Sound Design

Understanding the Universal Category System (UCS)

Understanding the Universal Category System (UCS)

For those of us who are sound designers or field recordists, we all have tons of recordings which may or may not be well labelled or traceable once they get copied on to a hard drive. Being able to search, find and understand what a recording contains is a major requirement when working professionally, as a badly organised or unlabelled library becomes a veritable haystack from which you are trying to extract a needle! UCS offers a method which means you can easily work through your own and other professional sound libaries. Here is a practical introduction and how-to guide on what it is and how you can use it.

What sample rate and bit depth should I use?

What sample rate and bit depth should I use?

This is probably one of the questions I get asked more than any other and it (thanks to the extremism of the internet) can provoke all manner of responses. As such I have put together the following set of guidelines which I use, and through explanation with my students suggest that they use. I hope that you find these guidelines useful when you are struggling with what sample rate and bit depth to use for your project.

SOMA Ether V2 1st Test - Walking down the Middlewich canal

SOMA Ether V2 1st Test - Walking down the Middlewich canal

Out and about with my new SOMA Ether v2 electro-magnetic field microphone for it's first test, listening to and uncovering hidden sounds along the Middlewich canal, from trees, signs, factories and gates. Still getting used to it, and excited to start using it indoors with random electrical items!

Using the surround panner matrix FX in Reaper to build Space Worlds with Fundamental & Reaktor

Using the surround panner matrix FX in Reaper to build Space Worlds with Fundamental & Reaktor

In this video I look at how you can use the surround panner plugin matrix in Reaper to blend between different effects on different channels. This is a really useful sound design technique and also can be used compositionally to create ever evolving soundscapes.