow itself (straining and creaking), the arrow as it gets drawn and released and lastly the ambience.
You can do this with any short gameplay clip, just make sure to really focus on the most important things (the highlights) and then fill in the smaller details later if you still have time.
Goal 3 - Learning “X” plugin
Habit: Take 10-40 minutes per day and focus on 1-2 parameters of that plugin. Modulate them manually, with envelopes as well as LFOs to see how it sounds and behaves. Use it on different source material and see how it reacts and behaves. Listen and get to know the sound.
Do this until you’re intimately familiar with every setting, button and knob of the plugin and then use them all in conjunction for a final longer experimentation session.
Outcome: Focusing on the single elements of the plugin and understanding how they work will let you use it in a lot more creative ways.
Below I’ve listed a couple of great Twitter threads of sound designers sharing tips on using specific audio effects.
Tips and tricks for getting the most out of reverb:
https://twitter.com/daviddagostino_/status/1517607810007068672
Tips and tricks for getting the most out of pitch shifters:
https://twitter.com/daviddagostino_/status/1514702513492172800
Some Motivation
I personally found this passage from the first chapter of Atomic Habits very encouraging:
"It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results." - James Clear
Good Artists Borrow Great Artists Steal
These are supposedly Pablo Picasso's words and they ring true, especially at the start of our journey. In the beginning, one of the best ways to get better is to try and imitate the sound of your favourite gameplay clips and trailers. Try to make your work sound as close to the original as possible, by reverse-engineering the sounds you’ll learn how to make them.
When reviewing your own work close your eyes and ask yourself if you can tell what’s going on just by listening to the sounds. If not then you might want to change something.
These two amazing tips are from Kevin Regamey, Juan Pablo Uribe and Jennie LaBonte who shared lots of their knowledge in an amazing episode of Reel Talk. I highly recommend watching some of the episodes as you’ll learn loads: https://www.twitch.tv/powerupaudio/videos
Deliberate Practice
In order to get better at something, we must practice. However, there is a big difference between simply repeating a task and being focused on improvement.
This masterfully written article by James Clear shows how you can implement deliberate practice and beautifully ties into the topic of “Feedback” below: https://jamesclear.com/beginners-guide-deliberate-practice
Giving & Receiving Feedback
Receiving Feedback
When you’re working in a team of sound designers you get feedback from your Audio Director in reviews and sometimes also your peers. Sounds sometimes pass through multiple different hands before making it into the game whereby each person improves on the previous ones work and iterates on it.
Feedback is not only an absolutely integral part of the sound design cycle but also in learning and improving. Someone providing feedback is having a second pair of ears listening and a second brain experiencing and analysing your work. We have a set perspective and allowing someone else's in can broaden ours.
The hardest part about receiving feedback is going into the right frame of mind while getting it. When we create something and have put a lot of care and effort into it we usually feel an attachment to it. Putting it out there for other people to critique can make us feel very vulnerable. It’s a learning process to be able to let go of our ego and see the feedback for what it actually is.
Feedback is there to make your work better. You are allowed to disagree and have your own opinion but dismissing the feedback based on feeling defensive is something that we have to learn to overcome.
A good way of doing this is to change your frame of mind and realise that whatever sounds you are creating have to make the game better for the player. The mantra is: “Whatever is best for the game”.
The Practice
The way we can get better at receiving feedback is by exposing ourselves to it on a regular basis. The fastest way you can do this is to create things often and ask various different people for feedback, write it down analyse and implement it then move on. By doing this you’ll get used to looking at your work from a more analytical and less emotional perspective.
Giving Feedback
Just as important as receiving, giving feedback means effectively and respectfully communicating your perspective of the work in question to your peers. It’s important to be truthful but also kind as saying something is bad isn’t valuable in any way shape or form.
So instead try to find what out:
What exactly about it do you like, think is good and potentially think could be done more of?
What do you not like, is causing problems and/or could be improved upon?
A good way to know if you’re being respectful is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and ask yourself: “How would I feel if I received this feedback?” in case you are still not sure, heed this advice from my old university lecturer who said it best - “Don’t be a dick.”
Of course, we’re all different and some people might be a bit blunter than others so just remember that when you’re on the receiving end of feedback.
Communication is something that we don’t only improve on individually but also as pairs and teams. As we get to know people and build a personal or working relationship with them we learn their communication patterns and habits as well as how to most effectively speak to them. This of course can only happen if you actually get to know them and communicate regularly.
The Practice
Practising giving feedback has the benefit that can be done alone as you can simply watch other people's demo reels, games and other work, critically analyse it and write down your findings as if you were telling it to the person. Of course, it’s even better if you can practice with a trusted friend as they can in turn give you feedback on the feedback they received from you.
Soaking Up Knowledge
You can learn a lot by reading books and blogs, watching videos and documentaries, listening to podcasts and interviews or simply having conversations with fellow people in the games industry. A great habit to cut down on your social media time in the morning is read your favourite sound blog while you’re having a hot beverage. It will also put you in a creative mindset for the day.
Teaching
Showing others the tricks and techniques you’ve discovered and explaining game audio concepts will solidify your knowledge. To teach you have to break down the topic into little digestible bite-sized pieces that someone else can easily digest and learn from. This in turn helps you understand the topic intrinsically.
Training Your Ears
Our ears are of course our most valuable and important tool. We can actively train them to get better at identifying specific sounds and frequencies and improve our general critical listening skills.
The easiest way to do that is to stop hearing and start actively listening which means taking out your earbuds when you’re on a walk or simply waiting somewhere in line and listening to your environment. Ask yourself the following questions:
What sounds can you hear?
How would you best record all of these sounds?
How would you implement them into a game if you were tasked to create this specific environment that you’re currently in?
How does the environment change throughout the day and night?
Another very fun way to train your ears is to watch gameplay or movie clips and try to analyse some of your favourite sounds. These can be specific ones like a weapon or ability or entire environments. Write down how you think each component was recorded, processed and designed.
Lastly, you can use software to improve your critical listening skills, below is a primer video along with two websites that will help you get started.
Being able to identify frequencies requires a lot of training but here is a great primer video by Audio University to help you get started: https://youtu.be/5rYrcm__3sk
iZotope’s EQ challenge is the perfect training companion to the video above (frequency identification):
https://pae.izotope.com/
Sound Gym - a great tool to train your ears in all kinds of aspects of audio through games: https://www.soundgym.co/dashboard/gym?aff=gl&sub=search&set=sound
