tabletopaudio

Copyright Issues with Cotton Club: Fixed

Greetings Patrons,

A quick note to let you know that Cotton Club, a track I made in 2018 has just recently been getting copyright violations from Twitch/Youtube. I thought this seemed strange, but after doing a bit of digging, I discovered that the archive site where I originally sourced the 1920s audio recordings, had gotten the dates wrong. 

I've removed that version...

New SoundPad: Atlantis

Greetings Patrons,

I can hardly believe it, this is the 30th installment in the SoundPad series. I still remember working on SoundPad #1, The Dungeon, like it was yesterday. I started working on Atlantis a few weeks ago. I had already done an underwater-themed SoundPad, Deep Six, but that was a more modern take on an underwater adventure. I felt that there was r...

New Ambience: Shaman's Hollow

Greetings Patrons,

I confess, I love rituals in role playing games. They're filled with so much possibility. Stories seem to flow from them. They can be the central focus, or a colorful diversion. 

Shaman's Hollow is music-forward piece that sounded magical to me, and I mean, magical in the literal sense. A small group of mystical shaman have gathered in the forest to ...

New Ambience: The Gaping Maw

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a grand scale set-piece in which the characters arrive at a massive gateway carved into the side of a mountain. I envisioned this as the scene that happens after a long and arduous journey. The party is exhausted, but now the adventure kicks into high gear. It's not action per se, but it totally could be.

Musically it's relatively large. Drums, low brass, a...

New Ambience: Robot Scrapyard

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a synth-heavy ambience that exists somewhere between sci-fi, anime, and cyberpunk. Robot Scrapyard is a factory for repairing and recycling robots. These machines are dismantled, parts are interchanged and new ones are created. It's the cycle of robot life. I hope Asimov would approve!

Musically it's fairly emotional and it felt appropriate that it...

New Ambience: Goblin Ambush

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a slightly less-than-epic battle piece that reminded me of playing the D&D 5e box-set with my kids. In it, one of the first encounters the party has to deal with is an ambush by a band of goblins. 

I do like making battle-type tracks but every time I do, I'm reminded of how many moving parts they have. Musically, they have to be driving and interes...

New Ambience: Dragon Rider

Greetings Patrons,

Here's where I talk a lot about horses in a track called Dragon Rider.

The music for this track has been kicking about my hard-drive in various forms for a couple of months. The earliest file name I saved it as was 'silvestri_thing_1' (I guess it sounded like Alan Silvestri when I started?). As I fleshed out the piece it sounded like it needed to be in a ...

New Ambience: Shuttle Crash

Edit: Additional tracks re-uploaded. I was too quick last time. -Tim

Greetings Patrons,

A terrible catastrophe on a planet far away! This track started with me playing with oven doors. I had some library sounds of creaky old oven doors and I was messing about with pitching them and eq'ing them to make them sound huge. Well, a few hours later I found myself dreaming up a sce...

New Ambience: Dusk of the Dryad

Greetings Patrons,

I had the music for this track completely finished before I knew where it would be set. I had two leading candidates: An abandoned sci-fi facility, or a spooky woodland setting.  These might seem like wildly different locations,  but I think they're strangely similar in vibe. 

I ended up choosing the woodland setting because I had just been reading ...

New Ambience: Generation Ship

Greetings Patrons,

I went back to space this week. Here's a slow, meditative underscore that I thought fit well with the idea of deep space and vast interstellar distances. The generation ship is a sci-fi trope that I've always loved: The survivors of a dying world set off on a journey to a destination so far away, that only their distant descendants will ever reach it. 

Here, ...

New Ambience: Swamp Thing

Greetings Patrons,

It's good to be back from our family trip and in the studio again. I decided to get things started with a horror-ish track based around a mysterious creature lurking in a fetid swamp. 

I say horror-ish because it's really just dark and mysterious, and not overtly scary. This would make a good addition to any campaign where you want to make a turn towards some...

Bonus: Welcome to the Jungle

Greetings Patrons,

I've just returned from a 6-day vacation in Costa Rica with my family. I would have loved to stay a bit longer but my kids are in public school here in New York City and they only get a week for spring break. We haven't gone abroad in a long (long!) time and it was wonderful to get out into nature. The birds alone are worth the trip.

The image above is the view fr...

New Ambience: Moisture Farm

Greetings Patrons,

This week's track features a desolate planet where enormous machines clunk and whir away in the distance. These huge structures use massive amounts of energy to draw scarce amounts of vapor from the atmosphere. I'd always liked the idea of water being the most valuable resource in the universe and I always thought the Star Wars version of these farms was underwhelming. ...

New Ambience: Bloodgate

Greetings Patrons,

The theme this week was definitely drums and percussion. I've been reading about Euclidean rhythms and how I could use them algorithmically to create interesting polyrhythms. That experiment lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole as I experimented with varying numbers of beats against ea...

New Ambience: Skullwharf

Greetings Patrons.

I received a very recent request at an opportune moment. I already had the bones (pun intended) of a track but it needed a bit of thematic direction. Here's a classic Forgotten Realms setting with the name changed a bit to protect the innocent (me).

Skullwharf is a subterranean port in a vast cave. It's accessible only via sea caves and various secret und...

New Ambience: Sand Raiders

Greetings Patrons,

Just to be clear, the title of this track is a portmanteau of Sand People and Tusken Raiders. And yes, it is an homage to Ludwig Göransson's work on The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. Less specifically, it's a hybrid score (combining orchestral instruments with synthesizers and various modern production techniques) that I felt evoked a kind of...

New Ambience: Aftermath

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a moody, atmospheric track that attempts to celebrate humanity in a hostile environment. I played everything in live without a click or quantization, so everything meanders and flows, both tonally as well as rhythmically. The instruments are all bit-crushed and ruined in various ways to impart a sense of woozy brokenness. I had fun with this one.

The ambien...

New Ambience: Hidden Valley

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a cinematic reveal of a beautiful, verdant valley. It's the kind of place you might come upon after a particularly difficult journey or event. Just looking at it is enough to give you and your traveling companions hope. 

Musically, it's quite lyrical. Flautando strings, airy woodwinds, some light vocal textures, and just the slightest bit of a pulse. I...

New Ambience: Fog of War

Greetings Patrons,

The ambience portion of this track is relatively abstract as it's essentially all done on a synthesizer. I was creating a patch out of noises and I liked how various filter settings, when combined with effects created something that sounded like an other-worldly storm. To that, I added some barely audible human whispers, some of which are reversed. I thought it gave it ...

New Ambience: Summoning

Greetings Patrons,

I was noodling around with some ideas this week and I realized I had very nearly created a Dead Can Dance track from the 80s. It wasn't spot on, but it was pretty close. Naturally, I continued working on it until it sounded less like an homage, but I liked that the DNA of the idea was s...

New Ambience: Floating Market

Greetings Patrons,

Many years ago, I was on a tour of South East Asia with a youth orchestra where we visited one of the floating markets in Thailand. It's probably one of the most touristy things you can do there, but there's a good reason for it. It remains one of my most vivid memories of the tour.

I was thinking about this trip recently and thought that it would make a wonderful...

New Ambience: Pool of Radiance

Greetings Patrons,

While I never played the original Pool of Radiance video game, I knew lots of people who did and loved it. What struck me about it was simply the title. I liked the idea of a body of ethereal liquid (was it blood?) that emanated magic and made everything around it shimmer and bend. 

This is a peaceful track, so the pool could be a meditative shrine or a place...

New Ambience: Burn Maneuver

Greeting Patrons,

This week I thought a journey to space would be just the ticket. This may have something to do with the fact that I've finally caught up with the latest episodes of The Expanse.  One of my favorite aspects of the show are the hard-SciFi bits. Don't get me wrong, x-wings and tie-fighters that bank and swerve like WWII fighter jets are super cool. I'm a big fan of not...

Crossing the Styx Alternate Tracks (oops!)

Greetings Patrons,

I was having a conversation yesterday with a Patron where they asked for a recommendation for a rowboat ambience for a 'crossing the river Styx' scenario. Well, I thought, I have just the thing! I pointed them toward the ambience-only version of the 2020 track, "Crossing the Styx". Done and dusted, as they say.

Except - there was no such ambience-only track. I che...

New Ambience: Necropolis

Greetings Patrons,

I must admit that the term Necropolis always seemed misused to me, but I think I was the one misusing it. It means literally, city of the dead in Greek. But it's often simply a large graveyard or complex of tombs.  I much prefer to think of it as an actual city, teeming with spirits. It's more dramatic, more 'fun', and is what I kept envisioning as I worke...

New Ambience: Gateway to Hell

Greetings Patrons,

How is it possible that I didn't hear about a fiery crater in Turkmenistan that's been burning for 50 years, until a few weeks ago? Well, the important thing is that now I have, and I've made an ambience about it.

Smoldering, windy, and probably reeking of brimstone, this gateway is a fictional version and has nothing whatsoever to do with Soviet geologists. ...

New Ambience: Survivors' Bivouac

Greetings Patrons,

The working title for this was 'frontier bivouac'. The idea was to create a temporary camping site where soldiers, explorers, adventurers could rest for a day or two. But, that was before I got my viola out. There's just something about that instrument, and the way it's voiced, that calls out for sad melodies. 

Not quite realizing where I was going with it, I...

New Ambience: The Frozen Trail

Greetings Patrons,

Happy New Year to you all! The first ambience of 2022 features some wishful thinking on my part. As in, wishing for snow. Living in New York City, it used to be fairly common to have snow on the ground in November, but aside from a few flurries, we have been snowless this season. Mind you, when it does actually snow, I'll probably join the rest of the city in complainin...

New Ambience: Closing Time

Greetings Patrons,

I thought this was a fitting title for the final ambience of 2021. I wasn't sure I was going to get to one this week, but I managed to sneak off for a couple of hours each day while family was otherwise occupied.

Here's a late-night, urban scene. Traffic and street noises float in through the open door of an out-of-the-way watering hole. There's a sense of comfort...

New Ambience: Cutpurse Pursuit

Greetings Patrons,

I had the hardest time coming up with a title for this track. I knew it was going to be set in a medium-sized medieval city, and I knew that the instrumentation was going to be a mix of hurdy-gurdy, viola da gamba, guitar, and modern orchestral instruments. But that was about it. 

As the piece began to take shape I started thinking that it was about a charact...