Greetings Patrons,
This is an item that's been on my list for a few months and I finally got around to working on it. I get lots of requests for 'old timey' style ambiences as they seem to go well with Cthulhu type games especially. This would also work well for any kind of pulp style story as well.
While I mentioned that it's set in the 1940s, you won't hear much in hear that...
2019-11-20 16:28:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I know I'm in jeopardy of annoying the "too soon!" crowd, but I started working on this ambience, Yuletide, in preparation for the season and it just so happened that I finished it. So...Here's a winter holiday themed ambience that I hope evokes a kind of yesteryear, Norman Rockwell vibe. I know This time of year is stressful for a lot of people (me inclu...
2019-11-13 16:10:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetins Patrons,
Just a quick note to let you know that all 36 sounds from the latest SoundPad "Ice Planet" have now been added to the Custom SoundPad tool and are ready for mixing and matching.
There are now almost 800 sounds available.
Thanks, as always, for your continuing support.
Best,
Tim
Greetings Patrons,
There's a scene in Young Frankenstein (stay with me here) in which Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman are walking alongside a carriage containing the coffin of the monster. It's of course played for laughs and there's a great bit when they're stopped by a policeman, but I loved the vibe of the town center at night. Cobblestone streets filmed in black and white, t...
2019-10-30 15:17:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I'm releasing the 23rd SoundPad Ice Planet today in sneak peak mode. This means it's available only via the direct URL listed below. Please share with gaming friends and family but not the internet at large yet as I'm still making some tweaks. I'll let you know when it's live for everyone.
When I first got the idea for this, I created a series of wind sounds, the ...
2019-10-22 20:57:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I started working on this track with the idea that it would be a slow, drum heavy atmospheric piece but, as often happens, it didn't end up that way at all. Each time I revisited it I felt it was dragging, so I kept upping the tempo. Then, in light of the new tempo, I found the parts too dull. Rinse, repeat. I felt it needed to be bigger, meaner, more... The pounding ac...
2019-10-16 14:51:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I got into the spirit as soon as October started so I'm releasing my annual Halloween track a bit early this year. Hopefully that will give you time to work it into all your spooky stories!
This is a kind of throwback Hollywood style soundtrack that's full of orchestral dissonance and bowed cymbals and weird string risers. It's extremely atonal and would probably ...
2019-10-09 14:41:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I was re-watching the movie Gravity this week. Can you tell? I must say, I didn't love it the first time and my opinion wasn't really changed much this time either, although I will say that the first 40 minutes or so are really very good. And then, there's the music by Stephen Price, which I thought perfectly accentuated the images and the mood in that long opening sequ...
2019-10-02 14:02:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I wanted to do something cinematic, like when characters on a screen come upon a scenic vista. In this case, the view is of a vast underground lake. There's a bit of magic here, in that the soft winds seem to whisper (spoiler alert: there are actually processed whisper recordings in this) and there is a little tension in the music, but not too much.
Also, the loca...
2019-09-25 15:14:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I'll admit that I'm not very well versed on a lot of D&D lore, so I'll occasionally flip through online wiki sites to see if anything piques my interest. I was looking at some of the maps of Faerûn when I spotted The Sea of Moving Ice. Hellooo...
To be honest, I stopped reading almost immediately after the title. I skimmed some bits about white...
2019-09-18 15:30:56 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Back into fantasy and music world this week. I wanted to do a music forward take on a country village. I imagined it as being a kind of homecoming ambience. Adventurers returning from afield into the familiar embrace of home. A quiet, charming little community that would hug them despite the bloodstains on their armor.
Or it could be something you might play...
2019-09-11 15:21:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I returned a few days ago from a much needed week away at the beach with my family. I am recharged! I even managed to go on some field recording excursions.
I've had this track, Cyberpunk Bar, in mind for a while. After all, you needed somewhere to go while wandering around Cyberpunk City. Some of the inspiration came from the admitte...
2019-09-04 16:26:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
This new ambience is from a recent patron request for an 'abandoned but still operating windmill' that I kept thinking about. I love the idea of locations that hint at stories. Where is this windmill? Why was it abandoned? I created the overhead sail pass-by on a synth and then blended natural mechanical wood sounds until I felt I had the basics of the sound. The stone ...
2019-08-22 14:34:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I know many of you are looking forward to the new editions of Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2077 which is probably why I've been getting so many requests for cyberpunk themed ambiences. I've done a few of these, including some purely musical tracks but I thought I'd do a big picture style city theme.
I tried to imagine a busy urban center, maybe some kind of market, whe...
2019-08-14 15:50:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
It seems as if this time each year I work on a 'cold' sounding track, as if that is enough to pull me out of the sauna that is New York City in August. I know my European friends are having it even worse this year so perhaps this will be some small comfort. This track is set in a throne room made of ice. I envisioned it as a kind Lich King version of the recent 'Royal C...
2019-08-08 14:00:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings patrons,
I was transferring sounds from my field recorder to my archives recently and I came across this longish recording I did outside my bedroom window in Brooklyn using a Sony PCM-m10 recorder with EM-172 mics. Just as an FYI, towards the end (around the 10:30 mark) it's got some traffic and fire engine noises. Other than that it's got some close splats (from the ivy around ...
2019-08-05 18:07:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Many of you are already familiar with my love of the TV show Stranger Things, and especially the music. Any excuse to do a synth only, knob tweaking analog music track I will take it. I've done 2 10 minute tracks on the front page of the site, each one coinciding with a season of the show. For season 3 I assumed I was going to repeat the process and then I thought...
2019-07-27 16:30:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Here's a piece I've been working on in the evenings after music camp for the past week. As camp just ended yesterday, I spent the morning making some final tweaks and I think it's ready for release.
I've done a few taverns before, and even a whole tavern SoundPad but I haven't done a full 10 minute ambience of just tavern music. So here it is. It's probably ...
2019-07-20 17:32:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
As many of you know, I'm in the middle of my 2 week stint as a strings coach at chamber music camp. It's the time of year where I get to 'play teacher', and every year when camp is over, I renew my appreciation of those of you who do this full time!
I've been working on Tabletop Audio in the evenings and yesterday I got to spend some real time putting the final to...
2019-07-14 15:38:15 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings Patrons,
Just a quick update to let you know this is the time of year that I spend 2 weeks teaching chamber music to kids (ages 8-16) at a summer camp here in Brooklyn. We spend 6 hours a day learning orchestra parts and chamber music and then (hopefully) they go home and practice some more! The upshot of this is that I only have evenings to work on Tabletop Audio. But rest assu...
2019-07-10 21:12:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I was hoping to get this out yesterday but the recent Cloudflare issues made that impossible. All the sounds from the 21st SoundPad, Hell Planet are now available for mixing and matching in the Custom SoundPad tool. With the inclusion of these 40 sounds, the total number of sounds is now over 700.
In addition to adding the new content, I managed to fix a few bugs ...
2019-07-04 15:21:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
After spending a 2 weeks in hell, by which I mean the latest SoundPad!, I needed to dial the evil back a bit, so I found a request from earlier this spring and decided that a courtly ambience might be just the ticket. Hushed tones and whispers, occasional footsteps as someone approaches...
2019-06-26 17:11:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Let me first say thank you all for bearing with me through my NAS hard drive failure. At this time, the new drives have all been installed and parity checked (87 hours!). All my data was backed up on various USB drives so I didn't lose anything. During that time I could still create sounds, just not work on the web code. I managed to finish off the sounds for this new S...
2019-06-19 16:20:56 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
The good news is that through some very patient tech support at Synology (shout out to Carl!), they were able to walk me through getting the system back, albeit in a degraded state. This meant that I had access to all the content so I could do one last massive backup before putting in the new drives. The downside is that I would need to re-install everything. I'll take ...
2019-06-15 14:48:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I thought i was being so clever by replacing the hard drives in my Synology NAS! However, As I was replacing drive 1, drive 4 decided it would be a great time to go belly up! Thus, 2 drives down means the volume is crashed and inaccessible. I have various backups so I don't think the loss is catastrophic, but it will take some time to rebuild. This is my main dev machin...
2019-06-12 13:58:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I started this piece a few weeks ago and as I worked on it, it began to sound, for lack of more musicological word, magical. Probably the chimes and the bells helped, but also the choral parts and maybe even the 3/4 time signature.
Once I had it in my mind that it was a magic theme, I kept the idea of a Wizard's Tower in my mind, and eventually s...
2019-06-05 15:18:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I had a request last month for a sci-fi ambience, specifically a high tech laboratory setting. As luck would have it, I had recently completed work on an escape room project of a very similar theme. Since the escape room track had some very specific requirements I couldn't use it whole cloth, but I thought it would work as the basis for this new track. The result ...
2019-05-29 16:51:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
This new ambience, Castle Jail, is from a recent patron suggestion which I thought was a good idea, and one that's sure to get some use.
This is where you'll end up if you attack a guard, steal an apple or displease someone in power. It's a dark, dank, nasty place. The distant cries of those more unfortunate than you are a constant reminder th...
2019-05-22 14:55:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I was working with someone over on Twitter to see if I could solve their particular issues with Custom SoundPad when I realized that I had broken something in the last update.
The 'Get Link' feature, which many of you use for backups and sharing, wasn't properly including all the scene ...
2019-05-19 18:08:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Here's a musical track I've been working on for a couple of weeks. I wanted to do another epic style battle track that could work for a number of different styles of combat and action. And I think this one fits bill. I could have spent weeks tweaking the composition and mix but when I last heard it a few days ago I was pleasantly surprised and thought it was...
2019-05-15 16:54:50 +0000 UTC View Post