My sound design approach for Cube

Coil Microphone

A lot of the sound design in my game involves using an electromagnetic microphone or coil mic. I wanted my game to sound somewhat original and thought by adding in instances with this microphone would help. I used it in a large variety of different ways, sounds in the game that I used this on include:

• Enemy weapons (all of which contain one or more sound using this)

• Health pick ups

• Amp pick ups

• Armour pick ups

• DCP event vocals

• DCP alarm

• Teleport

• Rhino vocals

To get the sound I plugged the microphone into a Roland SP404 SX which has a huge bank of effects that are unique to it. I mainly used the pitch effect which not only allows you to control the pitch but also a delay. By having the delay up high and by simply tapping the microphone on an iPad and iPhone creates the sound bellow which I thought was perfect for the player alarm. I also plugged a chorus pedal in the chain as well which bought a more choral musical element. The teleport lent itself to this technique, I found a spot with the microphone that represented this best and added a subtle phaser to replicate the spinning element.

Enemy Weapons

Swiping the microphone in-front of my hi-fi amplifier creates really low electronic whoosh sound and when added to different effects felt suitable for the game. This can be heard in the ogre, knight and goblin weapons. As you can't see an actual weapon for these characters and all they fire is a ball of either electronic looking fire, slime or ice I thought it would be appropriate to not have real life weapon sounds which could muddy up the mix but to use create them using this method. I added in a kick drum and very low sounds of weapon fire to show the enemy was attacking. The drone element to the coil 'swipe' really matched the projectile. I created a more musical high toned sound for the knight to match the ice element of his weapon, this is followed by a dramatic thud with a glass breaking for when the projectile hits a wall or character.

The Bauul weapon is one of my favourites as this was also created with the coil mic. For this I loaded a powerful electronic kick drum into the sampler and triggered this whilst holding the microphone up to my speaker. By doing this I got the classic thud from the kick but also an electronic element which has distorted it.

Pick Ups

For the pick ups I stumbled across an effect I could create by having the microphone against my phone whilst getting a text. Through pitched delay and the chorus pedal I thought this sounded amazing as it didn't replicate the original iPhone tone what so ever. I then went through the list of sounds in the settings recording the ones which sounded best. I then stretched and pitched them further in the DAW to make them sound completely unique. This effect is best heard on the two medical pick ups however all the pick ups use a combination of this method.