I don’t play video games much. What with kids, this site, other adult type duties there just isn’t the time. Which sucks. But my kids play (when I'm not making them practice their music ;p) and for some reason last month I decided to check out Portal 2. Yeah, I’m late to the party, I know!
Cut to two weeks later and I obsessively finished the entire thing. I was so inspired by the wit, the puzzles and especially the sound design that I decided to create an homage to Portal 2...
2016-11-29 22:11:27 +0000 UTC
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A small addition to the latest sort update: Now, when sort is turned on, you'll see a small red 'x' next to each sound in your SoundPad which will allow you to delete the sound without having to find it in the master sound list.
Make sure you clear your cache or refresh the page or the small red 'x' might appear too large, and/or - not red!
Thanks to the Patreon community for the suggestion!
best,
Tim
2016-11-21 14:33:04 +0000 UTC
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A few of you have been requesting the ability to rearrange the order of sounds in Custom SoundPads after they've been added. I spent the last few days working on a way that made sense and worked on mobile devices as well.
There is now a Sort button at the top of the page - sorting is off by default. Clicking the button that says "Sort Off" will toggle the button to its On state and allow sounds to be dragged and rearranged on the grid. To lock the sounds in place, preventing acc...
2016-11-15 14:38:51 +0000 UTC
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Just a quick note to let you know that I finally finished adding all the sounds from the latest SoundPad, Future City into the Custom SoundPad. tool. There are now over 300 sounds that can be mixed and matched!
Thank you as always for your support.
Tim
http://tabletopaudio.com/custom_sp.html
2016-11-11 14:48:10 +0000 UTC
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I’ve had lots of requests for a cyberpunk SoundPad so I finally started working on Future City about 3 weeks ago. As is often the case, I discovered that the visual representation of a genre comes much more easily than the audio.
To research this one I went back to the sources. I watched a bunch of films: Blade Runner, Dark City, Johnny Mnemonic, RoboCop even Metropolis, to get a sense of style, mood and setting.
I knew that the challenge of simulating an au...
2016-10-25 14:08:00 +0000 UTC
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Since this is now the 3rd annual Tabletop Audio Halloween ambience, I'm officially declaring it a tradition.
Vampire's Castle is a perfect backdrop for many horror themed RPGs and boardgames. Players of Curse of Strahd and Ravenloft will find lots to enjoy here. The master is lurking about on the periphery, occasionally playing his organ or communing with the creatures of the night
In other news, Tabletop Audio was recently featured on an AskReddit post that brought ma...
2016-10-06 14:07:05 +0000 UTC
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The truth is, I've seen this day coming for quite a while. Some of you have too. In fact, I've been getting a lot of questions on Twitter and Facebook asking me what kind of special to-do I was going to make when my 100th 10 minute ambience was released. I slowly started to dawn on my that I was a bit intimidated by the pressure!...
2016-09-23 13:13:27 +0000 UTC
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Greetings Patrons!
I have returned from family vacation and the kids are back in school! I've been itching to get back into audio-land for a couple of weeks now . I decided to go back to The List for this one and fulfill a request from a year ago (it's a long list). So here is Cavern of Lost Souls, a dark, naturally reverberant rock chamber, buried deep in the side of a mountain and filled with the voices of fallen warriors.
I got so many story and adventure ideas wor...
2016-09-09 15:48:54 +0000 UTC
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Greetings patrons! Hope your summer is finishing up nicely. Brooklyn has been beset by the muggiest weather imaginable, I hope wherever you live is cooler than here! I wanted to give you all a brief update on goings on here at Tabletop Audio HQ:
Firstly, I'm headed off to the beach in North Carolina to spend a couple of weeks with my wife's family before the kids get back into the school thing. Summer has absolutely flown by! For the past several weeks I've been living in code-world (as oppose...
2016-08-20 15:04:22 +0000 UTC
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Greetings patrons!
I've uploaded a new track called "Lost Mine" which is a musical, but contains sound design elements as well to create that 'ripped-from-a-film' style that I think works really well in many games.
I definitely had D&D on my mind as I was making it but after I finished I realized it's really quite setting neutral. Although you'll hear some rock noises and a brief running water section, so maybe no space-stations.
As always, I love to hear about which game...
2016-08-03 13:59:03 +0000 UTC
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Thank you so much for the support this month!
2016-07-31 23:59:00 +0000 UTC
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Greetings Patrons,
Just a quick update to let you know that all the sounds from last week's SoundPad, Wasteland have been added and are now available as a menu item in the Custom SoundPad. You can now mix and match almost 300 SoundPad sounds (I just counted).
Thank you for your continued support,
best,
Tim
http://tabletopaudio.com/custom_sp.html
2016-07-26 13:28:47 +0000 UTC
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Greetings Patrons,
I've been kicking around ideas for a Post Apocalyptic SoundPad since I first started making them. I even attempted one but it never really worked for me. It's funny, the whole premise of a Post Apocalyptic environment is that it's empty, void. A shadow of a civilization that was, and now isn't. Visually, this is a lot easier to imagine - nature gone to seed, buildings to rubble, man's gleaming cities reduced to twisted avant garde sculpture. But what the hell does it soun...
2016-07-20 01:07:27 +0000 UTC
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Dear Patrons,
It's that time of year again. The 2016 Gen Con EN World ENnie award nominees have been announced and I'm thrilled to have been nominated for the 3rd year in a row.
Tabletop Audio has been nominated in the 'Best Software' category, and no, I don't choose which category to be included in! To be honest, last year I was nominated for 'Best Website' and I'm not sure I'd fully support that category choice either! It's hard being a square peg!
I would love ...
2016-07-12 16:08:08 +0000 UTC
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I was going over 'The List' last week (my complete list of all requests) and found one from over a year ago, titled: City Under Siege. I think part of why I chose this was that I was excited to finally dig through dozens of NYC field recordings that I made over the last year and to coax them into a suitable urban backdrop from which the chaos could emerge.
City Under Siege is a modern ambience that should work for a pretty wide variety of urban combat games or "Escape f...
2016-07-11 13:53:08 +0000 UTC
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Thank you so much for the support this month!
2016-06-30 23:59:00 +0000 UTC
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I was a little desperate to get back into audio world after all the coding I've been doing lately, so I went back through the requests. I had a few people request a high-desert, windswept plains type backdrop for a variety of different games. So I decided to make Windswept Plains. A utility ambience that fills some gaps in the biome department. You could even possibly sell this as tundra if you don't look at the picture!
I added some subtle human and horse elements to the foreground ...
2016-06-24 13:28:20 +0000 UTC
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I'm finally putting this out there for you, my Patrons. I'd like to ask that you keep this to yourselves and your immediate group of friends and players (it's on the live site, but not linked from any of the menus yet). Which means, if at all possible, not to post this on social media until I say "release the hounds!".
If you've ever wanted your bard to ride his horse onto the deck of a starship and play his lute for a delighted crew, I think I might finally have you covered! Here's...
2016-06-19 23:20:15 +0000 UTC
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(Hopefully the attached image is animating properly)
I actually spent a whole bunch of time yammering over a video that lasted 5 minutes and realized that a 40 second gif gave a better indication of what I've been busy with.
This is very early days. Lots of stuff doesn't work right and I have a lot of things to figure out before this becomes a reality but the basics seem to be coming together.
Thanks for your support,
Tim
2016-06-04 23:24:42 +0000 UTC
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Thank you so much for the support this month!
2016-05-31 23:59:00 +0000 UTC
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Greetings patrons, I wanted to give everyone a quick update on the machinations and goings on at Tabletop Audio!
Occasionally I'll appear to have gone dark. But fear not! This darkness is but toil that has not yet born fruit! Or, in plainer English, I'm working on stuff that isn't ready yet. This week I've been hard at work tinkering with code for some new features.
As you all know, I must wear many hats in the course of operating the site. Some of these hats I don't look v...
2016-05-30 21:28:50 +0000 UTC
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In the past couple of months I've had several requests for Arabian styled musical/ambient tracks. Enough in fact that I actually googled: "new Arabian themed RPG" to see if I'd been missing something. Alas, nothing came up. But, it seemed like an interesting challenge. So, rather than studying up on maquams and microtonal scales I figured I'd just jump in and go for something that sounded like it could be used in this type of game.
I'm always hesitant to jump feet first into a...
2016-05-18 13:02:05 +0000 UTC
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A detective pulls back the sheet from a body lying in the street. A criminal rummages in a desk and pulls out an incriminating letter. A woman puts on lipstick in her rear-view mirror, glancing at the gun on the seat beside her.
We love our Television. We like our stories dark, malevolent and salacious. Noir Procedural is a TV styled soundtrack/ambience that will be at home in any modern suspense game. It wouldn't be out of place in a cyber...
2016-05-05 13:01:54 +0000 UTC
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Thank you so much for the support this month!
2016-04-30 23:59:00 +0000 UTC
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I realized last week that I was itching to do a sci-fi ambience for some reason. Then I looked over what I'd produced recently and figured out why. It's been a while! I decided to do this track, Starship Medical, because I'm always drawn to the iconic locations. We play games in space, we write stories about space and our characters sometimes get injured. They need a place to go. They need a place that's gleaming and modern and has machines that go 'ping'. Or 'bloop'. While the title refe...
2016-04-22 15:53:55 +0000 UTC
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I've always found that the scariest thing about horror movies is the horror you bring with you. This explains why twin girls in matching party dresses are more terrifying than a multi-fanged werebeast, and why a well-timed telephone ring can send shivers up your spine as easily as a blood curdling scream.
House on the Hill is a place where the horrors tend toward the creepier side of the spectrum. The old man, kept alive in an iron lung. A child's music box. The dreaded victro...
2016-04-13 00:57:18 +0000 UTC
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Everybody's got a different idea about battle music. On any given day, I have different ideas about battle music. I went in to this piece thinking less about theme and harmony and more about momentum. It had to push, then let up, and then push some more in a different way. Fight sounds were added to give it a more 'ripped from a film' type vibe. As always, spending every day for a week with something has a net-loss effect on critical perspective. And like all...
2016-04-05 01:31:26 +0000 UTC
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Thank you so much for the support this month!
2016-03-31 06:59:00 +0000 UTC
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I get lots of feature requests for Tabletop Audio. Small things, big things, even the occasional weird thing. As you probably know I add every idea I get to an ever growing list. One thing I never get, however, is a feature request followed by a fully working solution. Well, that was true until three weeks ago when I got an email from Merten Popp.
Merten's online gaming group in Germany wanted a way to use SoundPads online. He wanted to be able to...
2016-03-24 02:57:49 +0000 UTC
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After a two week plus stretch of SoundPad development I love getting back into the 10 minute designed-sound format. The serenity of this one may give you some sense of the struggle that was the Age of Sail SoundPad. Man those things are like jigsaw puzzles that are all sky pieces.
Not all fantasy locations have to be 'dark and full of terrors'. Sometimes you just want to wander deep into the forest and commune with the elves.
Elven Glade is a mostly musical ...
2016-03-15 01:03:07 +0000 UTC
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