Audio Rebuild Project No1 - World of Warcraft: Stratholme

Game footage is captured, then the audio is removed and rebuilt from scratch. This is my first rebuild. It's a segment from the MMO World of Warcraft, following a lv80 Paladin's assault on the cursed city of Stratholme. The entire audio track was re-created from scratch by me, including the music which is an original piece composed and recorded specifically for this project.

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Sound highlight #1: Stratholme Gate Opening

I wanted a heavy castle gate with a nice big slam at the end. This sound was built from a glass bottle being dropped on tiles, an oven door closing, a garage shutter door and a chain being pulled. In the final mix, the gate animation was too short, so the first half of the sound wasn't actually used but it is included here anyway.

Download as .wav

Sound highlight #2: Hammer of Wrath spell

This spell required a large impact after a throwing noise. I added a buzzing electrical generator at the start seeing as the animation shows a glowing blue hammer "charging up" in the player's hand. After that, the throwing noise was made with my mouth blowing gently into a microphone, the impact is a synthesised kick drum mixed with an anvil, and a static energy noise tails the effect out to reflect the flare of energy around and after the hammer's impact.

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Sound highlight #3: Ramstein the Gorger

Obviously a massive creature like Ramstein will have a deep, beastly sounding voice, but I wanted him to sound slightly unreal as well to emphasise the fact that he is undead and unnatural. I doubled the vocal sample, added a chorus effect and pitch-shifted the double down by one semitone so that it would sound slightly unnatural, but I faded this track down in level so the effect would reamin subtle. Finally, because the player changes position during his speech, I had to pan his voice from left channel towards centre to reflect this change in sync with the video.

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Sound highlight #4: Black Guard Sentries

For these monsters, I wanted a haunting, ghostly and evil voice sound. As with Ramstein above, I doubled the voices. I then applied a chorus and a 50-100 wet-to-dry ratio reverb to one track, and a metaliser + 100-60 wet-to-dry reverb on the second track. Finally, I recorded the reverb tail from the end of both voices' sentences, reversed it and moved it in front of them to create the initial ghostly "aaah".

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Sound highlight #5: Hammer of the Righteous spell

I tried to give each spell a different sonic texture, to avoid too much of the same type of sound - abilities that are used often have to sound different or it becomes annoying for the player. I wanted a heavy, almost industrial sound here to give this spell its own individuality. I used 2 kick drums for the hammer impacts. On top of those, I added some steel girders, a generic "lightning strike" noise and an ethereal synth pad mixed very low to give a hint of a magical ability without detracting from the harshness of the noise.

Download as .wav

Many thanks to Videobox for the pretty Lightbox code. All material on this page © A. Bertoni 2009, if you want to use something then please ask me first.