Arcade Ambience 1981 (65 minutes)

About the first 1981 track, it is about 65 minutes long and took many many hours to master. Most of the samples were created with

MAME. I used a program to record myself playing each of the games all the way through (until the game was over). Some games have more than one recording. I also recorded a few games in attract mode (like Gorf and Astroblaster, which have attract sounds). A few games I had to take samples from elsewhere, for example asteroids in MAME sounds terrible. Also, the coin changers (there are 3 distinct sounds) and background hum (kind of hard to pick up) I took from a local arcade. Once I had a big collection of wavs, I created a multitrack project in my sequencer/audio program. I basically made a separate track for each game/sound effect. I then randomly panned each track to the left or right to give the illusion of the games and coin changers being placed all around you. I also randomly adjusted the volumes for each track. I then placed several instances of the game recordings spaced out randomly. For example, there are about 6 identical plays of defender, randomly positioned on the CD. But there are so many games going at once, you cannot tell that the defender track is being repeated 6 times. Same goes for the other tracks. So basically I made sure that there is no repeating or looping in this sound (other than the repeat of each game wav, but that is almost impossible to notice since these games basically sound the same each time they are played). -Andy Hofle