Hello fellow pinheads! I'm a music producer, musician, and audio engineer by trade. I own a studio up here in Michigan, away from the over-crowded, over-priced coasts where most of my peers tend to flock. While I'm hyper critical about my audio work, I try to leave it in the studio, and not overanalyze the movies, video games, and pinball machines I play, but sometimes - for better or worse, I can't help myself.

So I'm going to dissect 2 modern machines' sound design. One bad and one good.

Let's get the bad out of the way first.

Unfortunately, it was the recent reveal of Toy Story 4 that got me thinking about bad pinball sound design. I hate to further add to the negative noise around this game's reveal, but when I watched Joe Katz's rule explanation, it quite literally made me feel slightly ill. Not exaggerating, it actually made me feel queasy. My wife felt the same, and considering the fact that she has also spent a good amount of time being a musician, we had a good long discussion about what might be causing our adverse reaction to this pin's sound. I've also read a few other posts here recently about others getting that same uneasy feeling from the audio. Last night, I tuned into Carl DeAngelo's (IEPinball) stream of Toy Story 4, and listened on in horror at the cacophonous clutter. Many people in chat felt the same way, and someone eloquently described the sound as "vertigo for your ears".

Many people in chat were guessing the problem came from the severe "ducking" of the audio from callouts. Yes, this can be jarring when there's an excessive amount of volume changes and cues, but from my perspective of audio engineering, music theory, and writing, I believe Toy Story 4's biggest sound issue comes from clashing keys, tempos, and an overall sense of audio clutter - busy to the point of inducing anxiousness. Audio ducking is used here as an attempt to de-clutter. The game will have a background song on loop, and then play an audio cue for a ramp, or target shot, or jackpot that completely clashes with the base music's key and tempo, and no matter how hard you duck the music loop, your ear knows it doesn't make sense with the song you just heard. They'll cue pieces of songs with different tempos and keys for an important shot. It's jarring, unpleasant, and cluttered. I've noticed this same exact problem with Wonka, and to a bit lesser extent, G&R. Jersey Jack machines seem to have fallen into the "more is more" trap of audio design. It is honestly enough for me to not want these machines, as fun as some of them are - bad audio is a deal-breaker in our house.

I think something a lot of pinball audio designers tend to forget, is that the pinball machines themselves emit a good amount of audio. You are not designing sounds in a vacuum. The sounds of ramps, flippers, pops, drops, rails, VUKs, etc. are all colors on your canvas before you even pick up your audio paintbrush, so if you don't take any of that into consideration, it's very easy to make a Jackson Pollock out of your pinball audio.

Now I want to move on to a great example of pinball audio.

Stranger Things. This is a game where the main theme of the show is your default song loop. The real audio genius here is how each of the 4 drop targets is a different note within the key of the main theme. No matter where or when you hit these main targets, they emit a pleasing tone that perfectly compliments the theme. Sometimes you'll hit 2 notes, and they'll make a chord, or even a dissonant cluster, but yet it still works, because it happens, and then it's gone. It doesn't linger. That's the beautify of smart, minimal audio design. If the main theme was more complex, or the drop target notes were more complex, or had their own tempo, it would instantly become cluttered and unpleasant.

There are many other modes in the game, like Total Isolation, where the song is very atmospheric and simple, but the jackpot shots are what add the musical dynamics and tempo. The spinner shot, for example, communicates this perfectly theme-appropriate spooky clicking sound, while also not getting in the way of any of the table's music. To me, Stranger Things is one of the best examples of pinball audio design out there. There are many tables that are simply more fun to listen to, like Monster Bash, Medieval Madness, any of the Elvira games, TNA, Rick & Morty, Attack From Mars, and a lot of the music pins, but Stranger Things employs an extremely clever awareness of key and tempo, and executes it with expert minimal precision.

I would be curious to hear other people's opinions on Bad / Good pinball audio design.

Haha, I've heard that a lot in the past few days, but honestly... no.

The wonderful thing about slot machines, and casino games in general, is that they've agreed to tune themselves to the key of C Major. This way, you're surrounded by a pleasant swirling of melodies that compliment each other and don't clash. If they were all in different keys, a casino floor would be absolutely awful.

Oh man, I absolutely love the crunchy/distorted synths used in pinball machines in the late 80s and early 90s. Funhouse, Whirlwind, Whitewater, No Fear, Getaway, Bally Game Show, Elvira and The Party Monsters, etc. all have great, minimal sound design. My big complaint with modern Sterns is that the audio quality is just... bad. When I first got Jurassic Park, I thought something was wrong. It sounds like awfully compressed MP3s or something. Oppositely, those old 80s and 90s pins weren't playing back audio tracks - they were running MIDI through a synthesizer live for your enjoyment! This is why those pins sound so good.

I heard a fantastic podcast recently with George Gomez who said that he believes constraints breed creativity. I absolutely believe this. When I produce bands, I try to get them to establish the rules of the record we're trying to make. "The sky is the limit" usually only invites indecisiveness and excess for excess sake - compensating for lack of talent/ideas with layers upon layers of guitars and vocals, for example. I tell them to write songs with one instrument and one vocal - if the song sounds great with only piano and vocal, or acoustic and vocal, we have a good song on our hands.

Hey Carl! Thanks for all the work that goes into events like INDISC. As someone who works in audio production, and dabbles with streaming pinball I can appreciate all the effort that goes into managing a clean looking and sounding event. Excited about the next tourney you stream!

But I was actually just working though this video with David Thiel. It's such a shame about Deeproot, because he was doing some cool shit with audio that is normally reserved for high-end video games. I've always wanted to work on a video game soundtrack, especially something like the recent DOOM games, where the game triggers dynamic layers according to the gameplay. I think pinball has a ton of potential for this style of approach. This also makes me think how badass a modern DOOM pin would be.