Mar 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By David John Farinella

Raymond Herrera probably didn't think his percussive skills would lead to a second career in the video game industry. But three years ago, when his drumming for industrial band Fear Factory led to work providing music for games such as Test Drive Cross-Town (Atari), Gran Turismo 4 (Sony) and Dead to Rights 2 — Hell to Pay (Namco), he founded the aptly named Herrera Productions.

“It's very exciting to be working in the video game market, because I've been into video games since the 2600 came out when I was 10,” Herrera says. “I started Herrera Productions because a lot of projects started popping up that didn't want heavy music like Fear Factory. If they wanted something heavy and fast, we could still do Fear Factory. If they want something different, I do it through my production company.”

GETTING INTO SOUND EFFECTS

Starting the company enabled Hererra to move into sound effects and voice-overs. Steve Tushar, one of Herrera's first hires, is one of three sound designers in the sound effects department. Tushar, who came into the video game market from the film industry, says that his continued work in film has helped his game work. Indeed, Tushar has collected sounds from Foley artists who have performed effects work on some of his film projects. “Sometimes I'll use my connections in the film industry to get sound for my video game work,” Tushar says. “I've done that once in awhile to get some sound effects from Foley artists, like sword-dropping sounds or wooden shields falling on concrete. It's good when you can get some original sounds rather than library stuff. That's some of the best stuff I have.”

Both Foley sounds and Tushar's effects library have been collected into about 400 GB of hard drives. His main audio editing tool is Steinberg's Nuendo. “It makes every other program seem like a toy,” he says, “especially when you're dealing with audio and doing editing and crossfades and inside-out fades. You can slip audio while keeping crossfades intact without having to throw them out like in other systems. If you're doing one-second loops and you've got all these fades, you can actually shift the audio internally without disrupting anything and you still have the one-second loop.”

In addition to Nuendo, programs such as Steinberg's WaveLab and plug-ins from Native Instruments get the call. Tushar adds few effects, relying mostly on pitch bending and pitch shifting. “Sometimes, I'll put a really short reverb on something to make it sound more stereo. Other than that, you don't use many more plug-ins, because you need to make things ultra-short. Maybe I'll use a Doppler [effect] plug-in for certain things, but for video games, it's pretty basic. It's all about finding the right sounds, laying them together, cleaning it up and bouncing them down, and hoping it matches what they've got.”

Tushar says creating short sound effects is one of his biggest challenges. “On a gladiator game, they asked us for a wooden cart that was rolling. They wanted a one- or two-second loop, and it's hard to get it to loop without it sounding stupid and not hearing repetition over and over that's really annoying. So, a lot of times I'll try to find some kind of rhythmic thing that has bumps in it that actually will make sense.”

Tushar delivers sounds to the programmers via e-mail. He explains, “I'll take the .AIFF files and zip them up to under 5MB attachments, which you can get quite a bit of sound in, considering most of them are under a second anyway, and e-mail them.”

WE'VE COME A LONG WAY

Before the advent of such gaming consoles as Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation 2, audio professionals had to deal with some fairly strict compression rates. Rather than the 11- or 22kHz rates they faced then, composers and sound designers are free to work up to 44.1 kHz. “We don't really need to compress too much and [programmers] handle the compression a lot on their end of things,” Tushar says. “We just deliver .AIFF or .WAV files for the most part and they compress it down. The good thing now with all the PC games is that they can actually have almost an unlimited sound per level, but they pretty much allocate how much they want to use to load up. It's not like the old days of the PS1 and the Nintendo when you really had to squash things.

“You used to have to make sure everything sounded good at 8-bit or lower sample rates,” Tushar continues. “I used to monitor my sound effects with a lowpass filter on the output of my program, just to hear what it's going to sound like muffled because it might be playing only at 22 kHz or 11 kHz. You had to make sure the sound stuck out at lower sample rates, and then you'd have to bounce it down to whatever they wanted. Sometimes they'd want delivery at 11 or 22kHz, but now we can do everything at 44.1 for the modern game systems. I'm so happy now that I can work in full bandwidth. These are good days.”

David John Farinella is a San Francisco — based writer.

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