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Welcome to the information site of Anthony 'Airon' Oetzmann Sound Productions.
My occupation evolves around sound engineering and some of it's more creative offsprings, such as composing,
arranging and producing music. Ever since I heard John Williams 'Star Wars' theme was I captivated by film music,
hence my intense love for it and my susequent love for writing music for special purposes as games and animations.
A little history
Up until 1987 I was but a listener when I felt writing music myself would be more satisfying. First experiments involved the C64 program Soundmonitor by Chris Huelsbeck, which didn't turn out so well. But I persisted and in 1990 I bought an Amiga 500 and hunted for software. Trackers would let you sequence samples and use effects to take heavy influence on playback frequency and volume during play. This was very similar to the Soundmonitor on the C64. The first program of this kind on the Amiga was Soundtracker by Karsten Obarski, which I discarded quickly, since I didn't disk handling.
I picked up Zoundmonitor and even though the interface wasn't very good either, it was closer to the old Soundmonitor and I wrote a few tracks on it. MED2.00 was my next choice with it's excellent interface. Shortly afterwards, in 1991 I picked up Protracker 1.0b. That was it, the program I'd been waiting for. Very fast and easy to use, an integrated sample editor with great features and equaly fast, and flexible file handling, unlike previous versions of Soundtracker, which Protracker had evolved from.
During the following years I concentrated on writing tunes on this tracker, but in 1995 I racked up all the cash I could and bought my first synth, the JV1080. At about this time I also met Nikola Fox, who had just put out his first music disk on the Aminet. I wrote him, admiring his work and we have stayed in close contact since then. Nikola currently runs Phase^D(istortion), a music group that primarily writes music with trackers, I've been a member since day 2(after Nikola and Sascha founded it). My primary function in the group is handling the web site of Phase^D and writing music, both of which I thoroughly enjoy. ( http://www.scene.org/phd )
Composing tunes with the synth came a littel easier but was also limiting in some ways, so I continued to write tracked
music, though not as much as I had before. Octamed, the successor of MED was the first midi program, I was used to a tracking interface
and this boasted a lot of good features and was easy to use.
Today's composing tools
Today I use Cubase and Impulsetracker for composing with midi instruments and Impulsetracker for tracked music. Fasttracker 2 is a neat tracker too but the interface is very,very slow. The problem there is that, coming from Protracker2.3d which was extremly fast with excellent keyboard shortcut layout, Fasttracker 2 slows you down and makes you think you're peddling around on a three wheeler, while Protracker zooms past at sonic speed. Impulsetracker is simple in interface design but excellent in keyboard layout and features, plus the wealth of drivers for soundcards, midi output and midi FILE output just degrades Fasttracker 2. It's a question of whether you can live with it. I used it for a while because of the similar fx commands but the slow pattern editor was unnerving soon enough. The first PC I used was a 386 SX33 with a GUS for tracking, a 386 40DX and now a P133.
Soundediting experiments with Soundforge and Cooledit, as well as Fasttrackers sample editor(it's only feature
I missed but don't do now) formed the basis for my love of soundfx editing. My favorite effect for a time was
turning my voice into evil demon voices. Of course explosions and gunshots fascinated me as well, I always directed
special attention to the sound in games and films. My decision to buy the Amiga 500 and later the Amiga 1200,
was based on the sole experience of playing Sidewinder with a friend(an ST owner)in a department store.
The PC was miles away from being anything but ugly at that time.
Getting professional
Last year I attended the School of Audioengineering and met Joachim Feske, who runs a little home studio with
a friend of his, though I'd hardly call the equipment they have un-professional. Protools24(with the 888 interface
that uses 24bit A/D converters), Akai HD recorders, lots of effects and more importantly a large collection of world
class microphones isn't home-studio level at all. Joachim has already recorded two albums and produced a number of demos
and singles. For listening examples, please head to our Music section on the examples page
Project MexX - The Mexx Level Sounds
I once wrote to Marcus "Mexx" Dromowicz, commenting on his great levelpacks Mexx7 (A Bishop's Bane) and Mexx8 (Prelude to Apocalypse & Mordrigor's Demise). I offered to help out with any audio he might need and he got back to me after a while and I made a few sounds for his Mexx9 (Penumbra of Domination) levelpack.
Shortly afterwards he began work on Mexx10 (The Cassandra Calamity), and told me he needed female vocals in addition a soundset for a cyborg character. At the time I was attending the SAE Berlin and was just into my sixth month, when I met Martina who seemed to have just the voice we needed. I grabed the TLM171, some time for the vocal booth and stuffed Martina in there with a page of script in front of her. The material was recorded straight onto a normal audio cassette without dolby. At home I sampled the output of my trusty tapedeck(old Kenwood KX-3510) with the GusPnP and edited the material with Cooledit. Some of these sounds are available in the sound effects section of the Examples page.
In march 1998 Stefan Schwoon of the QuakeDoneQuick team contacted me to ask whether I'd be interested in producing some vocals and perhaps some fx as well as music for their ongoing project "Scourge Done Slick", a Quake movie of a speed run through the mission pack "Scourge of Armagon". He'd liked the vocals and fx I'd done for two of the Mexx level releases, Mexx9 - Penumbra of Domination but primarily Mexx10 - The Cassandra Calamity, it featured vocals of a female computer voice I'd recorded with Martina, so he wanted something similar.
Of course I happily agreed to do it. Anthony Bailey, the project coordinator, provided me with an excellent script that nailed down timing and surroundings of the characters voices and I reserved studio time at the school and got the voice actors together. Up until then, only the computer and medic voice were on my list. Others, who were supposed to handle the other vocals however didn't manage to complete their part so I took over almost all the recording tasks in the end. Martina would do the computer voice again and Joachim the medic voice.
We recorded the computer and medic voices in one day at the school studio with some of the school's mics(TLM171,AKG414,MKH40,RE27) and the Neve 8128 console(love it). The music for the movie would be produced with Impulsetracker, as would the some vocal sequences. For most part all the post production was done with sample editors in Windows95 and Prottools on the Mac. All the material amounted to about five hours of DAT tape and 1500 resulting samples for this project, 268 files would make it into the final production.
As we neared the deadline, people bailed out of creating the other vocals. The only one who delivered his promise was Jason Holtslander, who recorded the marine voice. We'd done a second session at school to record four different versions from two actors each(Joachim and me) for the Marine character, and since Jason's vocals, even though they were terribly noisy, fit so well, Bailey and I thought his vocals should go into the first release. Joachim's vocals from our second school recording session would be released in an upgradepack. My voice didn't do so well and I droped it. I also did an Enforcer vocal with my own voice.
The music was usualy done within an hour and wasn't very complex. A little more effort was needed for the final part of the movie, a 15 second guitar and drums piece. Joachim and I were too lazy to stack up his Mashall speaker and Mesa Boogi amp so he plugged his guitar into a guitar fx processor and jammed up an hour of tape which I picked through to make the resulting 15 seconds piece you hear in the released movie.
One of the parts I took over was the commander voice. We recorded it with what I regard as the best close proximity mic of the ones I've used. The Neumann CMV563 with M7 capsules(of which we have two:) was perfect for capturing Michaels voice. Michael, a old friend of mine with a very cool rapping voice, performed the part at Joachims home in a less than perfect environment and in only 20 minutes. Nobody doubted the quality of the result for a second though.
Working with a single author, as I did with Marcus 'Mexx' Dromowic, was very rewarding, and working in a larger
team was a blast. Feedback and creative exchange is something I need badly and Bailey gave me such a good idea of what
they wanted that apart from one or two changes all the sounds came out fine in their first incarnation. You can check the complete
movie on the Qdq Team website at www.planetquake.com/qdq/sds.html
and the audio credits on this page.
Here and now
With technical knowledge, and hardware on a professional level there's little in terms of post production I can't do. With the help of Joachim Feske and several others of the sound engineering community no production task is too daunting. Whether it's a live band recording or a synth opera, we'll record and produce it for your game or perform post-production duties for your needs and deliver results in whatever format you require. Head over to our Examples section to see whether what we have done.
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