Thread by @BrentRAudio

gimme yer #gameaudio tips.

•transient designer followed by a clipper for big punchy impacts. gives the impression of a really sharp transient even though it’s shaved off

•envelope follower is great for gluing a bunch of layers together (one sound controls the amplitude of all the others) and makes things cohesive

•for snappy sounds, break the rules and use hard cuts with no fades (gasp!) and sometimes even tiny amounts of complete silence (GASP)

•think about rhythm and arrangement (low, mid, and high frequency balance)

•clean up unnecessary low frequencies

•use distortion to add harmonics back to stretched out sounds that lost some of their high-end detail

•think about movement (whether pitch, pan, volume, etc etc)

•think about front to back depth (reverb, delay)

#sounddesign

•besides EQ or time stretching, a good plug-in to add low frequency oomph to a sound is LoAir or bx subsynth

•compression and saturation are good to make things dense and blend layers together by adding harmonics

•cut 300Hz it’s stupid

•if you’re losing an important layer like a transient, make room for it by staggering sounds so they’re not overlapping. alternatively, side chain compression so the other sounds duck out of the way

•reverb into frequency shifter for over the top anime shimmer stuff

•EQ yer verbs. lotsa low end junk. use predelay to push it out of the way

•sharper transients and more high frequencies will push things forward, the opposite will push them back

•kind of already did this one, but having other sounds duck around another can make that sound huge and dramatic (think the way a kick drum pushes everything down around it)

•for massive low end on transients, have the sound side chained to a gate that lets a very low sine wave through

•lots of good impact sounds can be padded out with DRUMS

•more of a general mix thing, but make the bulk of a sound on a bad midrange speaker (and then polish on better ones). magic is in the midz

•use OTT, saturation/distortion or other heavy-handed compression to bring out tiny details that would otherwise get buried

•if you can’t hear your low end sounds on small speakers, use parallel saturation or maxxbass (adds harmonics above the signal).

•nother mix-specific one, but listen at crazy low volume to get a good picture of how things are balanced (what is and isn’t coming through, etc)

•another way to add some biff: make a copy of the signal and pitch that one down, blend it underneath the original