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Reader SurveyThe Sampler – January 11, 2006
Oct 11, 2005 8:00 AM
Sounddogs.com: SFX Library Has A Hollywood Pedigree
When I reach Sounddogs.com founder and chief Rob Nokes on his cell phone a few days after the new year, he was far, far away from his 310 (Los Angeles) area code. In fact, I’ve found him in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It turns out that the whale sound recording expedition he’d hoped to go on off the coast of neighboring Uruguay didn’t pan out: “I came to record whales, but the whales came and left early, so now I’m going to focus on getting these sea lions that live on an island around here,” the affable recordist says. “I’ve always dreamed of recording whales: my dream is to go up to Hudson’s Bay and record whales there because there are very few ship engines anymore, so it’s very clean [-sounding]. I want to get my underwater recording techniques down so that hopefully in the next three or four years it will get to the point where it’s worth going up to Hudson’s Bay and really making a goal of recording whales at a really high level.” For now, however, the sea lions will do.
To Nokes, the world offers an unlimited panorama of sounds to be captured and preserved…and sold. A Hollywood recordist and sound supervisor whose credits range from French Kiss, Cable Guy, and As Good As It Gets to a passel of sports films, including Seabiscuit, Million Dollar Baby, Miracle, Coach Carter, and the brand-new Glory Road, he spends about half his time working on Sounddogs.com, which he claims was the first online SFX company; in fact they’ve never been in the business of selling FX CDs.
“That’s definitely saved us a bundle,” he notes. “I guess you could say we dabbled in it—we did two CDs with Sound Ideas that very popular. One was called Larger Than Life, which was big sounds, and then we did The Art of Foley with Dan O’Connell [of One Step Up]. Since then we’ve done four one-CD sets that are directed more for the consumer market, though it’s all still really good high-quality material.”
Nokes got his start in the world of sound in his native Winnipeg, Canada. “I had been recording music and sound since I was 10 years old, and when I was 19 or 20, I went off to Toronto and got a job cleaning toilets for a [post] studio called Master’s Workshop, which also produced [Hollywood mixer] Paul Massey.” As is often the case in these situations, Nokes soon found himself assisting established engineers, learning his craft the old fashioned way. “I went from Master’s to working on the Rolling Stones’ At the Max for a guy named Peter Tilley, who did a lot of IMAX movies. Then I went over to Sounds Interchange [also in Toronto] for a stint and worked my way up there. And that’s where I met Greg King, who became partners with me [and Robert Grieve] in Sound Dogs USA. [King and Nelson Ferreira formed the original Sound Dogs in Toronto in 1991. The two operations are no longer affiliated, though they do work together.] Back in the early ’90s we dreamed of taking all our recordings that we were making and publishing them, similar to what Sound Ideas was doing, and by around 1996, we had moved to Los Angeles, and had worked on things like Forget Paris, Cable Guy, and French Kiss, and we had so much material recorded digitally that was already catalogued, we thought, ‘OK, now’s the time. Let’s do it.’ We were always recording to DAT; we never did any analog recording. And Amazon.com was starting to get big, so we thought online might work.”
Though an acknowledged “little guy” in a world where there were already giants such as Sound Ideas, Hollywood Edge, BBC, DeWolfe, and other library companies, Sounddogs.com quickly managed to establish itself as a significant player by appealing to professionals; today Nokes says they have some 50,000 clients around the world, in nearly every area of media production imaginable. Currently, sounddogs.com has about 285,000 sounds available online, 30,000 of them from Nokes’ own work through the years, the others mostly from libraries Sounddogs has acquired, including the massive SoundStorm library, which Nokes acquired 14 months ago.
“That’s an incredible library,” he notes. “It includes Bruce Stambler, who is an exceptional sound recordist, and others, too. When SoundStorm closed its doors and filed for bankruptcy, the assets were auctioned off and we got the library portion for $187,000. That included over 7,000 DATs, Beta F-1s, and a lot of quarter-inch [analog]. Generally speaking that stuff is very hard to catalog because you’ve got to bake it and then do noise reduction. Analog recordings really don’t stand up to modern-day 24-bit recordings in my opinion, so it’s got to be quite special or historic to make it out of quarter-inch, but there’s definitely great stuff in that format, too.” Sounddogs has acquired several other smaller libraries as well, including—in a perhaps ironic twist—the Master’s Workshop collection.
Much as Nokes seems to enjoy and have an aptitude for the library business (though his partner Paul Virostek does much of the day running of the operation), one senses that his greatest satisfaction still comes from going out in the field and gathering sounds. I asked him if when he’s working on a film he also has potential library usage in the back of his mind. “When I go and record, I always have the goal of the film in mind first and foremost,” he comments. “Of course, if there’s a great sound there, I’m going to get it regardless, and if I have to put in my own time and my own hours to go back again and get it, I will. Finding the gems is the challenge in recording sound; not so much getting the sounds you need, but getting the really great sounds.
“My deal is I always give them way more than they would ever need [for a film], but I own it. The sounds are far too important to give them away. I always want to maintain ownership, because we go the extra mile in terms of preparing it and shooting it and cataloguing it. I work for about ten supervisors in L.A. and they seem to be very happy with the results.”
Nokes’ own recording rig is simple: He carries two Fostex FR-2 24-bit stereo units, which record to CompactFlash (CF) cards. “Due to all the travel I do and the extreme conditions I’m in, I’d rather have something that’s both durable and disposable, rather than something where if it breaks or gets lost I’m going to cry. The FR-2 has been great. I have the battery mod on it so I have a nine-hour battery. And I only shoot to CF cards because I’ll often mount the recorders on either cars or go-carts or whatever, so with that kind of recording technique, the cards work better [than a traditional hard drive]. When I was in Kazakhstan working on a film called The Nomad, I had 26 horses charging at me at one point. In the movie there’s something like 5,000 horses [charging], so it was important to have the feeling of a lot of horses, and not building it from groups of two and three that are typically in libraries. It was an amazing experience.”
For microphones, Nokes brings “three Neumann 191i’s, one of which is a backup. I also have a Sennheiser 815 shotgun, and I’ll also use the Sennheiser E835S, which is great for mounting on cars and things like that.
“My philosophy is less technical and more finding the right sound and getting to the right sounds. So I’d rather have a small, light setup that fits in a handbag, and then run up the hill to get the sound, or run through a cave or a jungle….”
A bit lost in all the attention Soundddogs.com gets for its sound effects is the fact that the company also offers an ever-expanding library of production music as well. “We have a limited amount of material,” Nokes says. “We hire composers to build libraries. We haven’t gotten that far into it, but long-term we’re going to continue to move into music just to stay competitive in the market. A lot of people come to our site for sound effects and they also want music, so we want to be able to take care of them as well as we can. We’ll get more serious about music as we go along.”
But for now, there are those sea lions barking off the coast of Argentina, and there’s another football movie, called Invincible, that needs him back in the States. “I love to travel,” he says with almost child-like glee. “To get to travel doing what I love to do, is so much fun.”
We should all be so fortunate.
Comments? Questions? Jokes? Jive?
It’s not like we don’t get out or anything, but you can always find us as blair@blairjackson.com. Tell us what you’d like to see in The Sampler over the coming year and we will do our best to oblige.
Waves of Land Sample Library Released
Universumkiosk has introduced Waves of Land, a sound library created by Ton Driessens for musicians, music producers, game designers, multimedia designers, and commercial makers. The library is available as a whole or in sample packs.
About the Library: Waves of Land is divided into rhythmical loops, pads, single sounds, and construction sets. Tempos are indicated and range from 80-140BPM. The overall atmosphere goes towards ambient.
The samples are not meant to provide hooks and leads, they are meant to innovate, to alter, to add an exotic flavor, a sonic signature to an otherwise clean mix, it can create a psychological tension for a movie or it can just trigger creative ideas.
Packs Descriptions
Pushed
You feel yourself being pushed forward and you are moving closer and closer to the end of something, or the beginning of something. The rhythm goes on steadily, thin metallic shakers give you the tempo, or are those whips? The bass doesn't feel bad, although it hesitates and looks around quickly every now and then. The pads complement the ambiguity of this moment by modeling their frequency, giving it all a rather cold metallic feel.
Drifts
The rhythm is energetic and has some slice sounding percussion; the bass underlines the accents while the pads replace the horns that call for the hunt.
Essence
This atmosphere is somewhat mysterious and stressing at the same time. Ambient sounds that are spatial and sacred, a running bass line that sets the tempo, a breathing sound and a rhythm with small chain elements
Floating
A staccato rhythm with a reverberant accent is accompanied by floating particles that form a pad showing you around in this enlightening place.
Hinkel
The rhythm has gone through an old amplifier and the bass is close on your back, which adds nervousness. The airy pads are calling, singing, and enchanting.
Horseback
The rhythm has a fast attack and short decay, the bass goes in waves along and the percussion has been eroded over the time. The atmospheric pads give you air, but the drone behind makes you wonder if the air is fresh.
Lcday
Ship over dunes—imagine yourself in an unknown setting, finding an empty ship that rides the waves of land ahead of you. A rhythm that drives in waves, a pulsing bass line, pads with harmonics that faintly identify the things you see while taking this wonderful journey.
Mill
The rhythm is hesitating, slightly voweling, a bit android. The bass raises the question of how to escape and how to do so quickly. The pads give you the feeling that this is not the best place to be. Walls are coming closer, or is it a giant creature breathing?
Mooved
A happy groove and a funky rhythm with a clap that recalls ancient dance styles; the breathing symbolizes the human amazement. The leading atmosphere keeps it all on a mysterious level but fades to a major feeling of satisfaction.
Opened
You hear a systematical rhythm and other sounds going in different directions. The sounds are crisp, metallic, and the set has a pushing feel.
Bonus pack 1 & 2
It happens all the time in movies: cut! Scenes are cut out, added, changed, or left for the director's cut.
So yes, for music it is the same. You have finished you piece, but later on you are being asked to add a sequence, add a little sound to change subject, or to complement the theme.
This bonus pack gives you the extra's that may do the job while maintaining a strong individual personality.
Gearlist
Equipment used: Rode NT 1-A microphone, Focusrite preamp, Lexicon hardware reverbs, Kurzweil K2500 synth, Roland XP-50 synth, TC Electronic Fireworx, Ensoniq DP4, Emagic EXS24 sampler, Native Instruments Absynth, FM7, and Kontakt. The equipment also included Soundforge, Stomper, and numerous free plug-ins.
About Ton Driessens
Ton Driessens started out as a drummer and after some years he changed his acoustic drum kit for the electronic Roland TD-7 setup with an additional SPD-11 drum pad. This got him into sequencing and triggering other sounds than percussion. This new interest made him change his study and he went from industrial design to music technology in Hilversum (Netherlands). There he played less and less drums and got more and more into programming sounds and sound editing. He specialized in sound design and eventually got his certificate for sound design and multimedia composing. During his study, he worked for Digital Music Media, where he got to know the world of sample CDs. As a sound designer Driessens never used any pre-recorded samples, but he immediately recognized the potential of these CDs for studio owners and people with no time or skills to program their own sounds or loops. It came as no surprise that Driessens started creating his own library of sounds. At the same time Driessens was creating new presets for the Tc Electronic Fireworx and these instruments were very useful to shape sounds and loops. As a drummer, Driessens often keeps an eye on the concept of "groove" and he likes to program loops in all styles. He is also active as a web designer and has delivered many background loops and sound fx on many sites over the years.
