tabletopaudio

New Ambience: Pirates!

Greetings Patrons,

After last week's server fiasco, I needed to work on something rousing and triumphant. I know many of you have been asking for pirate themed tracks and this seemed to be the right time.  I decided that these would be fairly heroic pirates. The Hollywood variety with nice teeth. 

The music is martial, but also hopefully a bit romantic. I did depart a bit from my usual single-emotion in the track and added a bit of a doldrums section, but I think it work...

Server Update: Checking In

Greetings Patrons,

Thanks for bearing with me over the last few days. The server issues have been sorted but there still may be some residual effects. These are most likely due to my use of Cloudflare to cache as much of the site as possible. When you load the site, the majority of the content is pre-cached - a necessity for me to keep my bandwidth bills manageable. 

The issue is that in some locations, broken content from the server issue was cached. I've purged most of the ...

Server Update #3: Back?

Greetings Patrons,

After so much runaround I'm tentatively (hence the question mark) letting you know that things appear to be working again. Ironically, the one person that never saw the site return was the tech support person at the hosting company. 

Make sure you do a cache clear when you reload the site.  If you still do not see the site, let me know: 1) Where you are viewing it from and 2) Which browser you are using.

Thank you all for your p...

Server Update #2: Still down

Greetings Patrons,

After being elevated to tier 2 the server is still down as of this morning (US Eastern time). I've been on the phone again with the hosting company and they assure me that they are still working hard on the problem and that it should be fixed today. 

Again, my apologies for any inconvenience. I'll be sure to update you all as soon as it's back up and running.

Best,

Tim

Server Update: Still Down

Greetings Patrons,

As many of you have noticed tabletopaudio.com is not working. I've been in contact with the hosting provider off and on all day. Apparently they were migrating a bunch of servers to a new platform and, spoiler alert, it did not go well.

So the good news is, I haven't been hacked, nothing seems to be nefarious, but there has been a massive screw up (for once not by me!).

As of my last frantic call, I was told that they were expediting this type of problem a...

New Ambience: Throne Room

Edit2: It seems I was premature. The webhost told me that they are migrating the server as we speak and everything is going to be a bit sideways for a little while. They wouldn't put an exact time on that. My apologies everyone, hopefully this will be resolved soon. - Tim

Edit: Website should be back up and running, sorry about that. My host changed the DNS records and didn't tell me so my CDN was pointing to nowhere. Apologies! - Tim

Greetings P...

New Ambience: Nordic Noir

Greetings Patrons,

I feel like I'm late to this party. Having just finished watching  the Finnish series "Bordertown" and the Swedish/Danish series "The Bridge" I am now on the search for more of this Scandinavian goodness. (Side note - I cannot find a way to watch the Danish version of The Killing anywhere!) I thought I would try my hand at creating the signature dark, brooding and yet somehow propulsive soundtracks used by this genre.

This is a modern style underscore track...

New Ambience: Mind Flayer Chamber

Greetings Patrons,

This didn't have anything to do with Mind Flayers when it started. It began as an orchestral tension track, but the longer I worked with it, I kept seeing these floating, tentacle faced creatures in my mind. 

For the ambience portion,  one of the things I did was create a sampler patch out of all the squishy, brain-like sounds I could come up with. Then I 'played' this on the keyboard along with the music. I do this occasionally and it's a fun alternat...

New Ambience: Training Grounds

Greetings Patrons,

Here's another of those not-quite-battle tracks. It's definitely action oriented, but it's meant to be a kind of cinematic montage where we observe soldiers training before the big fight. It's the type of scene you could imagine being in the background of any establishing shot of a castle interior. I really wanted to call this 'Castle Training Grounds' but alas, the title was too long for the site!

This ambience centers around the busy...

New Ambience: Defiled Temple

Greetings Patrons,

I spent some time underground this week, metaphorically speaking. I was looking over recent tracks and thought we hadn't really seen a proper dungeon type ambience in a while. I set about to remedy that and this was the result.

So here's Defiled Temple. A dark, atmospheric ambience, brimming with horrid creatures, foul winds, guttering torches and broken idols. 

I've included ambience-only and music-only versions here for patrons. I hope this...

New Ambience: Rainy Village

Greetings Patrons,

I started this track a month ago, with no real idea other than it was going to be a kind of Howard Shore-ish type piece. Something on the lighter side, suitable for lots of different fantasy scenarios. 

As I worked on it, an image of a rainy country village kept coming to mind. But the music wouldn't let it be a dreary one, so I populated it with a few friendly townsfolk. 

I like the idea of travelling for days in terrible weather, and arriving a...

New Ambience: Lush World

Greetings Patrons,

I don't play video games much, but I managed to get some time on No Man's Sky last weekend and really enjoyed it. I especially liked the way the music added to the sense of wonder and exploration. It sounded generative/procedural to me - but in a good way. Something Eno would have been happy with. 

I started this track with the music first. Super minimalist, a single evolving and gently modulating tone to which I added other musical elements. Of co...

New Ambience: The Orrery

Greetings Patrons,

I hope this note finds you well. I took quite a long and meandering path trying to discover where this track was going. I almost scrapped it a couple of times. I eventually arrived at music that I liked, a kind of oscillating chamber music pulse, but I couldn't decide what story it was trying to tell. I originally had this set in an old manor style house with doors opening and closing, distant footsteps of staff milling about. This was ok, but I thought I'd try to con...

New Ambience: Mech War

Greetings Patrons,

This is a battle track. It's future combat. It's large, mechanized warriors trying to pulverize each other into scrap. Musically however, there's a bit of a push and pull. It starts with a slow, relentless march and ends up - well, bigger.  It was lots of fun to make.

I've included music-only and ambience-only versions of this track here for patrons. The music only track can be used for a fairly wide range of action-type sequences, from fantasy to modern to...

New Ambience: Icebound Town

Greetings Patrons,

A number of recent requests for some "cold, not particularly friendly, northern villages" got me guessing that one or two of you were planning to run some games in Icewind Dale. 

As I'm not well versed in this location I had to do some reading and youtubing. As longtime readers/listeners know, I don't usually like to do super game-specific ambiences. That is, I try to make sure that ambiences have a certain degree of utility, and can be used in a variety of...

New Ambience: All Hallows' Eve

Greetings Patrons,

This is my 6th annual Halloween ambience. I just read that again and found it slightly hard to believe.

I listened to some of the classic horror soundtracks and as always, nothing provokes that sense of beauty and dread so well as gothic horror. Looming castles, beautiful people clad in black, ghostly figures floating down stairways, elaborate empty rooms. 

All Hallow's Eve is the soundtrack to a non-existent black and white horror film. Even...

New Ambience: Interrogation Room

Greetings Patrons,

I watched a few episodes of Netflix's "Criminal: UK" this week. If you haven't seen it, it's a police procedural that takes place almost entirely in an interrogation room. Stories unfold, points get pressed, emotions boil - it's very well done. 

This ambience, Interrogation Room, is the perfect backdrop for tension filled, story telling. Environmental sounds of fans, note taking, nervous tapping and chair scrapes keep the action minimal and close. ...

New Ambience: Mushroom Forest

Greetings Patrons,

Something on the peaceful side this week. I was thinking about a kind of psychedelic, Alice in Wonderland type setting and what could be more appropriate than a forest of giant mushrooms? 

I wanted to create a setting that seemed natural, but maybe was just slightly out of the ordinary. I started designing this by creating birds and insect sounds on a synthesizer. I thought if I could get those sounding right I'd be most of the way there. Naturally that was...

New Ambience: Terror in the Woods

*EDIT*  The music-only track I originally uploaded was the same as the track on the site. I've since fixed this and the new music-only track is correct. Sorry about that. If you grabbed the file right away make sure you get the new one attached below. - Tim

Greetings Patrons,

I've really been enjoying the brilliant new HBO series "Lovecraft Country" lately. It got me thinking (again) about Lovecraft's stories and how he used fear of the unknown as a central element t...

New Ambience: 60s Computer Lab

Greetings Patrons,

I'm back from a week at the beach and excited to be in the studio again. While I was away I watched several excellent films, but the one that stayed with me was The Andromeda Strain (1971). Perhaps a bit on-the-nose in the time of Covid, it's still  an amazingly atmospheric and intense bit of hard sci-fi.

Perhaps my favorite part, however, is the score. Created by Gil Mellé and recorded entirely with synthesizers - including one called the percussotron whi...

New Ambience: New Orleans Noir

Greetings Patrons,

This ambience evolved a bit from inception to finish. I knew I wanted to do something in New Orleans, something vaguely Cthulhu-ish. I decided it should be set in the 20s, so that part was fairly straight forward. I tried to do some research of actual sounds from the era but it proved to be quite difficult. 

YouTube has some great footage, but not surprisingly, it's all silent. No problem, I figured I'd just read some descriptions and construct the...

Brief SoundPad Broadcast Update

Greetings Patrons,

I wanted to let you know that I'm in the process of making some behind-the-scenes changes to the SoundPad broadcast function. As some of you know, this is the only component of the site not written entirely by me, luckily, dear friend of the site and original broadcast coder Merten Popp has had a bit of time recently.

A number of things necessitated this change.

• Google has been taking measures against unwanted auto-playing of music so the original wa...
  2020-08-24 18:09:45 +0000 UTC View Post

New Ambience: Mansion: Night

Greetings Patrons,

I started working on this track last week after seeing a clip of an old Scooby-Doo cartoon from the 1960s. That show, as comically formulaic as it was, did a pretty great job of distilling a sense of pulp adventure into a few short minutes. And the music, if you could hear it through all the classic slide-whistle and bongos sound effects, was also quite good. 

I also really enjoyed Spielberg's uncanny-valley fest, TinTin for the same reason. Of course, that...

New Ambience: Salt Marsh

Greetings Patrons,

Frequent listeners know how I love the in-between moments  in games - travelling, waiting, camping. So many good stories comes from these times. Here's an actual in-between space. The salt marsh is that odd, natural ambiguity between ocean and grasslands. Some of each, but also neither. Water meets land in a liminal space where both ecosystems merge and exist. 

As many of you know, there's a D&D module called "Saltmarsh" but that's a town. (The tra...

Custom SoundPad Updated

Greetings Patrons,

Just a quick note to let you know that I've updated the Custom SoundPad with all 36 sounds from the recent, Wuxia SoundPad.

This brings the total number of available sounds to exactly 900. The Wuxia sounds are a natural fit with lots of other SoundPads, be sure and experiment!

Also, a bit ...

New SoundPad: Wuxia

Greetings Patrons,

While working on the last 2 wuxia-based ambiences (Wuxia Tea House and Wuxia Village), I created so many individual sounds that I thought I would try and combine them into some kind of cohesive set to be used in a SoundPad. To be honest, I wasn't entirely sure it would work. 

At first I found the fighting element a bit tricky. I eventually settled on the idea of separating the body into 3 zones. The head - for vocalizations, the middle - f...

New Ambience: Wuxia Tea House

Greetings Patrons,

Today's ambience marks my second foray into the world of Wuxia. This one is even less martial than the previous offering. As you know, I adore exploring the in-between elements of games and stories. The places our heroes go when they're not battling for glory, loot or honor. 

Wuxia often creates dualities in the behaviors of it's heroic characters. A hero might be a master of the sword, but could only achieve this mastery by focusing on something ephemeral ...

New Ambience: Sunken Treasure

Greetings Patrons,

I hope this finds you well. New York City is sweltering this time of year and I decided that this week I needed a nice swim.  Well, an auditory swim anyway. 

Lots of requests for nautical ambiences lately so I thought I'd do something below the waves. This track is called Sunken Treasure but it could really be about anything going on in the depths of the ocean. 

The musical track is ever so slightly ominous - as I think it should be...

New Ambience: Wuxia Village

Greetings Patrons,

It's interesting how often requests come in clusters. This month has seen an uptick in the number of requests for Wuxia style ambiences. As I'm not too well versed in this genre beyond the most popular films, I set out to remedy that.

I probably watch films a little differently from most people when I'm doing this type of research. I get really excited and rewind things that would probably bore you to tears. I'm always looking for a type of vocabulary that the f...

New Ambience: Tinkerer's Workshop

Greetings Patrons,

I hope this post finds you all safe and well. I needed a bit of levity in the studio this week and I thought it would be fun to do a gnomish workshop ambience complete with some lighthearted, almost comic music.

The Tinkerer's Workshop is a place full of bits and bobs, pieces of junk and machines in various states of disrepair. The be-goggled gnomes who work there know where everything is and can build, modify or adapt anything you can dream up, as long...