Megan Frazier

Up Skilling and De Skilling: Generative AI and the Art Generative AI is a pretty potent topic, and this short blurb of an article doesn’t even to begin to cover a small facet of the effects it’s…

This article was prompted by a thread in the Field Recording Slack. Thank you Matt Miller, and I hope it's interesting to y'all. medium.com/@megan_75518...

So this isn't what you asked for, but check out Little Bitz. It's a fantastic introduction to synthesizers. I can be plugged into something like audacity which is free, and one of the simpler daws out there.

Money and the Art: When the Muse is Absent One of the things I’m embarrassed about is, very occasionally, I just don’t wanna do the stuff I am so lucky to do, professionally for…

Short. Sweet. Musings about Money, Art, and the Muse.

Enjoy y'all. #gameaudio

medium.com/art-journey/...

Why We Rest as Artists I’ve been running a fair bit recently, and finally managed to clear Week 7, Day 1. The last two weeks of Couch to 5K are kinda interesting…

Hiya folks. This weeks noodle is about why we rest as artists. Bit wiggy, hope you dig it.

medium.com/@megan_75518...

Chooo chooo! All aboard! Next stop sustainable living!

Wait can I join the Megan game audio train?

Hey folks! This week's noodle thought is about one's relationship with money and one's relationship with the Art and how those two relationships can be inversely related.

medium.com/@megan_75518...

When life sends you airplanes, point the mic at them. The latest idea for MURDER STUFFIE GORE my inner child wanted to record was the sound of children chewing on entrails.

Hey folks!

This week, I wrote about the relationship with mental flexibility and mastery of the art.

medium.com/@megan_75518...

picture of meal prep ingredients for an autumn theme advanced salad, chicken sausage, arugala, butternut squash, fresh mozzerella, and pepitos

To all y'all ready for the insanity, this salad is the next one!

Or honestly, that workflow you've been scared to try because you hate that derping novice feeling of scrabbling about with your pants on your head. But then - CLICK adding roasted potatoes to your salad is ok, and the salad police isn't coming for you and all of a sudden you LIKE SALAD AND WTAF.

It's about finally realizing a missing bit of your workflow to allow you to SCALE. Its realizing that your library NEEDS to be in Sound Miner, or that you have wasted TOO MANY OPPORTUNITIES not to master that plugin (gawddamnit Envy why aren't you a VST yet).

What does advanced salads have to do with being an intermediate sound designer?

5 components generally is all I need to make a fantastically complex interesting salad I can eat all week. Meal prep is then: One weeks batch of protein for the week. Make a batch of "grain" for the week. Check cold components stores are sufficient for week - and assemble each night via microwave.

Cold components are cruciferous vegetables (spinach, arugala, etc) or "actual vegetables" (cucumber, carrots, etc) or fruits (apples, oranges, etc) or dairy (cow or goat). Warm components are protein (chicken, beef, beans etc) and "grains" (barley, couscous, potatoes).

This allows salads as a valid thing to eat to persist in most seasons (autumn, winter and spring) since the last thing I want to do is eat something cold when it's cold out. Even in summer unless it is CRAZY hot out, I usually want a warm meal for dinner.

But we've gotten away from Advanced Salads, which is my latest of the healthy sustainable endeavors I've been noodling on, and the unifying principle here. Advanced Salad is the frame work of an idea that salad comes in two components - a cold component and a warm component.

how ready your systems are when dev says it's greenlit to go, if you jam it in there for the first time, that is the first day you got to REALLY design. When rubber has actually hit the road and you are trying to break the sound barrier before the deadline to a build being cut is up.

If you only get one iteration cycle at the very end in the last hours of the milestone, every sound designer knows you aren't going to be at your best work, because no matter how many videos you watch to add your stuff to sync, how much source is ready when animators have finally stopped fiddling-

Intermediate to advanced game devs know: the game of production is often about scale and speed of which a contributer can complete an interation cycle. So for sound design, how fast can you get a "first pass" in.

That was until I moved to China for a year and discovered the secret to making vegetables taste great: drenching them in oil and spices. Unfortunately, my precious regional Chinese cuisine cooked veggie recipes are usually best only for a day as leftovers. They don't "scale" into a weekly mealprep.

When I grew up, salad was lettuce, tomato and ranch dressing.

I have heard worse stories from other people, but I still attribute this stringent lack of creativity to one of the key reasons why I have a mixed love-disgust relationship with vegetables.

salad from pagliacci in a pizza box

Advanced Salads - A Metaphor for Tackling Intermediate Level Professional Problems; a thread
#sounddesign #gamedev

So, how do you A*BL?

I stopped feeling guilty that sometimes I just didn’t want to record or wasn’t feeling like it. I also stopped feeling guilty for not wearing headphones when I record during studio sessions because I just wanted to listen to what I was hearing first and see what the mic could hear.

What I took from ABL was not feeling bad about all the times I couldn’t sort through my stuff and execute recordings.

Of all the wonderful pieces of knowledge and wisdom I received from various mentors over the years, one of the best of them was definitely from Andy Martin, one of the greatest nature recordists I know. He said (paraphrased) that instead we, as an artistic discipline, should always be listening.

And yet, now, I’d say ABR also caused me a pernicious disbelief in myself as an artist.

The impossible standards of ABR made recording too high-pressure rather than just focusing on the enjoyment of listening and fostering my own curiosity.

There is absolutely a mystique about all the fancy gear we get to play with to make the incredible sounds that we do. The limitless potential of the world around us, the pristine rolloff of a shotgun mic side rejection. It’s dreamy.

But what is interesting is that ABC as a concept followed me to game audio, dragging it’s unwashed, greasy ass and bellowing after me as I go on my latest recording trip.

In game audio, ABC is “Always Be Recording”.

I used to be in sales and there was a saying that only slightly revolted me called “always be closing”, or ABC. I can finally really articulate what about Always Be Closing really rubbed me the wrong way — humans as a species aren’t “always”. We kinda suck at “always,”.