Sound Designer 2nd entry: Mick Gordon's career

Continuation of Case Study : Mick Gordon's Sound Design Career. 

Mick Gordon is well known mostly for his success with the Need for Speed franchise in which he has earned himself international acclaim.


















 The games he was involved in were: Need for Speed: Shift, Need for Speed: World, Need for Speed : The Run and Need for Speed: Shift 2. 

Mick also started writing scores for games for Nickelodeon, Marvel and THQ. Various projects included: Attack of the Toybots, El Tigre and the Marvel Super Hero Squad series.

                                

Mick also scored the video game adaptation of M Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender and the accompanying score, released for free, has been downloaded over 140,000 times to date.

Mick has also given talks twice at GDC, once at the World Computer Congress and several times at 
various Universities and Colleges.


Mick is obviously a very creative guy, he often experiments with new techniques and ideas. He will regularly partakes in various mental and physical challenges and experiments.


Below is a video of one of those experiments.


" I wandered around with a little microphone at GDC San Francisco 2011 to record vocal sounds from anyone who was willing to make them. I wanted to make a song out of these noises. In fact, I wanted to make a complete song, using nothing but these vocal recordings." - Mick Gordon

This is a really interesting use of sound. It shows how you can manipulate sound in a variety of methods. The creativity and technicality in this is amazing, Mick gordon has really got me enthusiastic about sound design and got me considering it as a career option. I am even more enthusiastic about games lately which i usually don't look twice at. 


 The link below has a page that goes into detail on how Mick went about making a song like this, describing the process's and techniques that he used.  
http://mick-gordon.com/funstuff/voices-of-devs/

Here is a brief explanation of his processes


1. Matching waveform visuals:
The idea is that you visually inspect the waveform of a sound that you’re trying to replicate, and then attempt to match it using whatever source material you have.







This techniques was use to re-create the snare, kick drum and all cymbals used in this song.


2. Looping waveforms for “synths”:
 Based on Wavetable Synthesis, where a segment of digital audio is looped to create a constant tone that can then be manipulated via a sequencer. This technique is extremely simple and allows for a lot of freedom and experimentation with virtually endless possibilities.




Below is a nice cinematic piece of music by Mick Gordon called " Someone special". 

This is a good example of something that i would like to make as an in-between song on an album.