With Sonic City down with the flu, I’ve decided to add the next Richard Jacques SST article to the main blog instead.  This time I invited Richard to tell us a bit more about some of the technical aspects of his work on SEGA Superstars Tennis (which is out of course on March 20th).  Over to you Richard:

From the beginning of the project, the producers of SEGA Superstars Tennis were keen to have all the classic music from the various franchises produced in surround sound. This was a superb decision and so I started to make a list of all the classic tracks that would need mixing in surround.

As the latest consoles all support one form of surround or another, coupled with the fact that home theatre systems are now comparatively cheap and widely adopted amongst the gaming community, this was a great move by SEGA to be so forward thinking and accept nothing less than the highest audio quality for the title. So myself, and SEGA producers Warren Leigh and Ben Barker started to get together a list of the tracks that needed mixing in surround. This was already a fairly daunting task since the game involves so many classic franchises, and therefore a lot of the music associated with a particular character or franchise.

When all was said and done we ended up with about 85 music tracks that were going to be mixed for surround sound. This is no tall order, and SST has one of the largest music track lists produced in surround.

The main format we were working on was producing 5.1 Dolby Digital content. This is a widely adopted surround sound format which can be produced on PS3, Xbox 360 as well as being present in many home cinema receivers and amplifiers. It basically means that you have two main front speakers (Left and Right), a centre speaker, two rear surround speakers (Left and Right) and a sub woofer (also known as the LFE channel) for earth shattering bass!

One of the challenges with the music for SST was that we were dealing with material that had been created over a 15 year period, and obviously technology (both gaming and recording studio technology) has changed a lot during that time. Another factor was that there was music from many different composers, recorded and produced in many different studios in Europe, Japan the US and other countries, so we also had to bear that in mind.

So I and my team began to create the surround mixes.

This was a complex process using lots of high end studio equipment and we had to treat each music track in its own right and tweak various settings accordingly. And of course we were under tight time constraints so there was a constant stream of surround mixing, composition and remixing taking place for the duration of the project. I think everyone will agree that the results are stunning, and it was a joy to be able to work with such iconic music (including some of my personal favourites), providing a new fresh surround sound to these classic tracks.