Some of my readers might not have heard of you, can you introduce yourself briefly?
I’m AJ, sound designer and musician from South Wales UK and I run Sword Coast Soundscapes.
What influenced you to start making sounds?
Well, I trained as a sound engineer at uni, and when I was studying for my Masters degree we delved into things like active listening, film sound, and Avant Garde music - which went into stuff like Musique Concrete, minimalism, and all sorts of other weird stuff. Through that I got a taste for telling stories with sound without the use of music, by using things like soundscapes, space, tension etc. Then I started exploring 3D sound, synesthesia, and sound memories. Am I coming across as pretentious yet? Haha. But basically I got really interested in taking journeys into worlds of sound.
TGL: It sounds incredibly interesting actually.
How does RPG fit in this?
So i’ve always been a tabletop gamer, from Warhammer as a kid, then again in my early 20s with WH Quest, Bloodbowl, Infinity, and then a couple of years ago my friends and I decided to stop messing about and accept that we’re all nerds - so we started playing D&D. That was just before being a geek became cool and acceptable, but I guess a lot of people around the world had the same idea as RPG gaming kinda exploded after that. As we started playing our DM made a comment about sounds. At the time I was working as a sound designer for a film company that specialised in Viking Films (check out Viking Siege, Viking Legacy, The Cleansing, and Excalibur Rising if you want to see some of my sound work - the films are low budget, but the sound is great). So my DM asked if I had anything that would work for castles and stuff, so the next week I started putting some together.
TGL: If only I had such a dedicated player. Seems like you you were able to get stuck immediately after your studies.
When did you start to get your work out in the world and how did that evolve into selling your work online?
That’s actually a bit of a strange one. Since I was making sounds for our games, I needed an easy way to transport the sounds to games, and the files were too big to fit on usb sticks or phones, so I decided to stick them on YouTube as it was free hosting and easy for us to get to.
But as it turns out that was also easy for the rest of the world to get to, and people started finding them. I started picking up subscribers, getting likes, and then even getting requests! So it just kind of grew because my work was out there, and as I made more it got bigger. As for selling my work, this is where my subscribers come in. I tend to treat them as my business advisors, and if enough of them ask for something then I’ll do it. People started asking for shorter versions on Bandcamp, asking me to set up a Patreon page etc. And then I started getting e-mails through from podcasts, streams, and even big companies asking to use my sounds in their work. I kind of work on a “pay what you can afford” approach, and I know a lot of podcasts and streams are more a labour of love than for profit, so most of them use it in exchange for a shout-out.
What will the future bring you, or what do you hope to accomplish by 2021?
Well I’m looking to keep growing. I like the direction the channel is going and I like the fan base that has built up around it. I obviously want to get my channel remonetised, but really I’m after my first plaque from YouTube - it’s something solid that shows how far we’ve come with this you know? I guess I just want to keep the quality of my work up. There are a lot of other people out there making sounds for RPGs, but I like to think that it’s the quality that sets mine apart. Perhaps because it’s informed by my background in sonic art and sound design as well as studying the sounds of the world. The essence of the location is there, rather than a representation of what it would probably sound like, if that makes sense? But I also want to start bringing people behind the scenes on it. Not just in the technical aspects of it, but on the art that informs it - it’s something I love and I want to turn other people on to it too!
I hope you discovered another new artist that might enhance your tabletop RPG.
You can find AJ's work here and if you ever send him a message, tell him you came from thegreyleague:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/swordcoastsound
Spotify: click here
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