Creating the Sound of Formula One Games
Interview with Video Game Sound Designer Mark Knight
Recently, I had the pleasure of “sitting” down with sound designer Mark Knight. Mark is a veteran video game sound designer with 25+ years of experience. He has worked on Formula 1 games for 15+ years and has worked with such clients as Electronic Arts, Crytek, Bullfrog Productions, Audi Motorsport, and Dovetail Games. In our interview together, we dove deep into the topic of designing cars for games.
For this post, I picked out some of the questions and topics which I thought were most interesting and probably most useful to people reading about this topic. If you want to see the full interview, be sure to check out the video. I hope you enjoy this interview!
David:
When you’re working on a game, are you leaning more towards realism and keeping the fidelity of the sound of whatever car you’re recording? Or is there also a cinematic aspect to it where you might want to rev it up?
Mark Knight:
It just depends on the game, pretty much whether you’re going down the route of a simulator or whether you’re going down the route of an arcade game. So you’ll find like the need for speed games, which are kind of a bit more arcade-y than simulation. That’s kind of like turning the sound up to eleven. So everything sounds correct. A Subaru will sound like a Subaru and a Skyliners sound like a Skyliner. However, they will have worked on the processing to beef up the harmonics, and often you might find that they’re mixing other engine sounds into things to kind of improve the overall sound of the car for simulation.
Then I’m much more for the sort, like the “au natural” approach, especially for a title I’m working on at the moment which is an Indy called BeamNG. And that’s very much kind of placing the driver, as it were, in showroom type cars, which are unmodified – therefore actually a lot of them sound quite boring. But the point is that we’re trying to simulate what things sound like in real life. So, yeah, very much, whether it’s a SIM or whether it’s an arcade game and you do have different approaches to do to doing either of those.
David:
Once you have a meeting set up and your car picked out and you’re going to go, how do you actually go about recording cars?
Mark Knight:
Sure. There are two main approaches and it very much depends on how you intend to play the sounds back in-game. So the two main ways of playing back car sound in-game are, either using a loop model where you have static loops at different RPM’s or you use a granular system where you would record a sweep. So the car accelerating and decelerating. If you’re going to go for a loop system, you’re more likely to be doing that using a rolling road. So the car won’t be moving, but the wheels will be and the wheels are on rollers.
So you can drive it for 50, 60, 70 miles an hour, but the car actually isn’t moving. And that gives you the ability then to obviously multi-mic around the car using mic stands and using distance to help the sound grow. But you do have to combat the sound of the rollers, which tend to be quite noisy. And also, if you are using turbocharged vehicles, especially, then they tend to heat up quite quickly.
So there’s an element of fan noise involved as well. So if you’re going for a granular approach and you’re recording what we call a sweep, which would be starting the car off in idle, so it’s basically just moving at maybe eight hundred rpm and then pretty much throttling it all the way up to the red line, which depending on the vehicle could be 6000 rpm, it could be 9000 rpm. If you’re doing that, obviously you can’t use mic stands, you can’t have microphones that are a couple of meters away, so then you’re close to micing.
So that tends to be a lot of suction mounts and lots of gaffer tape used micing around the exhaust pipe. And as you kind of said, you know, inside the engine bay as well. And again, the sort of equipment that you might use depends on the vehicle. So the instruments of choice tend to be a lot of the Sound Devices machines. But also if you’ve got a lack of space, then you might need something smaller.
So when I’ve been recording Formula One cars up until most recently, I’ve been using a little Zoom machine. An H6 actually, because it’s pretty damn compact, but you also have to think when you’re recording those sorts of vehicles, sound quality is probably the least important aspect of the recording. The most important things are that you get a recording in the first place. So you need to get a recorder that is going to be able to shrug off vibration. Obviously, there’s a lot of vibration in things like Formula One cars.
There’s also a heck of a lot of heat, a lot of heat! So vibration and heat are very, very important to sort out. And then also the sheer volume of these machines, maybe not so much the V6 Turbo’s at the moment, but when you’re looking at the V8s, the V10s, the V12s of yesteryear, they scream. So you have to do a lot of attenuation on the microphones before that the sound gets to the recorder because otherwise you will just overload the preamps and you’ll just get a distorted mess.
So there are lots of things to kind of think about before sound quality when it comes to a lot of these different motor vehicles.
David:
What gear do you use to record cars?
Mark Knight:
There are quite a few microphones nowadays that can cope with things. But rather than me, reel off sort of like 10 or 15 different mics for somebody sort of like breaking into it. If it comes to loud sounds with not a lot of space, then you may first look at the DPA mics, so the 4062s, which were originally designed by the BBC to record Formula One for the Formula One TV program years and years ago.
And they commissioned DPA to make the microphone and then decided it would make a commercial product. So the 4062s are very small. The actual head capsule is at a guess around about a centimetre and it doesn’t weigh anything. So you can put it into lots of tiny little nooks and crannies that you may not get to stick an SM58 into. And they also take a very, very high SPL. Again, the 4011 DPA microphone takes a very, very high SPL, but you tend to have a mixture.
So for example, if I’ve got the space to secure microphones around the vehicle, like the exhaust pipe, I even use SM57s and SM58s. You know, it depends very much on the vehicle, it depends where you can place the mics and a lot of trial and error to be honest with you. But yeah, if you said to me I need to buy one microphone now that’s likely to do the job, then I’d probably say get a 4011 or 4062 depending on the size.
David:
What does designing a car sound actually look like? Is there designing that goes into the sound or is it mostly editing and removing noise?
Mark Knight:
There’s this but there’s both really. And let’s take Formula One as an example, so we know that it’s going to be using a granular system. So straight away the work that you would do with the source recording is different from what you would do if it was a loop-based system. So we are dealing with the sound of the car accelerating and the sound of the car decelerating. With an F1 car, the other thing I didn’t mention to you is that whereas I mentioned the sound of the rollers, if you’re recording on the rolling road. Obviously if you’re recording on track, you’ve got two other issues.
You’ve got the issue of wind buffeting and you’ve got the issue of tire noise or surface noise. Luckily, with an F1 car, that doesn’t tend to be too much of a problem for a couple of reasons. The surface noise just isn’t a reason because the engine is too loud and you tend not to get a lot of wind buffeting problems because if you’re doing an officially sanctioned F1 recording, health and safety will not allow you to have anything attached to the car externally.
So everything is built inside the car. So obviously then a lot because obviously an F1 car is streamlined to cut through air is as good as it possibly can. You’re not getting much air getting into the vehicle apart from where the designers want it to go through, which is through the radiator system. So you don’t get a lot of wind issues. So that at least saves the problem of having to clean up the recordings too much. So you do tend to get quite a pure recording from F1 cars if you’ve done it correctly.
However, there’s still work to be done just to kind of beef it up a little bit. They do tend to sound very flat, just like, for example, if you’re doing some fairly work and you’re recording impact sales. So let’s say you’re hitting a crash helmet with a baseball bat. If you do that in a foley studio, you basically get a recording of clicks. You know, it’s not until you maximize the hell out of it, like, you know, about minus 30 DBS on your ultra maximizer, that suddenly you hear all the detail and it’s kind of like the same sort of thing with the engine sounds.
You have got to beef things up. There will be a little bit of judicious queuing, obviously, with sweeps as the pictures are always rising or falling, then we tend to do spectral editing a lot more. So that could be spectral layers or it could be using iZotope RX and you’re where you’re trying to bring out those harmonics just so they kind of are a little bit more in-your-face. I’ve also looked at separating the tonal elements from the noise elements of the recording so that I’ve got the control over either. And especially if you’re working on a project where let’s say you’re working on an F1 type game and you get the opportunity to record one engine, but you’ve then got 10 or 15 vehicles that you need to provide the sound for, then being able to do things like separate the harmonics and separate the noise and process the harmonics in some way, whether that’s using a little bit of distortion or increasing the gain of certain harmonics that allows you to design the sounds of the other vehicles that you haven’t been able to record.
And yes. So obviously, we’re also probably going to be reducing the dynamic range, because if we had real world dynamic range with Formula One cars, you’d need a P.A. system and you’d need to turn it right up and then have the sample really, really quiet to start off with. So obviously, we’re kind of squashing things. I choose to squash things a bit more with the source samples and then use volume curves within, you know, whatever tool I’m using be it Wwise or FMOD, then kind of control it externally, as it were.
And then you’ve got to look at things like how the engine might wobble when you change gear, not so much from an F1 car, but certainly with some of the supercars and that you get these little gearbox wobbles with the pitch and there’s all these little niche things that you then try and do to increase the realism with F1 cars. I’d say the most important thing, then, is on the decelerations and getting the overrun, which is sort of like the exhaust popping that you tend to get out the exhaust, getting that right with gear changes and that sort of thing, which again, that’s one of the things that certainly the official F1 game still hasn’t got right, unfortunately. But things like artifacts and they’ve got a much more, I’d say, accurate way of doing that sort of thing. So there’s all these little nuances that you have to add to it then to kind of create the full picture.
David:
We’ve talked a little bit about filling out your car sounds. How do you beef up your car sounds?
Mark Knight:
I tend to use some analog preamp emulations. So for example, it might be the REDD 17 preamp from Waves. I like using that a lot just to add some kind of very natural distortion, especially in the bottom end of the R.P.M. where things can sound a bit flat. I use iZotope Trash a lot because of the multiband distortion. Again, very, very subtle, but it’s just trying to kind of warm things up again. You’ve got to find other ways to compensate for the fact that your speakers are not going to play the stuff back – it was proper volume. So by enhancing it, using subtle harmonic distortions and that sort of thing, just to warm up the sound can really, really help, especially if you’re then playing things back through those awful Logitech speakers or whatever, you know.
But it’s very much trial and error. You know, what works for me might be completely, completely wrong for somebody else, you know, and obviously, you can’t go out and buy every single plugin there is just to try things out.
That’s it for this written interview. Make sure to watch the video to get a lot more details and information.
Check out Mark and his work here:
http://www.sonicfuel.co.uk/author/mark-knight/
https://marktdkknight.bandcamp.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamesounds/?originalSubdomain=uk
If there is somebody else you would like me to interview or have on to discuss sound design, do let me know in the comments below.
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