Hey guys, please introduce the team and company:
The SkewSound team met years while working together at a game developer in Cambridge, MA.
Dan Crislip was audio project lead and lead technical sound designer, handling the project’s audio direction. Nicholas Kallman was sound designer and mixing engineer, working on dialogue assets and real-time mixing systems. Christopher Wilson and Steve Pardo were tasked with creating a fresh, original, and interactive soundtrack while also creating sound assets as needed.
We took these roles to heart and continue to operate as a coherent and highly efficient team as we continue to create, design, and compose for our own products as well as the products of others.
What made you get involved in SFX library creation?
While working together over many project cycles, we became very comfortable with field and Foley recording. We decided to use this talent to start capturing unique and useful sounds for sound designers working on all types of projects. We still love the nitty-gritty of audio production, but library creation is a great way to keep busy between projects.
Can you give a brief overview of your three new libraries?
Frostbite contains some great ice and snow sounds – 99 files and 843 sounds total. Living in the Northeastern and Northwestern parts of the U.S. the temperatures get pretty low in the winter, allowing us to freeze large blocks of ice outside and destroy them!
QWERTY (220 files and 1328 sounds) and reel2reel (138 files and 689 sounds) are multi-mic’d sessions of some vintage electro-mechanical equipment; a typewriter and a tape machine, respectively. In these you’ll find some great interface and impact sounds. Check out some of the contact mic impacts in reel2reel – some of those sound exactly like a bullet impacting metal, but they were simply a finger tap on the enclosure.
Recording frostbite was, perhaps unexpectedly, an extremely cold experience
What was making frostbite like?
Frostbite was a particularly technically difficult sound library to create. As snow and ice are not readily available, we challenged ourselves and our gear to record in inclement conditions.
We learned quite a bit about keeping equipment from freezing, recording in the middle of the night to avoid city ambience, and matching and mastering audio from dozens of sessions in both the Northwest and the Northeast during the polar vortex of 2014. Our biggest takeaway: pack hand-warmers…not only for yourself but for your equipment.
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from a myriad of independent sound creators, all covered by one license agreement: