Megan Frazier

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,”.

there are two bags packed for a trip, one has a microphone

Always* Be Listening - a thread.

#gamedev #sounddesign #recording #gameaudio

In Swedish there is a phrase "Det finns inget dåligt väder, bara dåliga kläder" or, there is no bad weather only bad clothing. Once I get better sea legs with the language I'm going to figure out a better retort that is "well, there is terrible weather, but there is trying again".

For recording, that is, grabbing the nearest prop I can record and hitting the go button in REAPER (everything has been way set up in advance, so recording is a 1–2 process. Three is too many.) This time the prop was a Konjac Jelly Peach pouch from H mart (so glad they came to Ballard!)

Doing the absolute lowest minimum thing to ensure you are back in the game.

For MURDER STUFFIE GORE, I’m going to come out and say it. I’m in the slump. Getting major surgery really just stuck a wrench in my normal patterns of just everything. But coming around the bend of it two weeks out, I’m ready to start recording again. And what is the best way out of a slump?

But a couple years ago, I actually was ready for November. Not with “a can-do attitude that THIS TIME I WOULD DO IT” or like $1000 in REI running wear. Nope.

I got the cheapest gym membership I could find and started an entirely different fitness art: weightlifting.

Slumps are weeks to months, even years in length. Personally, there is a TON of GUILT and SHAME all knotted up in being in a slump, until I started to realize that every year without fail, November would come when it got cold and wet and I’d kinda just stop.

The dip isn’t actually threatening to the habit. Illness or your body communicating it needs rest, it is ACTUALLY temporary. I’ve found that as long as the dips are irregular in pattern, they don’t amount to anything meaningful. Where it becomes a problem is when a dip becomes what I call a slump.