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Mentor My Mix Ep. 008 – Ken Felton: Game Audio Bound, From LA To The SF…

  • From Live sound and national touring to theater sound to assisting and running sessions in LA recording studios to the scoring stage at Universal Studios
  • Getting lucky with a gig in Editorial, laying in backgrounds and sound effects for TV shows and movies
  • Developing custom sound design for the Weird Science TV series
  • Getting exposed to working in Dolby Surround and using that experience to transition to the SF Bay Area Film and Post world
  • Being warned how that was going to be very hard in the Bay Area
  • Seeking council from engineers working at The Saul Zaentz Film center
  • Getting introduced to Murray Allen, a Chicago Ad legend, president of AES and founder of The Recording Academy (The Grammys)
  • Finding common ground with Murray that led to contract work with EA working on Wing Commander 3 and mixing on ADAT
  • Eventually being hired on the team with Don Veca, Rob Hubbard and other Game Audio industry legends
  • Going on to work on many sports titles. Figuring out the concepts of granular sound design for interactive sound
  • Meeting the memory challenges of early gaming consoles
  • Grinding 12 hour days, 80 hour weeks and building long-lasting relationships
  • Going from twelve years at EA to Sony in 2006 to work on the Socom franchise on the PS2 console and becoming Audio Director for The Godfather Project
  • Building a twelve-man audio team for an open-world game
  • The importance of engineering support in the audio design process
  • Porting to the second generation Xbox 360 with expanded memory and using the additional RAM to up-sample the effects for higher audio quality causing the game mix to sound off requiring each sound design event to be re-mixed
  • A deeper dive in mixing a game title
  • The many challenges of working on a “launch title”
  • The need to be agile, working with multiple departments, and meeting multiple deadlines and challenges
  • Supporting outside developers as a service team
  • Working on Sly Cooper with Greg Debearde and “becoming the audio team”
  • Working on Uncharted and The Last of Us by supporting “The Santa Monica Team”
  • Working with Dolby Pro Logic & Pro Logic 2 with EA sports out of Canada and then on the SSX Snow Boarding titles encoding four channel DTS for live, real time Quad mixing
  • Moving to a nice to have feature to a must have that enhances the experience and sales of the games
  • Detailed description of creating an immersive audio demo to compare three tools for immersive audio mixing: Dolby Atmos, FB 360, and Dear VR
  • Using the Dolby Atmos render to create a realtime Binaural mix
  • Differences in HRTF and headphones affecting the results of a mix

Check out Ken’s recent blog post for more detailed info and all three Binaural mixes side by side.

Opening Music Credit: LGTBLTS by Dylan Seligman from his soon to be released Game Music EP, Acronym.

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Greg Gordon Pyramind Headshot

Greg Gordon

host

I connect artists and producers to their purpose and help launch their careers.

Executive, producer & engineer with over 25 years in the music and video game industries: technical and creative services, business development and management, music publishing & education.

Host of the “Mentor My Mix” Podcast that features interviews with a global network of industry professionals, producers, artists and educators.

I have conducted panels and spoken at: SXSW, The SF Music Tech Conference, AES Conference, The Academy of Art, SFSU, and GRAMMY Sound Tables.

Voted entrepreneur of the Year by The Renaissance Center For Entrepreneurship and awarded ICIC’s (Initiative for a Competitive Inner City) top 100 fastest growing inner city companies in America.

30 year voting member of The Recording Academy (The Grammys). Served on the board of Governors and as a Trustee.

Clients have included: HTC Vive, Microsoft Studios, Insomniac Games, Ubisoft, Disney, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Blizzard and Zynga, working on award-winning titles like: Watch Dogs 2, Halo Anniversary, Sunset Overdrive, God Of War, World Of Warcraft, Kinect Disneyland, Arcade Saga VR, and Tron Run/r.

Music credits include working with many globally recognized recording artists including Rob Garza (Thievery Corporation), Giorgio Moroder, K Theory, Rain Phutureprimitive, The Bronx, Merl Saunders & Jerry Garcia (The Grateful Dead) and Rocker T & the legendary Joan Baez amongst many others.

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