Podcasts are extremely popular nowadays, so one of our assignments at the Audio Production Masters here at the University of Salford was to create a 15-minute long episode on an audio-related topic we like. So, after some discussions, our group of 4 people (Argi, Jem, Omer and me) decided that it would be great to produce something game audio related. So without any hesitation, we started working on the pre-production.
The Topic of The First Episode
So, after some talks and ideas, we decided to dedicate the episode to the history of audio in video games, discuss the first video games and how they approached sound design and music and gradually go through the decades and talk about where things are now. Obviously, some research had to be done before even attempting to record the podcast itself, so I went straight into the depths of the web, looking up information on consoles and their specifications, what sound chips were used and how they worked. There was a lot of information compiled and structured, but later we realised that it would take much more than our 15-minute limit to discuss all of this in great detail and would be much harder in actual production, so we as a team decided to structure the podcast in a slightly different way - the information acquired was split into some sort of a road map and was used just as topics to freely discuss and talk about, and it turned to be great in the way and I am glad about how we went from one idea to the other and in the end created a quality podcast. So finally let’s talk about how it was recorded, processed and compiled!
The Production Process
The recording session was really fun - we have recorded the episode at Jem’s private studio on 4 very different microphones (AKG C414, P120, Behringer C1 and Shure SM57), but in the end, it all worked quite well, except the fact that we went way over the 15-minute mark, but hey, we had great conversations and discussions, making the time we had working together well spent.
After the session, we went our own ways and I started working on the main theme of the podcast, which I was really excited to compose. The main concept behind it was to combine a few motifs from my favourite soundtracks and spice the soundtrack with some drama and sound design. So I started working on the track in Ableton Live, borrowed melodies from two of my favourite tracks - Epilogue from Dark Souls 3 and the looped arp from the Forgone Destruction from UT2004. After finalising the arrangement, I have bounced all the individual tracks and mixed everything in Pro Tools.
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Regarding the podcast itself, it was fully edited in Pro Tools and single tracks were cleaned up in iZotope RX9, using modules such as de-noise, de-bleed and others, which was essential to making the podcast sound good.
Self-criticism And Final Thoughts
Even though I am quite happy with the final result, in the future I still want to create a more script-driven, essay-like type podcast, but obviously, that would take a lot of time and effort, but it is the end result anyway. I hope that you have enjoyed listening to the podcast and see you next time!
P.S. By the way, the original research done for podcast is going to be gradually published on this blog-page, so stay tuned!