tabletopaudio

New Ambience: Manor Dark

A rare reception takes place at the curious house on the corner. (Patreon patrons receive 6 additional versions of this track)

Greetings Patrons,

A moody, semi-dramatic musical piece this week, set against the backdrop of an old Victorian manor house where a rare gathering is happening.

I often get asked if I come up with ambient sound effects first , or the music. My stock answer is always, "yes". This was a case of music coming first and letting the ambient so...

New Ambience: High Alert

A military base readies for action. (4 additional tracks available for patrons)

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a modern style set-piece that exists somewhere between calm, and action. A military base has just received word that things are kicking off somewhere, and it's go-time o'clock.

The ambience is scurrying soldiers, jeeps, helicopters and radio chatter that connects everything to everything. It's one of those situations that runs like clockwork for those on the te...

New Ambience: War Wagon

Rumbling across the plains, leaving destruction in its wake. (Patreon patrons receive 6 additional versions of this track)

Greetings Patrons,

Whew. This one took many twists and turns. I had originally sketched this out to be a Halloween track, but last week's Lady of the Wood was a better fit. War Wagon ended up being more bombastic, more chaotic, and even sweeter in parts.

The sound of the war wagon is layers of wood scrapes, rattles, multiple t...

New Ambience: Lady of the Wood

A mysterious presence inhabits these woods. Halloween 2025. (Patreon patrons receive 4 additional versions of this track)

Greetings Patrons,

Happy almost Halloween 2025!

I wanted to do a classic spirit-in-a-barren-wood that was kind of 'beyond good and evil'. You're not being hunted (per se), but you're also not sticking around to see if this slow-moving, luminescent being is going to hand out elven gifts to your fellowship.

One of the key sound design elements here i...

New Ambience: Ready the Castle

Preparations for celebration, or war? (Patreon patrons receive 6 additional versions of this track)

Greetings Patrons,

I have a notebook on my desk that I scrawl all types of things in. Often they're notes on mixing (too much cowbell on measure 18), sometimes it's a musical idea, and often it's ideas for future ambiences. Whenever I get ready to start a new track, I flip back through the pages and see if anything jumps out. This week's track is courtesy of the barely legi...

New Ambience: Ice Harvester Station

Water is scarce in the universe. (Patreon patrons receive 6 additional versions of this track)

Greetings Patrons,

I was thinking about how if we ever start traveling the stars, water might be the most valuable resource in the universe. I know that guy in The Martian made it out of hydrogen and oxygen but I prefer getting water the old fashioned way: Using heavy machinery and ice axes to to chip it out of mountains.

This is what I would call sci-fi adjacent. The the...

New Ambience: Upriver Recon

A journey to the source, perhaps? (Patreon Patrons receive 8 additional versions of this track)

Greetings Patrons,

I've always loved stories about journeys. - point a, to point b. It sounds so linear, and that's the point. It opens things up for adventure, for surprises along the way. Is the destination that is reachable, or not?

In Upriver Recon, you're traveling on a longtail style motorboat, up a winding jungle river. The banks of the river are dense with banyan...

New Ambience: Witches' Dance

"Fire burn and cauldron bubble" - W. Shakespeare (Patreon patrons receive 6 additional versions of this track)

Greetings Patrons,

I've been working on this piece on and off for a month or so. I kept coming back to it and re-orchestrating, re-working, removing sections, etc. The final result is pretty far from where I started, but it's also much better.

Witches' Dance is about wild magic, chaos, and sinister plotting. But it's all done with a gleam in in the eye and...

New Ambience: Pharaoh's Chamber

"Snakes, why did it have to be snakes?" - Indiana Jones (Patreon patrons receive 8 additional versions of this track)

Edit: Sept 23, 2025 - It seems a musical gremlin in the form a glitch sneaked into the music-only version of this track. It's been replaced. If you've already downloaded it, replace with this one (the date on the mp3 file should read Sept 23, 2025 and not Sept 17.)

Greetings Patrons,

There's this thing that John Williams does so wel...

New Ambience: Boiler Room

Are you the hunter, or the hunted? (Patreon patrons receive 4 additional versions of this track)

Greetings Patrons,

Noir, horror, mystery, suspense. - at some point you know you're going to end up in one of these. What is it about boiler rooms?

I mean, we all know the answer - which is why they're so popular across a large range of stories. For the ambience I hewed pretty closely to the tropes: wet floors, grinding machinery, reverberant metallic hits and scrapes. A centr...

Elgato Stream Deck Control of Custom SoundPads: Super Early Test

Edit: Added a Linux Appimage of the companion app.

Greetings Patrons,

I'm not sure how many of you are interested in this, but I like tinkering with things and I must admit I went down a bit of a rabbit hole.

A couple of you have asked for Stream Deck integration with Custom SoundPads. I've done some really preliminary testing and, if you're game, I've got something for you to play around with. I really have no idea how useful this might be, but it was fun ...

New Ambience: Gravedigger

"It's an honest living, mostly." (Patreon patrons receive 8 additional versions of this track)

Greetings Patrons,

As a kid, I have a very vivid memory of listening to David Bowie sing "Please Mr. Gravedigger" from his 1967 debut record. It was the first time I'd ever heard sound effects (rain, church bells etc) on a musical recording. The song itself is a capella, which makes the lyrical content even more creepy. Here's 2025-09-03 17:02:19 +0000 UTC View Post

New Ambience: Lifeboat

Congratulations on surviving disaster #1...(Patrons receive 8 additional versions of this track)

Greetings Patrons,

This week's track takes us to sea. You, or you and your small band, are the only survivors of an ill-fated ship. You managed to escape just in time, as the main mast of doomed vessel sank beneath the surface. But your problems aren't over. In fact, you're all slightly screwed. The boat has scant rations, there's no land in sight, and what is that strange singing comi...

New Ambience: Barghest Fell

Greetings Patrons,

I'm back. I had a lovely family trip to the beach. On the way home I dropped both my kids off at college, or uni as some may call it.

Before I left I had started this track and gotten fairly far into it. While doing my morning walks on the beach, I kept thinking about what the setting might be. I listen to a lot of film and TV scores while I walk. One of these was the score to the Omen by the late, great Jerry Goldsmith. It's a funny thing - walking on a beach ...

New Ambience: Lost Contact

Greetings Patrons,

Before I tell you about this new track, I wanted to let everyone know that I'm off for the next 10 days for the annual family beach trip (actually leaving this Friday). So, no release next week.

For this track, 'Lost Contact', I wanted to do a suspense/mystery thing, without venturing into horror. I realized that it's so easy for me to slip down the horror path! This is what I would call a sci-fi adjacent track. Meaning, the original idea was a kind of space sta...

Tech Update: Playlist Sorting, Resizing

Edit: 5 Aug 3pm EST - pushed another fix and crossfades and playlist loops should respect volume set by slider more consistently now. - Tim

Greetings Everyone,

This update is going out to everybody, as all my posts do when they affect the free live site. As many of you know, I've been adding features to the ambience player recently. The latest has been the ability to select smooth fades when pressing stop, as well as the often-requested ability to crossfade smoothly betwe...

New Ambience: Kingdom of Mist

Greetings Patrons,

I hope those of you in the northern hemisphere are surviving the heat. New York City has been absolutely sweltering, hopefully we'll get a reprieve soon. To that point, this ambience may have been a bit of wishful thinking on my part. Although my studio is air conditioned, I still wanted relief from the heat, at least in a sonic way.

The ambience here is a distant city that exists within a natural forest/jungle type biome. I would imagine that it's morning a...

New Ambience: Prison Block

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a cinematic underscore track that has a moderate amount of pace/momentum. I wanted the energy level to be elevated, but not full-on action. Musically it's fairly typical hybrid orchestration. Synths, and electronic percussion are mixed with ostinato strings, solo cello and some traditional orchestral percussion. There's an ebb and flow to the intensity so it stays out of 'relentless' territory.

The music definitely leans modern, and I'd say it could absol...

New Ambience: Ice Mephit Cavern

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a fun action track for low-key battles and skirmishes. As much as I like big epic battles, not all of them are. In this one you and your party are wandering through a frozen cavern when you're beset by a group of unruly mephits. Obviously, these are of the ice variety.

Musically, I'd say this could be used for almost anything upbeat. It pushes the pace and keeps things going, but as I mentioned, it's not epic. Pizzicato strings, lots of percussion, choir,...

Tech Update: Crossfades

Greetings Patrons,

I'm making this a public post as it pertains to all users who access the site.

*May require a hard refresh of the main page to become visible.*

This all began with an email from a patron (hey, Eric!) who wanted a more graceful fade-out when stop was pressed on the player. I managed to get that done a few months back, but I knew that the real prize would be to figure out how to do crossfading between tracks.

I'll spare you the nuts and bolt...

New Ambience: Prisoner Transport

Greetings Patrons,

This is essentially a sci-fi action sequence. What action that is, is up to you. The plan was to create a moving, enclosed space where you're shackled to a bench. And now that I think about it, I'd say it was sci-fi adjacent. It could absolutely be used in a modern story. I took inspiration from the scene in Rogue One where Jyn is in the back of one of these (the 10 wheeled Star Wars version) and the vehicle is ambushed and she gets rescued. It's a fairly short scen...

Sanctum Content Added to Custom SoundPad

Greetings Patrons,

Just a brief message to let you know that all 36 sounds from the latest "Sanctum" SoundPad have now been added to the Custom SoundPad tool (you may need to refresh the page to get it to show up in the left-hand column). This brings the number of sounds available in Custom SoundPad to 1200.

Also, the Sanctum SoundPad is officially out of Patreon sneak-peek so it's live and linked on the site. Share away!

Thank you all, as always, for your continuing suppor...

SoundPad: Wuxia (Remastered)

Greetings Patrons,

I have now finished remastering these early edition SoundPads. This is the last one I needed to complete to make the whole set available!

Please don't share these files. They are for you, dear patrons, and you alone!

The website versions will most likely stay as they are for the time being, but these re-mastered audio files are of higher quality than what appears online (bandwidth/cost issues) and have been ...

New Ambience: The Threshing Hour

Edit: 7/2/25 - Apparently the mixed version got corrupted during the upload so it was giving errors. This track has been replaced and all the downloads are working again. - Tim

Greetings Patrons,

Cornfields, rusted windmills, distant trains. That's what I wrote in my notebook. I wanted it to feel a bit like an 80s movie, or a retro modern film set back then. So, synths. And then, more synths.

At some point I thought of a mech. My original concept was a rusting hulk,...

Tech Update: SoundPads / Custom SoundPads

Edit 7/2/25 - Oops, messed up multi-part sounds on the Custom SoundPad (x4, x2 etc). This is now fixed. - Tim

Greetings Patrons,

This post is set to public as it's for all users of the site:

I've spent a lot of time recently working on the underlying code for the Individual, as well as Custom SoundPads. As I was working on Sanctum (the most recent), I ran into a few maddening bugs, and a few small quality of life issues that I finally decided to address. He...

New SoundPad: Sanctum

Greetings Patrons,

Note: This SoundPad is live on the site (link below), but unlinked in menus. Please share with your friends and family but kindly refrain from posting the link on the internet until after it goes public in a week. Thanks! - Tim

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I've had this idea rattling around for almost a year. I've started it at least twice, but each time I couldn't seem to get it right. The goal was an all-in-one religious simulator. It needed the flexibility to do sacred ...

New Ambience: Monsoon Temple

A remote shrine, nestled in a dense forest. (8 additional versions available for patrons)

Edit Sept. 27, 2025: The Ambience Only - No Chants track had music in it. The correct version has been uploaded. - Tim

Greetings Patrons,

My goal for this piece was to hint (ok, more than hint - let's say obvious nod!) at Asian religious musical themes without making it an overwrought trope. And believe me, it was harder than I thought. I'd come back to it and roll my eyes at s...

New Ambience: Steampunk Telescope

Greetings Patrons,

Sorry about the totally on-the-nose title, I began this track as something like 'mystical observatory' but by the time I added in all the telescope sounds and large servos I had a hard time buying the word mystical anymore. But, as you know, I always encourage everyone to ignore my titles and use it how you like.

My creative brief to myself actually started like this: "A new star appeared in the sky one evening. Things have been strange ever since." I still lik...

Tech Update: SoundPad Accessibility

Greetings Patrons,

I got an email last week from a blind user who said he used to be able to access SoundPads using screen reader software, but was now unable to. I didn't think I had changed anything, but then realized that when I removed the way-too-long drop down menu (34 items) of SoundPad links in favor of a single menu page, I had accidentally killed that feature.

With his help I made some adjustments to the code of the SoundPad launch page and got it working again with scr...

New Ambience: Battle Stations

Greetings Patrons,

Phew. This one seemed to take forever. I tinkered with it so much that I was going back and forth between mixing and writing for days. I'd get it to a spot where I liked it, then something would bug me and and I'd come at it from another angle. But! I finished it and I like how it ended up, so here it is.

Battle Stations was an idea I had about a pre-battle montage sequence in a film. This was a scifi/modern style setting so I set it on the hangar deck ...