Nick Holiday Giveaway

500 iPads????!!!!!!



I had plenty of time to work on this spot but somehow it came down to the wire. Still, it's nice to be able to really explore the sound to go with such cool looking 3D graphics. And as always, for your listening please, the SFX Splits:

Spike Sports Sizzle

It's always fun to work on a Sizzle spot that is not for air. You get to use cool music tracks like The Beastie Boys "Sabotage" Here's the SFX Split:

Contact Mic Recording with Hiss and a Roar

CONTACT MIC RECORDING from tim prebble on Vimeo.

Tim Prebble never ceases to impress me with his obsession with cool sounds. I picked up Pressure Max and Vegetable Violence a while back but this contact mic library looks like a must have. Such a variety of cool sounds that can be applied all over the place to give a unique stamp to any piece.

CONTACT MIC PREVIEW by timprebble

Winx Club

Just wrapped a long week with my friends at Nickelodeon putting together the finishing touches on the promos for a new show – Winx Club. Toward the beginning of the campaign, we spent a few days looking for the perfect piece of music and never found it so I offered up to compose something. In the end, we used two pieces of music – it started off with drop music and then went into my piece. This is the music track by itself:



Here's the full music track I composed:

Nick WinxClub ID Music Full MSTR by noisepatterns

And as always, here is the sound effects split out:

Breakout Kings

Breakout Kings. Second season of the series on A&E with Domenick Lombardozzi from The Wire and Entourage. A classic tough guy cop.

The mix for this spot was a little rushed. Seems like they had a lot of sound effects already in place from another edit. But they were all mono so I kind of went through it and replaced or added to a lot of the original effects. It ended up sounding a lot better. But in fact the original mix sounded pretty cool at times. I was able to get some good ideas from it. Then made them sound a lot better. They put in whooshes and room tone all over the place! Kind of overkill but hey, it's a trailer after all.

At other times I questioned the orignal mix. You could tell the mixer was pretty inexperienced. Instead of removing the noise from a sound bite, they decided to cut around the dialogue and removed the noise only when the character was not talking. So you could hear these massive shifts in the noise floor (25 seconds in, Shea Daniels being interviewed outside). And because they cut out all the clean noise, that is, the noise in isolation when Shea was not talking, I had very little time to sample the noise in isolation. Anyone who knows much about noise, you know you need to isolate the noise in order to remove it. The plug-ins need a clean sample. And the worst thing you can do is to sample some noise that has a breath or other noise in it. Then your noise-reduction filter ends up taking out too much noise and you get this watery type of reverberant effect.

Long story short is I was still able to make the clip sound better and in fact, I think the average listener will not hear the noise floor jumps now. Not in the mix, at least. You can still hear it pretty clearly in isolation. But it sounds much better than before.

Bag Of Bones Behind The Scenes

This behind the scenes interview with Pierce Brosnan is particularly funny when he talks about shooting 3 sex scenes in one day. You can practically hear him thinking – "jealous much?" Oh Pierce.

Apparently this scene will be playing in theaters across the country. I really pushed the dynamic range more than I normally would for TV. Although not as much as an actual film since I figure they're going to be playing it while people are finding their seats and talking to each other. But hopefully the big hits and the bass will get their attention. I hope I can find out when it's airing and check it out.

Oh and if you can't tell, that's me making the labored breathing sounds at the top and the end. I'll add the FX only version later for you fanboys out there. Come on, I know you're out there.

To be honest, I had tried to be a lot more subtle with some of the sound FX but they kept saying more more more. And what Johnny wants – Johnny gets.

Kina Grannis

Cute video, nice song. I listened to an interview with Kina Grannis on This Week In Music and really enjoyed hearing how she grew her career organically through her youtube page and taking the time to interact with her fans at shows and through social media. Social promotion and online marketing is the future of the music business. A business that does not need media moguls or fat cat producers, just talent and drive. Good looks don't hurt either.

Seems like she has borrowed a little bit from another youtube favorite of mine, Pomplamoose, who got a lot of attention last Christmas with the Hyundai holiday commercial.



One of my favorite covers they have done, Beyonce's "Single Ladies." Somehow those vocals gain a particular haunting quality, especially combined with Nataly Dawn's deadpan stare.

Supah Ninjas

I had a lot of time to make this spot sound super kick ass, appropriately for the subject matter.

This spot features internet sensation Ryan Higa. I looked him up on Wikipedia. Apparently I'm old or out of touch. Or both. Because this guy has had about a billion youtube views. They're actually pretty funny. Especially if you're about 13 years old. This guy has basically created a career for himself by being pretty funny and posting videos on youtube. Wow. That's awesome. Much respect for the internet.

I also included an FX only version so you could hear all the intricacies:

Intervention on A&E

Another fine mix for the A&E network. I had a hard time looking at the acne though. Over and over again as I mixed. Yuck.

Gulp

This is one big stop motion movie! Great work. Nice to see advertising supporting cool creative projects.

Cinemax Sizzle

I hit the ground running when I started my new job at Nutmeg. Here's a spot I mixed for Cinemax.

Mangled Metal

This sounds awesome! I'm definitely going to have to spring for this one. From The Recordist, via Designing Sound

The Sound of Transformers

I was ready to write off this movie as another crappy Hollywood crappy crap. But then I saw this about the sound. Wow. Great sound design video. Original post by Michael Coleman here.

Garden Share

I recently became more involved in the management of my CSA which I have been a member of for the last couple years. I took some pictures today for our website and newsletter. I enjoy taking still life shots of food.

Eggs in repose.

Relaxing with a little chamomile.

Excuse me – do you speak chive?

Dem's some damn good looking eggs.

Nick Summer Packaging

Summer is here and it's time for the Fresh Beat Band, Dora, Bubbleguppies and all your friends at Nick Preschool. This is the first in a series of spots we mixed as part of the Nickelodeon re-packaging coming this summer.

On a separate note – Dora makes so much money. When is Nick going to hire a decent composer for Dora and stop spitting out cr*p content. Never mind the low budget animation. Really. Please.


This is the SFX only split.

I really enjoyed having time to experiment with the sound on this spot. The producer really wanted to give it a summery feel and to underscore the sparkle with all the lens flares. I found some nice bell-like synth sounds in Digidesign's Xpand2 synth and played a bunch of high chords and arpeggios. Then I flipped them backwards, ran them through the TL Space Reverb, flipped that backwards, ran them through again, flipped, bussed, verbed some more and there ya go. I used a nice big cavernous church reverb. I love TL Space. The true stereo long tail convolution reverb sounds awesome.

Clothespin

Spring Things

Asparagus in Repose

April awakening.

Wheel Barrows

Homestead Lane, Yarmouth Port, MA

On The 40

On The 40, Act 2, Crowd Source from Tim Altman on Vimeo.

Mix and Sound Design on this TeenNick interstitial featuring Nick Cannon, Lady Gaga and the Cali Swag District.

On The 40 Sound Effects Comp by noisepatterns
Sound Effects Montage.

Economist Education

The Economist asked me to write music for their Education campaign which featured seven spots, the first of which is featured above. The folks of the Economist have always given me a wide creative latitude and trust my experience in sound. Either we are always just consistently on the same page or else, being English, they are too polite to question my musical decisions.

That being said, we did go through a number of variations for the open. In fact, by the time I delivered the final music, we had gone through over a dozen different instrumentations, three major melodic shifts and one complete rewrite. In the end, we used the grand piano for the melody. Something about the piano lends to the authoritative and classic tone of the magazine, The Economist. The piano, like the magazine, transcends trends.


This is the music only version.

Rymdreglage 8-bit Trip

I saw this a while back and ran into it again. Good stuff. I think these guys with way too much free time are Swedish.

Best Superbowl Commercial

After seeing this commercial, my good friend, Josh, confessed he has at times pretended to have supernatural powers with his twin 2 year old girls.

Fire! Fire!

Ultimate Fire SFX Trailer from Frank Bry on Vimeo.

The Recordist Ultimate Fire Sound Effects Library. This is what happens when you leave Sound Designers alone in the woods too long. Awesome stuff!

Native Instruments "The Mouth"

Native Instruments is always finding new ways to take software to the next level with audio production. Here is a cool demo of one of their products, simply called "The Mouth."

Sunset Collage

I went to Miami Beach and there was a spectacular view of the sunset behind Miami. I took a lot of pictures but I had a couple favorites that follow:

Diego's Risky Rescue Week

The challenge for this spot was to evoke 1970's action suspense television shows like The Bionic Man. I ran the music and VO tracks through a low pass filter and also put a little distortion, delay and verb on the VO to try to give it some of that 70's retro sound. Maybe I should have run the whole mix to a cassette deck on low speed but who has time for that when you have plug-ins.

As far as the FX – after a variety of experiments with metal rulers sped up, slowed down, tweaked out with ring-modulators and delays, I ended up with just throwing some metallic transients into a delay and using MIDI faders to play with the knobs. Some of the SFX were just products of the feedback.


Here's the SFX only split for your listening pleasure.


And here's a sample of me creating the sounds, in all its knob-twisting glory.

Berry Bush near Fresh Pond

Took a walk around Fresh Pond just after the New Year. This bush seemed to be a good subject in the dying light.