Rezumatul episodului
Today I'm talking with Dom Smart, who makes music as Neurodriver and runs the plugin company Devious Machines. He spent about fifteen years doing sound design for games, a lot of it on the Harry Potter games at Electronic Arts, and back in the day he was half of the breaks act Far Too Loud. Then he taught himself C plus plus, teamed up with his business partner Jim Credland, and they made Texture and Infiltrator. I still use Texture all the time. He also just finished a new Neurodriver album after a long break from music, and it's on Alpaka Musik. We get into the granular car engine stuff they were doing at E A, which is kind of insane, and how Texture started as a techno trick with gated white noise under the hi hats. He also tries to explain the Fourier transform to me, which I still don't fully get. We talk about why pretty much only audio software uses knobs, saying no to power user features so a plugin stays easy to use, the sample based instrument they've been working on for ages, and how he's coding…
Today I'm talking with Dom Smart, who makes music as Neurodriver and runs the plugin company Devious Machines. He spent about fifteen years doing sound design for games, a lot of it on the Harry Potter games at Electronic Arts, and back in the day he was half of the breaks act Far Too Loud. Then he taught himself C plus plus, teamed up with his business partner Jim Credland, and they made Texture and Infiltrator. I still use Texture all the time. He also just finished a new Neurodriver album after a long break from music, and it's on Alpaka Musik. We get into the granular car engine stuff they were doing at E A, which is kind of insane, and how Texture started as a techno trick with gated white noise under the hi hats. He also tries to explain the Fourier transform to me, which I still don't fully get. We talk about why pretty much only audio software uses knobs, saying no to power user features so a plugin stays easy to use, the sample based instrument they've been working on for ages, and how he's coding…
Episoade
MBP #189 Dom Smart
AscultateToday I'm talking with Dom Smart, who makes music as Neurodriver and runs the plugin company Devious Machines. He spent about fifteen years doing sound design for games, a lot of it on the Harry Potter games at Electronic Arts, and back in the day he was half of the breaks act Far Too Loud. Then he taught himself C plus plus, teamed up with his business partner Jim Credland, and they made Texture and Infiltrator. I still use Texture all the time. He also just finished a new Neurodriver album after a long break from music, and it's on Alpaka Musik. We get into the granular car engine stuff they were doing at E A, which is kind of insane, and how Texture started as a techno trick with gated white noise under the hi hats. He also tries to explain the Fourier transform to me, which I still don't fully get. We talk about why pretty much only audio software uses knobs, saying no to power user features so a plugin stays easy to use, the sample based instrument they've been working on for ages, and how he's coding…
MBP #188 AHEE
AscultateToday I've got AHEE back on the podcast — Chris Adams. He came up through audio engineering and synthesis, and he's spent years pulling dubstep, trap and future bass into one sound, with releases on Bassrush, Subsidia, Circus Records and Wakaan, and support slots for Excision, Subtronics, Shpongle and Liquid Stranger. He also puts a lot of producer knowledge out for free on YouTube, which I respect. Last time we spoke he'd moved onto a farm outside Portland, Oregon. He's still there, still has the chickens. Most of this one is about his new DJ/VJ rig. Instead of DJing with WAVs and MP3s he's DJing with MOVs, running them through Rekordbox with the CDJs as a MIDI controller, so the audio and the visuals come off the same file and the faders crossfade both at once. He turned the camera around and walked me through the whole thing, including where the visuals come from, which is mostly CapCut and InShot on his phone, layering up gifs and old commissioned artwork into what he calls hyper collages. We also get…
MBP #187 Tom Cosm
AscultateToday we're joined by Tom Cosm, a New Zealand-born producer, technologist, coder, and educator who's been pushing the boundaries of music and sound for over two decades. He's known for pioneering YouTube tutorials that taught a generation of producers, and for building systems that turn things like tree-disease data and biometric signals into actual music. He's currently Technical Director at Telepathic Instruments, where he built the first prototype of Orchid and now oversees its development. We start out talking about travel and jet lag recovery, which sounds like small talk but turns into a pretty real conversation about what it actually feels like to be constantly in motion — the post-travel bounce, the crash that follows, and learning to slow down when you get home. Tom just got back from London, Berlin, and Spain, partly for a Telepathic team meetup and a pop-up where people could come play Orchid in person, and partly for Superbooth, which he describes as basically a Vegas casino lobby for modular…
MBP #186 David Satori
AscultateToday we're joined by David Satori — co-founder of Beats Antique alongside Zoe Jakes and Sidecar Tommy, a trio that came out of the San Francisco performance underground, Burning Man, and the West Coast Circus Bass music scene. He's also co-founder of Dirtwire with Evan Fraser and Mark Reveley, which blends experimental bass music with folk music from around the world. Between the two projects he's co-produced and recorded over 20 albums in the past 15 years. He also co-founded a nonprofit called SunRise Studios Collective, which builds micro recording and multimedia studios in under-resourced communities around the world to give youth a voice through music and production. David and I actually go back to a tour we did together in 2017, so it was good to catch up. We spend a good chunk of this one talking about life on the road — buying and converting buses, what it actually costs to tour as an independent artist, and the tradeoffs between owning your vehicle versus renting. He just got off a two month run…
MBP #185 Nicholas Yochum
AscultateToday we're joined by Nicholas Yochum, an LA based sound designer currently working at Blizzard on Overwatch, where he focuses on synthesized sounds to help create effects with a more clean, stylized aesthetic. He's on the heroes team and is currently working on new heroes for the game. Nicholas and I actually go way back to like 2012 in Boston, so it's cool to finally catch up. We get into how he got into the industry — starting out at a third party audio company called Hexany, which he describes as kind of like sound design boot camp, and eventually landing a senior sound designer role at Blizzard, which even he still seems a little surprised about. We talk about what stylized sound design actually means — why game audio has been pulling more and more from the electronic music world, and how listening to stuff like Noisia is basically research at this point. We also get into the difference between working at a third party studio versus being embedded on a game team, and why that sense of ownership and…