Greetings Patrons,
Following up on the last ambience The Feywild, I got quite a few requests for The Underdark. I was already planning on doing it at some point (honest!), but the more I thought about it, they do make great companion pieces. And so here is my take on what Gary Gygax originally referred to as a planet spanning dungeon.
If you're no...
2019-05-08 15:07:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
My family and I have returned from our week in Montreal where we had a wonderful time, ate lots of delicious food and made a heroic attempt to speak as much French as possible. When the locals immediately answer you in English that means your French is amazing, right?
I had done most of the work on this new track before I left and my intention was to do a quick on...
2019-05-01 15:22:37 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings Patrons,
Just a brief note to let you know that I'll be taking the kids to Montreal this week for their Spring Break.
I'll have a field recorder with me of course, so who knows what I'll find. I have a few tracks in the works that I'll be finishing up on my return.
Thanks, as always, for your continuing support.
Best,
Tim
Greetings Patrons,
This is something that I've been working on, scrapping, coming back to..rinse and repeat.
I wanted to do a dark cyberpunk action track - something both driving and slightly unsettling at the same time. I finally wrangled this 10 minute behemoth which I called Neon Drive, into something that I felt I could release.
The above photo, kindly donat...
2019-04-17 14:59:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Just a quick note to let you know that all the sounds from the latest SoundPad, Alien Starship, have been added to the Custom SoundPad tool and are ready for mixing and matching. There are now over 650 sounds to choose from.
Thank you all for your continuing support.
best,
Tim
2019-04-10 15:59:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
This is a sneak peak of the new SoundPad - it is unlinked from the main menus for now. The direct link is below. Please don't share with the Internet at large until it's live :)
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I've been wanting to do another pure sci-fi SoundPad and I got the idea for this one while I was working on the Nostromo ambience. This is a 36 sound, classi...
2019-04-04 16:30:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I've been in a nautical frame of mind lately. I can't say for sure whether it's in anticipation of the new D&D Saltmarsh module coming out but.. actually, yes I can say for sure. It's totally that.
To be clear, I have not seen an advance copy of the book. I just can't imagine that there wouldn't be locations that could benefit from sounds like l...
2019-03-27 15:13:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I've been on a bit of a nautical kick lately and with the upcoming D&D book being all about the Ocean, I decided to create some possible locations.
Longtime listeners will know that I love to go on about 'in-between' places, and how often these overlooked spots can have just as many stories as a frenzied battle. For Quiet Cove, I can imagine man...
2019-03-20 15:24:13 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings Patrons,
I'm trying to get the Tabletop Audio Alexa skill published in non-English markets and Amazon is very particular about making sure that every utterance and invocation is properly translated. I'm going to attempt to keep the titles and flavor text in English if they'll let me, otherwise that's a much bigger job and a bit more work each time a new track is uploaded.
...
2019-03-19 15:09:44 +0000 UTC View Post
I got a request for an elegant steamship ambience recently and it got me thinking about what a great setting that could be. I decided that any old steamship wasn't going to cut it however, so I went with the steamship. The RMS Titanic. (Pre-iceberg!)
What's so great about this location is that you could really do an entire series of sounds based on the class divisions within the ...
2019-03-13 15:05:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
A couple of you expressed interest in just the music portion of yesterday's Cistern track. I initially thought it might be too sparse, but I did a bit of editing (of course) and it actually stands up pretty well on its own so I'm making it available here.
Thanks as always,
Tim
2019-03-07 14:05:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
This is one of those ambiences that was born of a single photograph. Pictured above is the El Jadida cistern, built in the 16th century by the Portuguese in Morocco. It was so gorgeous that I thought I would explore what it might sound like.
Cisterns were used in medieval castles to store and filter water and were a crucial element for withstanding long sieges. Of...
2019-03-06 15:41:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I've spent the last week in code world, working on some new features for Custom SoundPad. This is a preview page which will disappear when it goes live.
NOTE: This page shares all your saved SoundPads and scenes with the live site, so any edits you make here will affect the current live Custom SoundPad. To be safe, you can make a few throwaway SoundPads ...
2019-02-27 16:18:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Greeting Patrons,
Many of you know by now that I'm intrigued by sonic environments that hold many stories. These aren't always iconic locations or epic encounters. A background sound should inspire ideas, bring up images, hint at action but not fully describe it.
I had a request a few weeks ago from a DM who was planning on creating a scenario in which a child goes missing in a busy...
2019-02-20 17:12:44 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings patrons,
I started tinkering around with some musical ideas this week and realized I was basically making a version of the classic Massive Attack tune Angel. Once I realized where this was going I decided that instead of scrapping it, i'd continue along that vein and make it into an homage to 90s trip hop.
One of the things I loved about the original song is that it lent s...
2019-02-14 15:35:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
This new ambience, Forest: Day, is from a recent request for more nature ambiences, specifically daytime ones. I went back over the some of the other nature tracks I've done and thought I could find a spot for a sound that was useful for a wide range of stories.
There are many ways to approach tracks like this. Forests can be peaceful and safe, or...
2019-02-06 15:01:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I was looking for interesting locations for Cthulhu stories when I stumbled upon a few articles about the magnificence that was Shanghai in the 1930s, a multicultural crossroads of style, music, theater, crime and nightlife. I spent a few days down the rabbit hole on this one.
Shanghai's international areas (concessions) were a haven for the disenfranchised p...
2019-01-30 16:44:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I'm always looking for ambience ideas that have a wide range of appeal and utility. I think of them as sounds that have a lot of stories in them.
Sometimes the sound is the story, and sometimes it's just the backdrop. An ambience can be as plain or exciting as what's going on in the foreground. This might be a story you're writing, a scene you're pl...
2019-01-24 15:01:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings patrons,
Just a quick note to let you know that all the sounds from the latest SoundPad, Combat:Siege have now been added to the Custom SoundPad tool for mixing and matching with other sounds.
These will be especially useful when combined with the original Combat sounds and there are some good universal utility sounds that can be used with a wide variety of genres...
2019-01-22 15:41:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Happy New Year! I got back from my holiday travels with a new SoundPad in mind and I couldn't wait to get started on it. This is the 3rd in the combat series and is a more macro, zoomed-out look at medieval warfare. Specifically, the siege.
I spent a week or so fast forwarding through various films that depicted city/castle sieges and rewinding many, many di...
2019-01-10 15:46:17 +0000 UTC View Post
A very Happy New Year to you all!
As 2018 comes to a close I thought I'd take a few minutes to look back and take stock of what has been happening in Tabletop Audio land. This is something of a tradition now as this is my 5th installment in this series. (And, as I typed that, I really can't believe it's been 5 years since I started this little experiment.)
Before I start, I'd like t...
2018-12-31 21:47:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I'm off for the holidays tomorrow but I wanted to leave you all something before I left. (I'll be back in the studio January 2nd).
This is the gleaming city of Waterkeep, the jewel of the north. Yes, I changed the name slightly as I didn't want to poke the hornet's nest - although, honestly I can't imagine anyone having any issues with it. Anyway, I wanted to do s...
2018-12-20 15:48:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I decided I was in the mood for a big, propulsive, Hollywood style action score this week. These usually end up taking quite a bit more time but I managed to get the rough outline done in a couple of days and finished the week with endless tweaks. I finally got it to the point where things weren't leaping out at me so I called it finished.
There are definitely some...
2018-12-14 14:16:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I was chatting with a few people on Twitter recently who were asking for a a sci-fi ambience that was a little lower tech than the traditional gleaming and beeping starship bridge. This new ambience, Star Freighter, is the interior of a massive, utilitarian, deep-space cargo ship. I imagined it bei...
2018-12-05 17:08:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Here's one of those tracks that has been kicking around on my hard drive for quite some time. As many of you know, I'm a big fan of John Carpenter, both as a composer and a director, and I wanted to do a musical nod to the score of The Thing - which was actually composed mostly by Ennio Morricone. My track is called Outpost 31, which is of course the name of ...
2018-11-28 16:18:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Just a quick note to let you know that the frequency timer update has gone live for all the SoundPads and Custom SoundPad. Thank you so much for your support while I climbed code-mountain to get this done. I'm going to leave the two test pages online for the time being but I plan on taking them down in the next week.
Have a great weekend and a happy Thanksgiving to...
2018-11-21 17:42:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I wanted to share with you the latest version of Custom SoundPad that I've been working on for several weeks. I was hoping to be able to get this off to you in time for the weekend. This is a preview for patrons only and has it's own temporary URL (link below), so if you don't mind, please share with friends family and small gaming groups, but not with the Internet at large. 2018-11-16 19:50:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I just wanted to let you know that I'm hard at work on the new SoundPad frequency features. One of the problems with diving into code world is that I tend to block out everything around me and get lost for hours, only to emerge blinking into the daylight, hungry, and with a stiff neck. I wish I were better/faster at this!
However, after a truly frustrating week of inexpl...
2018-11-14 17:22:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
As many of you know, I've been working on the code for the new frequency / interval timers on the SoundPads but I needed a break. Climbing code mountain makes my brain hurt sometimes and I needed to shift gears and make a quiet space to think and relax. As it's #NaNoWriMo (That's National Novel Writing Month for us non-writers) I decided to create a place where you migh...
2018-11-06 18:17:23 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings Patrons,
A quick update to the new frequency/interval timer feature test page.
I've gone through the sounds and made frequency available on all the ones that I thought wouldn't sound bad as one shots. This includes the tones on this page as they fade fairly nicely, but may not include tones in other SoundPads. In fact, I'm starting to think that I'll need to hand pick which of th...
2018-11-02 20:24:46 +0000 UTC View Post