Holding On (to the Mic) For Dear Life

Don’t worry, this COVID-19 lockdown will just be a few difficult weeks, maybe a month or two at most, and then things will get back to normal…

…That’s what I had told myself back at the start of March before anyone really knew just how dramatically this virus was going to alter our lives. If life was a movie, it basically went from a feel-good rom-com like You’ve Got Mail that smashed cut to the Lynchian-hellscape of Eraserhead.

As a sound designer working mostly in live-action film and television, my work essentially froze to a standstill as productions across the globe shut down, halting the pipeline of new projects coming in. To put things in perspective, I was working full time prior to the lockdown, averaging five days a week on union and non-union projects. Now, five months later, I am lucky to get three, maybe five days of work per month. And I won’t even go into how, let’s use the word “difficult,” some of these projects have been in terms of schedules, rates, etc.

Before I go on, let’s get one important thought out of the way here… I am extremely grateful that being a sound designer allows me to work safely from home or my private studio space with nearly zero human contact. My heart goes out to everyone working in healthcare, the service industry, film production, etc. which requires face-to-face interactions, or those who simply lost their jobs entirely because they were unsustainable with the pandemic. So, I realize that I am very lucky to be where I am, even if work is hard to come by. Okay, moving on…

Where was I? Oh, right… As an artist that primarily works with the medium of sound, I have had the fortune of receiving steady work over the years as an outlet for my creativity. Some projects would lend themselves to design-heavy sequences where you really get to push yourself and flex your creative abilities. But I’d argue that even dialogue-driven projects require a great deal of creativity; deciding what sort of ambiences you want to include (or exclude), how to mix the music, sweeten the dialogue, etc… The point is, we artists love to create, and this pandemic took away the projects that gave us a major outlet for our creativity.

The point is, we artists love to create, and this pandemic took away the projects that gave us an outlet for our creativity.

Sure, I had a couple freebie passion projects that had been in my lap for awhile, so I finished those, which was fulfilling, but then there was nothing.

So I waited patiently for more work to come in…

And I waited…

Aaaand waited.

“Yikes. This isn’t changing anytime soon,” I thought to myself. That’s when I realized it was solely up to me to stay motivated and keep working with sound before my sonic muscles atrophied any further.

I grabbed the nearest microphone I saw, which was a LOM Priezor, a microphone that picks up electromagnetic frequencies, and just started free-form recording, something I hadn’t done in awhile. For kicks, I had my fiancé shoot a video of me while I danced around the house waving this wand-like mic around like a madman. Here’s the end result:

Wow, what a blast. Also, not that hard to do at all. However, it took me several days to muster the mental energy to say ‘JUST CREATE!’ and not care about the end result. Just focus on the act of creating.

Anyways, I sliced up the recordings, added some metadata, and WABAM; instant sci-fi sound design source material for future projects.

On a technical note, I recorded at 192khz because there’s a ton of ultra high frequency content captured by this EMF mic, so later I can slow it way down and get some really juicy sounding results. Here’s a few of the sounds you can listen to and download for use in your own projects:

[These sounds may take awhile to load due to the high sample rate]

After that little sonic adventure, I realized I had to make more time to just play with sound and create more, even if I didn’t have a story to tell with those sounds just yet. I had been so accustomed to sticking to the order of:
1) Receive Project
2.) Plan the Tone/Character of the Story’s Soundscape
3.) Record and Design Sounds Accordingly
4.) Profit
5.) Live a Happy Life With No COVID-19

So, I kept at it…
I introduced myself to video game audio via online tutorials.
I finished mastering a crowds FX library after many years in the making.
I dove deeper into the amazing wavetable synthesizer called Serum.
I even started spinning records on Twitch every week, because why not?

I had to push myself despite the daily barrage of bad news, absence of work; you know, that wonderfully cruel pandemic malaise.
Hey, I almost forgot to mention; I even got back into stop motion animation, something I hadn’t done in over 15 years. Of course, I had to do the sound design on the film as well. Check it out!

Now, of course, I have had my grand share of lazy days where I just sit on the couch playing video games, eating tons of junk food, ignoring my microphones and creative possibilities… I don’t want to paint a perfect portrait of some mega productive sound designer in lockdown. I’d say there’s still tons of room for improvement in my daily life as an artist.

I will say, when I do take the energy to create something, anything, whether it’s the sound of a lazer zap, a mustachioed outlaw made of clay, or even writing this blog, I feel a sense of fulfillment that no amount of coffee flavored ice cream or first-person-shooters could ever provide.

So go grab that microphone, or that paintbrush, or whatever you can get your hands on, and create something, anything, because this world needs artists now more than ever to help pull us through this experience we call life.