The sound for successfully solving a small puzzle witin a creepy, foreboding atmosphere. I made this for an upcoming game.

Success, but a long way to go

I opened up the case of an old Apple II CRT monitor from the 80s, then I put a contact mic on various locations. This is the sound of the computer monitor turning on then off.

Electrical Hum from AppleII CRT monitor

A comparison of a few different pitch shifting algorithms. 

First is the original audio file (a wooden chair scooting across a concrete floor in a large room). The next four sounds are all playing at 0.2 speed (five times slower) while trying to preserve the original pitch. Then it ends with the original sound again.

The pitch settings in order are:
Simple Windowed: 50ms window, 25ms fade
Simple Windowed: 10ms window, 3ms fade
Simple Windowed: 3ms window, 1ms fade
élastique 3.2.3 Pro: Normal (Reaper's default)

Different pitch shifting algorithms offer a lot of creative options for sound design, especially when designing scifi, abstract, or unworldly sounds. Reaper gives us many pitch shifting options to play around with, so I can encourage you to explore them. It's fun!

Pitch Shift Algorithms

This is a snippet from the radio drama podcast called "Evil Wears a Green Dress: A Mrs. Claus Story" (also known as "The Adventures of Mrs. Claus"). A local theatre group named Last Act Theatre wrote and performed the story. I was hired to record and edit the voices as well as do all of the sound design. 

This is one of my favorite sound design moments in the series. Mrs. Claus and her crew on her spaceship run into some trouble and find themselves fighting off enemy starships. The snippet starts with the show's narrator explaining the scene to the listener and ends with Santa Claus interrupting Mrs. Claus's telling of the story (it's a frame story), which suddenly cuts off the space battle scene.

Designing a busy space battle took a lot of work and I'm really happy with the end result. My favorite sound design decision is to have the space battle sound effects follow the narrator's description ("Whoosh! Zoom! Pew pew pew! Boom!").

If you'd like to hear the rest of the show, you can search for "The Adventures of Mrs. Claus" in your favorite podcast app or you can find the show here:
https://lastacttheatre.podbean.com/

Adventures of Mrs Claus snippet: the space battle

Playing with matches

A friend of mine made a little endless-runner game where a cat runs through a cave. It's cute and simple game and it needed some music. I made this looping music in an afternoon as a favor.

Cat Cave Music

Your ship has crashed. You're way off course and this planet isn't on any of the star-maps.  Your radio can't pick up any signals. You're alone.

This planet seems to support life, though. Time to get to work.

A little musical vignette for an uncompleted project.

Crashlanding on an unknown planet

I made this track to serve as the background loop for a promotional video for the Let's Play Program (https://letsplayprogram.org/).

Relax and Parallax

I was inspired by some of the sounds of an 80s digital synthesizer and wanted to make a theme song for a Saturday morning cartoon. Imagine dinosaurs with laser guns and spaceships fighting each other while you listen.

The synth is a Kawai K3 I picked up off Craigslist for cheap. 80s keyboards like this are fun because they use MIDI. And MIDI is an amazing standard that lets me hook up these old instruments to computers that didn't at all exist when the instruments were created! The keyboard had a couple of keys that didn't work right. I had to give it away when I moved and I miss it.

Dino Wars! - fictional 80s cartoon

I'm a sound designer and occasionally I pretend to be a musician.

TroysNoize