Greatings Patrons,
A couple of months ago I mentioned that I had been asked to contribute ambient audio tracks for Grant Howitt's (Goblin Quest, Unbound, One Last Job) new RPG, The Spire.
I asked Grant and company if they would allow me to share the work I did on the site and - lovely people that that they are, they agreed!
Here then is the first of seven trac...
2017-09-12 15:45:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I'm getting packed up to leave tomorrow morning to pick the kids up at camp and then drive down south for a week with my wife's family. I guess the South was on my mind because I started laying down the broad strokes for this several days ago. The end result is Crossroads.
It may appear to be a sleepy intersection on a rural road, but if you’ve ever read any o...
2017-08-25 23:23:12 +0000 UTC View PostApologies for the interruption this morning. The issues with the site content not loading have been fixed (user error, totally my fault!), although a page refresh may be in order.
Now back to regularly scheduled programming!
-Tim
2017-08-25 15:29:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I was out on the town last night and not checking my phone, but, I discovered in the cab ride on the way home that Tabletop Audio had won a gold medal for 'Best Website' at the 2017 ENnie awards at GenCon. Since the only way for this to happen was for lots of you to take time out of your day and vote for me, I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart. No, there's no...
2017-08-19 21:11:21 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings Patrons,
Kids have been dropped off at music camp for 2 weeks so I'm finally going to do all those things that I've been putting off, like...cleaning my studio.
Honestly, it's a disaster. This wasn't helped by the fact that I've been doing Foley for a new project and it's littered with bricks (and brick dust), scrap wood, hair brushes, combs, mic cables (everywhere), plasti...
2017-08-14 20:05:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I hope your summer has been going well. NYC seems to have been spared the brutal heat for a couple of weeks. Good news for those of us who work in studios where the A/C is constantly being turned off for microphone recording!
I've uploaded a new track, called RavenPuff Common.
I've had lots of requests for an HP themed ambience over the years but I f...
2017-08-02 16:08:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
It's great to be back at home in Brooklyn after a wonderful 10 days in the UK. As a half-Brit (my mum is British) I have lots of family there and catching up with everyone face to face was fantastic. Plus it turns out my kids travel well, so bonus!
Upon return I embarked immediately on a 2 week stint at a chamber music camp here in Brooklyn where I coached a string quart...
2017-07-24 15:23:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
2 Quick Things -:
2017 ENnie Awards:
Tabletop Audio has been nominated for a Best Website ENnie Award. For those who don't know what this is it is an RPG industry award that's presented every year at GenCon. I'm thrilled to have been nominated for the 3rd year in a row. In 2015 I got the Silver Medal but I'm hoping that if the troops rally I can wa...
2017-07-17 21:40:00 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a sneak peak for patrons, the official announcement will go out tomorrow sometime.
I needed to get back down to earth after the last two abstract 'planes' ambiences, so I decided to go all middle-earthy and see what I could do with a massive dwarf city.
My list of notes contained the following: "fire, bubbling pools of molten metal, dripping metal, machiner...
2017-06-22 23:48:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I'm giving you all a sneak peak at a sound I'll be announcing publicly tomorrow.
I wasn't really meaning to do another abstract 'plane' ambience so soon after Ethereal Plane but that's exactly what happened.
One of the nice things about abstract sounds, as you all keep reminding me, is that they can really be used for anything. Since they're...
2017-06-16 00:16:54 +0000 UTC View PostTwitch streamer and DM extraordinaire Neal "Koibu" Erickson , (link to his Patreon) has categorized all current 112 Tabletop Audio ambiences according to sound type and usage case in a google spreadsheet that he's sharing with us all. A wonderful resource for planning your adventures with sound!
Thank you Neal! 2017-06-08 20:51:03 +0000 UTC View Post
I have to be honest, none of my D&D games ever really ventured to the various planes. We were always pretty terrestrially bound. Taverns, dungeons, towns, forests. These were our stomping grounds and stomp we did! But there was always those few pages in the Dungeon Master's guide that I skipped over and that nagged me. What were these planes things and what did one do there?
And what did the...
2017-06-04 22:35:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Just a quick note to let you know that I've finally finished adding the sounds from last week's True West SoundPad to the Custom SoundPad tool.
You can now mix these western sounds with all the others to create some pretty unique settings!
If they don't show up on first load try refreshing the page or possibly clearing your browser cache. 2017-05-30 18:38:21 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm releasing this early for patrons only (link at the bottom) so it's not linked from any of the other pages yet - Tim
---
As a species, we have always loved tales of adventure. Brave heroes venturing into uncharted and dangerous lands is a cornerstone of our collected stories. The Greeks brought us to the gates of the Underworld and to the rarefied air atop Mount Olympus. Hom...
2017-05-20 14:59:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
I've implemented a new feature on the Custom SoundPad that I hope you'll find useful. It's similar to the text filtering on the home page, but instead of a living keyword dictionary for each sound, it just filters by title.
For instance, if you type in 'rain', like the screenshot above, it shows you all the sounds, across all the SoundPads, that cont...
2017-05-10 00:26:55 +0000 UTC View Post
This one started out from a field recording I did at Grand Central Terminal in NYC while waiting for a train. As I was standing in the main hallway (I was the tall guy with headphones, holding a field recorder and trying not to look suspicious to all the armed soldiers) I kept thinking about how I would use the sound of this huge, bustling reverberant space on Tabletop Audio. <...
2017-05-02 13:32:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Frequent visitors to the site may notice that I’ve done a bit of a spruce-up with the graphics. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for the longest time but as there’s an endless list of things to be done, graphics and tedious CSS tweaking always seem to take a back seat. The new updates are nothing fancy, I just think the new logo and dragon image look a little bit cleaner. ...
2017-04-27 16:47:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Edit Sept 2025:
Ok, here's a mystery. I was recently alerted that this attachment had disappeared. No problem, I think - I'll just re-upload it. But...I can't find it on my hard drive, or backups either? Like Han Solo said: "That's what I'm trying to tell you kid - it's been totally blown away".
Anyway, I had to go back to the original project file but I manag...
2017-04-17 14:43:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
For those of you who have told me I can never make enough taverns - here's a somewhat different take. Much like the venerable fantasy tavern, the western saloon was the social and business hub of any frontier town. It was always the first place you stopped to see what was what.
Whiskey, women, work, word from back east - the saloon had it all. It even had tha...
2017-04-13 12:57:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings patrons,
This would definitely classify as a utility ambience in that it doesn't evoke the same movie for the mind quality that some sounds do. However, it is still quite useful, especially if your story unfolds at 30,000 feet.
With these types of sounds I tend to fight against myself a lot. I always start off adding way too much, and then gradually pair...
2017-03-24 13:45:52 +0000 UTC View Post
We just got hammered with a nasty March blizzard here in NYC and this time of year that always stings. So, to fight the protracted winter blues I decided to work on something that evoked warm weather.
The travelling Carnival is a classic theme. Some call it a fair, or an amusement park, but I always thought that the term carnival implied transience - here today, gone to...
2017-03-15 14:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
The Western, as a genre is an integral part of America's cultural DNA. Images of wide open spaces, endless skies, lawless towns and frontier justice invoke the same sense of mystery and adventure that sailing adventures did a century before. We're so enamored with these themes that we've combined them with every other genre and created an endless number of...
2017-03-06 16:32:56 +0000 UTC View Post
I finally read Joe Haldeman's excellent Forever War last week. Plus, I've been watching the new season of The Expanse, so naturally it was time for a sci-fi ambience.
I took my cue from the classic - "we've lost contact with the outpost! " trope and went from there. Lunar Outpost is a suspenseful , damaged wreck of an installation. Wires hanging from the ceiling,...
2017-02-22 14:12:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
The new musical track Weirder Things is either a shameless rip-off, or a sincere homage, you'll have to decide for yourselves. But know this! I grew up in the 80s. I went to middle school and high school in the 80s and I played D&D in the 80s, so I'm voting for homage!
Like many of you, the brilliant Netflix show, Stranger Things capti...
2017-02-08 15:37:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons,
Just a quick note to let you know that all the sounds from the lastest SoundPad, Combat:Future, have been added to the Custom SoundPad tool. You can finally use your blaster weapons in the Dark Forest!
Additionally I've made a few tweaks to the Custom SoundPad code:
- The global fade-in parameter for the sounds has bee...
2017-01-27 15:06:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons!
I rarely do this but I'm releasing this today as a Patrons-Only sneak peak, so it's not linked from any of the main menus yet. I'll get to that over the weekend hopefully. Feel free to share it with your gaming groups of course! (link is at the bottom)
I've finally finished (literally, seconds ago) what I've been working on for the past 3 weeks. I always underes...
2017-01-20 17:15:28 +0000 UTC View Post
I almost forgot!
I wrote this post on my blog after getting a request about using SoundPads in less than optimal or zero internet situations.
As I mention in the post, I have tested this, but only to the point where I found it worked. So, not in any real world gaming situation.
If you have a chance to try this out, please report back your findings (email would be best) and I'll...
2016-12-31 20:31:31 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings Patrons!
As 2016 wraps up and I look back on my 3rd year of the adventure that is Tabletop Audio I thought I’d look back on some of the things we did together. As a creative type I’m constantly battling the notion that you will only be appreciated for the last good thing you produced. I’m sure many of you can relate to that. I’m old enough now to realize that it’s this ...
2016-12-31 18:16:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Patrons!
I hope your holiday season is going smoothly and you have had some peace and tranquility along the way. To aid in this quest I've created a musical ambience called "River Town". River Town is a lovely place. The inhabitants are kind, the beds are warm, and there are bountiful fish in the river.
Truth be told, I started working on this as a kind of therapeutic escap...
2016-12-19 00:15:45 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings all! Hope your various holiday seasons are going well so far and will continue to remain happy and stress free!
As many of you know I've been making some changes to the server in order to offload some of the heavy lifting and generally try to speed things up. For the most part I think it went quite well - except for those cases in which it failed miserably!
A few of you have repo...
2016-12-10 21:23:18 +0000 UTC View Post