tabletopaudio

New Ambience: 1940s Boardwalk

Greetings Patrons,

This is an item that's been on my list for a few months and I finally got around to working on it. I get lots of requests for 'old timey' style ambiences as they seem to go well with Cthulhu type games especially. This would also work well for any kind of pulp style story as well. 

While I mentioned that it's set in the 1940s, you won't hear much in hear that would be out of place as early as the 20s or possibly before. And, you could probably bring it into...

New Ambience: Yuletide

Greetings Patrons,

I know I'm in jeopardy of annoying the "too soon!" crowd, but I started working on this ambience, Yuletide,  in preparation for the season and it just so happened that I finished it. So...Here's a winter holiday themed ambience that I hope evokes a kind of yesteryear, Norman Rockwell vibe. I know This time of year is stressful for a lot of people (me included) so I tried to make a very welcoming, warm gathering that was inclusive to any and all who wante...

Custom SoundPad Updated

Greetins Patrons,

Just a quick note to let you know that all 36 sounds from the latest SoundPad "Ice Planet" have now been added to the Custom SoundPad tool and are ready for mixing and matching.

There are now almost 800 sounds available.

Thanks, as always, for your continuing support.

Best,

Tim

Custom SoundPad 

New Ambience: Barovian Village

Greetings Patrons,

There's a scene in Young Frankenstein  (stay with me here) in which Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman are walking alongside  a carriage containing the coffin of the monster. It's of course played for laughs and there's a great bit when they're stopped by a policeman, but I loved the vibe of the town center at night. Cobblestone streets filmed in black and white, the eerie desolation of an unnamed, presumably Eastern European city in the mountains. 

Th...

New SoundPad Preview: Ice Planet

Greetings Patrons,

I'm releasing the 23rd SoundPad Ice Planet today in sneak peak mode. This means it's available only via the direct URL listed below. Please share with gaming friends and family but not the internet at large yet as I'm still making some tweaks. I'll let you know when it's live for everyone.

When I first got the idea for this, I created a series of wind sounds, the low constant drone wind, the fearsome blizzard wind, then the interior cave wind and then -  I ...

New Ambience: Endgame

Greetings Patrons,

I started working on this track with the idea that it would be a slow, drum heavy atmospheric piece but, as often happens, it didn't end up that way at all. Each time I revisited it I felt it was dragging, so I kept upping the tempo. Then, in light of the new tempo, I found the parts too dull. Rinse, repeat. I felt it needed to be bigger, meaner, more... The pounding acoustic drums needed something more aggressive than orchestral instrumentation. But I added that too....

New Ambience: Haunted

Greetings Patrons,

I got into the spirit as soon as October started so I'm releasing my annual Halloween track a bit early this year. Hopefully that will give you time to work it into all your spooky stories!

This is a kind of throwback Hollywood style soundtrack that's full of orchestral dissonance and bowed cymbals and weird string risers. It's extremely atonal and would probably work well layered with lots of other kinds of sounds for an instant old scary movie vibe. 

New Ambience: Gravity

Greetings Patrons,

I was re-watching the movie Gravity this week. Can you tell? I must say, I didn't love it the first time and my opinion wasn't really changed much this time either, although I will say that the first 40 minutes or so are really very good. And then, there's the music by Stephen Price, which I thought perfectly accentuated the images and the mood in that long opening sequence.

I decided to try my hand at a similar style of musical track, something ominous with slo...

New Ambience: Underground Lake

Greetings Patrons,

I wanted to do something cinematic, like when characters on a screen come upon a scenic vista. In this case, the view is of a vast underground lake. There's a bit of magic here, in that the soft winds seem to whisper (spoiler alert: there are actually processed whisper recordings in this) and there is a little tension in the music, but not too much.

Also, the location is not perfectly serene, it contains a hint of mystery. Perhaps you can't see all the way acros...

New Ambience: Sea of Moving Ice

Greetings Patrons,

I'll admit that I'm not very well versed on a lot of D&D lore, so I'll occasionally flip through online wiki sites to see if anything piques my interest. I was looking at some of the maps of Faerûn when I spotted The Sea of Moving Ice. Hellooo... 

To be honest, I stopped reading almost immediately after the title. I skimmed some bits about white dragons and frost giants but I already knew that this was going to be a harsh, desolate environment...

New Ambience: Country Village

Greetings Patrons,

Back into fantasy and music world this week. I wanted to do a music forward take on a country village. I imagined it as being a kind of homecoming ambience. Adventurers returning from afield into the familiar embrace of home. A quiet, charming little community that would hug them despite the bloodstains on their armor. 

Or it could be something you might play as an introduction to a game - a 'before it all goes pear-shaped' type thing. This is the charming ...

New Ambience: Cyberpunk Bar

Greetings Patrons,

I returned a few days ago from a much needed week away at the beach with my family. I am recharged! I even managed to go on some field recording excursions. 

I've had this track, Cyberpunk Bar, in mind for a while.  After all, you needed somewhere to go while wandering around Cyberpunk City. Some of the inspiration came from the admittedly awful movie, Johnny Mnemonic as they did manage to get a couple of things close to right. The re...

New Ambience: Abandoned Windmill

Greetings Patrons,

This new ambience is from a recent patron request for an 'abandoned but still operating windmill' that I kept thinking about. I love the idea of locations that hint at stories. Where is this windmill? Why was it abandoned? I created the overhead sail pass-by on a synth and then blended natural mechanical wood sounds until I felt I had the basics of the sound. The stone grinding sounds of the millstones helped sell the scene. I put the whole structure on subtle volume ...

New Ambience: Cyberpunk City

Greetings Patrons,

I know many of you are looking forward to the new editions of Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2077 which is probably why I've been getting so many requests for cyberpunk themed ambiences. I've done a few of these, including some purely musical tracks but I thought I'd do a big picture style city theme.

I tried to imagine a busy urban center, maybe some kind of market, where technology and language and culture doesn't so much co-exist as coalesce.  The simple descri...

New Ambience: Ice Throne and New Google Action

Greetings Patrons,

It seems as if this time each year I work on a 'cold' sounding track, as if that is enough to pull me out of the sauna that is New York City in August. I know my European friends are having it even worse this year so perhaps this will be some small comfort. This track is set in a throne room made of ice. I envisioned it as a kind Lich King version of the recent 'Royal Court' ambience. It's ominous and heavy and cold and could actually be just an ice cavern if you want...

Bonus Track: Brooklyn Rainstorm (Raw)

Greetings patrons,

I was transferring sounds from my field recorder to my archives recently and I came across this longish recording I did outside my bedroom window in Brooklyn using a Sony PCM-m10 recorder with EM-172 mics. Just as an FYI, towards the end (around the 10:30 mark) it's got some traffic and fire engine noises. Other than that it's got some close splats (from the ivy around the window) and distant city hum, but also some nice rain and thunder.

The recording is 12:49 ...

New SoundPad Preview: Weirder Things

Greetings Patrons,

Many of you are already familiar with my love of the TV show Stranger Things, and especially the music. Any excuse to do a synth only, knob tweaking analog music track I will take it.  I've done 2 10 minute tracks on the front page of the site, each one coinciding with a season of the show. For season 3 I assumed I was going to repeat the process and then I thought...wait a minute! There's a SoundPad in here!

As a child of the 80s there's so much nostalgia ...

New Ambience: Tavern Music

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a piece I've been working on in the evenings after music camp for the past week. As camp just ended yesterday, I spent the morning making some final tweaks and I think it's ready for release. 

I've done a few taverns before, and even a whole tavern SoundPad but I haven't done a full 10 minute ambience of just tavern music. So here it is. It's probably a bigger "band" than would actually be in a tavern, I mean, I did add a whole string section! But th...

New Ambience: Barren Wastes

Greetings Patrons,

As many of you know, I'm in the middle of my 2 week stint as a strings coach at chamber music camp. It's the time of year where I get to 'play teacher', and every year when camp is over, I renew my appreciation of those of you who do this full time!

I've been working on Tabletop Audio in the evenings and yesterday I got to spend some real time putting the final touches on this new track, Barren Wastes.  My hope is that this track will work well acr...

Quick Update

Greetings Patrons,

Just a quick update to let you know this is the time of year that I spend 2 weeks teaching chamber music to kids (ages 8-16) at a summer camp here in Brooklyn. We spend 6 hours a day learning orchestra parts and chamber music and then (hopefully) they go home and practice some more! The upshot of this is that I only have evenings to work on Tabletop Audio. But rest assured, I have things!

I'll be releasing something this weekend and probably the following weeken...

Custom SoundPad Updated

Greetings Patrons,

I was hoping to get this out yesterday but the recent Cloudflare issues made that impossible. All the sounds from the 21st SoundPad, Hell Planet are now available for mixing and matching in the Custom SoundPad tool. With the inclusion of these 40 sounds, the total number of sounds is now over 700.

In addition to adding the new content, I managed to fix a few bugs in the code along the way. 

I've also attached the Drama and Action cues from the SoundPa...

New Ambience: Royal Court

Greetings Patrons,

After spending a 2 weeks in hell, by which I mean the latest SoundPad!, I needed to dial the evil back a bit, so I found a request from earlier this spring and decided that a courtly ambience might be just the ticket. Hushed tones and whispers, occasional footsteps as someone approaches the throne - or crosses behind you, and occasional bits of sound that could be notes passing or jus...

New SoundPad: Hell Planet

Greetings Patrons,

Let me first say thank you all for bearing with me through my NAS hard drive failure. At this time, the new drives have all been installed and parity checked (87 hours!). All my data was backed up on various USB drives so I didn't lose anything. During that time I could still create sounds, just not work on the web code. I managed to finish off the sounds for this new SoundPad during the upgrade and then finished the web portion. Now that this is finished I can start ...

NAS hard drive update: (good news)

Greetings Patrons,

The good news is that through some very patient tech support at Synology (shout out to Carl!), they were able to walk me through getting the system back, albeit in a degraded state. This meant that I had access to all the content so I could do one last massive backup before putting in the new drives. The downside is that I would need to re-install everything. I'll take that trade-off any day. So, no data loss!

As you can see from the above image each drive under...

Hard drive crash

Greetings Patrons,

I thought i was being so clever by replacing the hard drives in my Synology NAS! However, As I was replacing drive 1, drive 4 decided it would be a great time to go belly up! Thus, 2 drives down means the volume is crashed and inaccessible. I have various backups so I don't think the loss is catastrophic, but it will take some time to rebuild. This is my main dev machine/server so while I wait with crossed fingers for Synology to walk me through this (or give me the b...

New Ambience: Wizard's Tower

Greetings Patrons,

I started this piece a few weeks ago and as I worked on it, it began to sound, for lack of more musicological word, magical. Probably the chimes and the bells helped, but also the choral parts and maybe even the 3/4 time signature.

Once I had it in my mind that it was a magic theme, I kept the idea of a Wizard's Tower in my mind, and eventually settled on that as the name. There would be walls of books, tables covered with scrolls, potion bottl...

New Ambience: Robotics Lab

Greetings Patrons,

I had a request last month for a sci-fi ambience, specifically a high tech laboratory setting. As luck would have it, I had recently completed work on an escape room project of a very similar theme.  Since the escape room track had some very specific requirements I couldn't use it whole cloth, but I thought it would work as the basis for this new track. The result is Robotics Lab.

It's definitely a sci-fi feeling track but I think it will also work...

New Ambience: Castle Jail

Greetings Patrons,

This new ambience, Castle Jail, is from a recent patron suggestion which I thought was a good idea, and one that's sure to get some use. 

This is where you'll end up if you attack a guard, steal an apple or displease someone in power. It's a dark, dank, nasty place.  The distant cries of those more unfortunate than you are a constant reminder that you need to get the keys from the jailer's belt, or die trying.

Naturally, this will also m...

Bug Fixes / Tweaks: Custom SoundPad

Greetings Patrons,

I was working with someone over on Twitter to see if I could solve their particular issues with Custom SoundPad when I realized that I had broken something in the last update. 

The 'Get Link' feature, which many of you use for backups and sharing, wasn't properly including all the scene information. I managed to track down how I had botched this and fixed it.

Also, as I was pokin...

New Ambience: Cry Havoc

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a musical track I've been working on for a couple of weeks. I wanted to do  another epic style battle track that could work for a number of different styles of combat and action.  And I think this one fits bill. I could have spent weeks tweaking the composition and mix but when I last heard it a few days ago I was pleasantly surprised and thought it was time to put it to bed, so to speak.

I hope you enjoy this one and it finds its way into your ...