Greetings Patrons,
After last week's server fiasco, I needed to work on something rousing and triumphant. I know many of you have been asking for pirate themed tracks and this seemed to be the right time. I decided that these would be fairly heroic pirates. The Hollywood variety with nice teeth.
The music is martial, but also hopefully a bit romantic. I did depart a bit ...
2020-12-22 15:10:57 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings Patrons,
Thanks for bearing with me over the last few days. The server issues have been sorted but there still may be some residual effects. These are most likely due to my use of Cloudflare to cache as much of the site as possible. When you load the site, the majority of the content is pre-cached - a necessity for me to keep my bandwidth bills manageable.
The issue ...
2020-12-20 20:38:50 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings Patrons,
After so much runaround I'm tentatively (hence the question mark) letting you know that things appear to be working again. Ironically, the one person that never saw the site return was the tech support person at the hosting company.
Make sure you do a cache clear when you reload the site. If you still do not see the site, let me know: 1) Where you ...
2020-12-18 15:06:34 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings Patrons,
After being elevated to tier 2 the server is still down as of this morning (US Eastern time). I've been on the phone again with the hosting company and they assure me that they are still working hard on the problem and that it should be fixed today.
Again, my apologies for any inconvenience. I'll be sure to update you all as soon as it's back up and running....
2020-12-17 15:09:40 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings Patrons,
As many of you have noticed tabletopaudio.com is not working. I've been in contact with the hosting provider off and on all day. Apparently they were migrating a bunch of servers to a new platform and, spoiler alert, it did not go well.
So the good news is, I haven't been hacked, nothing seems to be nefarious, but there has been a massive screw up (for once not by...
2020-12-16 21:40:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Edit2: It seems I was premature. The webhost told me that they are migrating the server as we speak and everything is going to be a bit sideways for a little while. They wouldn't put an exact time on that. My apologies everyone, hopefully this will be resolved soon. - Tim
Edit: Website should be back up and running, sorry about that. My host changed the DNS r...
2020-12-16 15:57:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I feel like I'm late to this party. Having just finished watching the Finnish series "Bordertown" and the Swedish/Danish series "The Bridge" I am now on the search for more of this Scandinavian goodness. (Side note - I cannot find a way to watch the Danish version of The Killing anywhere!) I thought I would try my hand at creating the signature dark, brooding and ...
2020-12-09 16:10:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
This didn't have anything to do with Mind Flayers when it started. It began as an orchestral tension track, but the longer I worked with it, I kept seeing these floating, tentacle faced creatures in my mind.
For the ambience portion, one of the things I did was create a sampler patch out of all the squishy, brain-like sounds I could come up with. Then ...
2020-12-02 18:33:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Here's another of those not-quite-battle tracks. It's definitely action oriented, but it's meant to be a kind of cinematic montage where we observe soldiers training before the big fight. It's the type of scene you could imagine being in the background of any establishing shot of a castle interior. I really wanted to call this 'Castle Training Grou...
2020-11-25 17:16:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I spent some time underground this week, metaphorically speaking. I was looking over recent tracks and thought we hadn't really seen a proper dungeon type ambience in a while. I set about to remedy that and this was the result.
So here's Defiled Temple. A dark, atmospheric ambience, brimming with horrid creatures, foul winds, guttering torches and broken ...
2020-11-18 15:42:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I started this track a month ago, with no real idea other than it was going to be a kind of Howard Shore-ish type piece. Something on the lighter side, suitable for lots of different fantasy scenarios.
As I worked on it, an image of a rainy country village kept coming to mind. But the music wouldn't let it be a dreary one, so I populated it with a few friend...
2020-11-11 16:32:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I don't play video games much, but I managed to get some time on No Man's Sky last weekend and really enjoyed it. I especially liked the way the music added to the sense of wonder and exploration. It sounded generative/procedural to me - but in a good way. Something Eno would have been happy with.
I started this track with the music first. Super min...
2020-11-04 16:37:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I hope this note finds you well. I took quite a long and meandering path trying to discover where this track was going. I almost scrapped it a couple of times. I eventually arrived at music that I liked, a kind of oscillating chamber music pulse, but I couldn't decide what story it was trying to tell. I originally had this set in an old manor style house with doors open...
2020-10-28 15:25:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
This is a battle track. It's future combat. It's large, mechanized warriors trying to pulverize each other into scrap. Musically however, there's a bit of a push and pull. It starts with a slow, relentless march and ends up - well, bigger. It was lots of fun to make.
I've included music-only and ambience-only versions of this track here for patrons. The musi...
2020-10-21 15:56:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
A number of recent requests for some "cold, not particularly friendly, northern villages" got me guessing that one or two of you were planning to run some games in Icewind Dale.
As I'm not well versed in this location I had to do some reading and youtubing. As longtime readers/listeners know, I don't usually like to do super game-specific ambiences. That is,...
2020-10-14 15:12:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
This is my 6th annual Halloween ambience. I just read that again and found it slightly hard to believe.
I listened to some of the classic horror soundtracks and as always, nothing provokes that sense of beauty and dread so well as gothic horror. Looming castles, beautiful people clad in black, ghostly figures floating down stairways, elaborate empty rooms. 2020-10-07 14:55:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I watched a few episodes of Netflix's "Criminal: UK" this week. If you haven't seen it, it's a police procedural that takes place almost entirely in an interrogation room. Stories unfold, points get pressed, emotions boil - it's very well done.
This ambience, Interrogation Room, is the perfect backdrop for tension filled, story telling. Environmenta...
2020-09-30 14:43:56 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Something on the peaceful side this week. I was thinking about a kind of psychedelic, Alice in Wonderland type setting and what could be more appropriate than a forest of giant mushrooms?
I wanted to create a setting that seemed natural, but maybe was just slightly out of the ordinary. I started designing this by creating birds and insect sounds on a synthes...
2020-09-23 15:03:48 +0000 UTC View Post
*EDIT* The music-only track I originally uploaded was the same as the track on the site. I've since fixed this and the new music-only track is correct. Sorry about that. If you grabbed the file right away make sure you get the new one attached below. - Tim
Greetings Patrons,
I've really been enjoying the brilliant new HBO series "Lovecraft Country" lately. It got me t...
2020-09-16 14:46:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I'm back from a week at the beach and excited to be in the studio again. While I was away I watched several excellent films, but the one that stayed with me was The Andromeda Strain (1971). Perhaps a bit on-the-nose in the time of Covid, it's still an amazingly atmospheric and intense bit of hard sci-fi.
Perhaps my favorite part, however, is the score. Creat...
2020-09-09 15:49:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
This ambience evolved a bit from inception to finish. I knew I wanted to do something in New Orleans, something vaguely Cthulhu-ish. I decided it should be set in the 20s, so that part was fairly straight forward. I tried to do some research of actual sounds from the era but it proved to be quite difficult.
YouTube has some great footage, but not su...
2020-08-26 14:52:42 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings Patrons,
I wanted to let you know that I'm in the process of making some behind-the-scenes changes to the SoundPad broadcast function. As some of you know, this is the only component of the site not written entirely by me, luckily, dear friend of the site and original broadcast coder Merten Popp has had a bit of time recently.
A number of things necessitated this change. 2020-08-24 18:09:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I started working on this track last week after seeing a clip of an old Scooby-Doo cartoon from the 1960s. That show, as comically formulaic as it was, did a pretty great job of distilling a sense of pulp adventure into a few short minutes. And the music, if you could hear it through all the classic slide-whistle and bongos sound effects, was also quite good.
<... 2020-08-19 15:08:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Frequent listeners know how I love the in-between moments in games - travelling, waiting, camping. So many good stories comes from these times. Here's an actual in-between space. The salt marsh is that odd, natural ambiguity between ocean and grasslands. Some of each, but also neither. Water meets land in a liminal space where both ecosystems merge and exist. ...
2020-08-12 15:10:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Just a quick note to let you know that I've updated the Custom SoundPad with all 36 sounds from the recent, Wuxia SoundPad.
This brings the total number of available sounds to exactly 900. The Wux...
2020-08-05 17:38:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
While working on the last 2 wuxia-based ambiences (Wuxia Tea House and Wuxia Village), I created so many individual sounds that I thought I would try and combine them into some kind of cohesive set to be used in a SoundPad. To be honest, I wasn't entirely sure it would work.
At first I found the fighting element a bit tricky. I eventually s...
2020-07-28 15:50:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Today's ambience marks my second foray into the world of Wuxia. This one is even less martial than the previous offering. As you know, I adore exploring the in-between elements of games and stories. The places our heroes go when they're not battling for glory, loot or honor.
Wuxia often creates dualities in the behaviors of it's heroic characters. A hero mig...
2020-07-22 15:13:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I hope this finds you well. New York City is sweltering this time of year and I decided that this week I needed a nice swim. Well, an auditory swim anyway.
Lots of requests for nautical ambiences lately so I thought I'd do something below the waves. This track is called Sunken Treasure but it could really be about anything going on in the dept...
2020-07-15 15:36:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
It's interesting how often requests come in clusters. This month has seen an uptick in the number of requests for Wuxia style ambiences. As I'm not too well versed in this genre beyond the most popular films, I set out to remedy that.
I probably watch films a little differently from most people when I'm doing this type of research. I get really excited and rewind ...
2020-07-08 16:04:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I hope this post finds you all safe and well. I needed a bit of levity in the studio this week and I thought it would be fun to do a gnomish workshop ambience complete with some lighthearted, almost comic music.
The Tinkerer's Workshop is a place full of bits and bobs, pieces of junk and machines in various states of disrepair. The be-goggled gnomes who w...
2020-07-01 16:55:43 +0000 UTC View Post