RICHIE NIETO | SOUND DESIGNER & COMPOSER

12.03.11 It's been a long while since I last posted here. This last Wednesday I did a lecture for some of the music students at York University and it was a blast, lots of fun. Couldn't have asked for a cooler audience; they asked many great questions and everyone seemed to enjoy it. My thanks to Isaias García for putting it all together, and I hope we can do it again sometime.

Also, I'm planning on rebooting the monthly gatherings I used to organise with local sound designers and composers here in Toronto, so stay tuned. I'll make an announcement soon this month with a date and location for the first event.

Finally, I have added some more music to the Portfolio section of this website. It includes a medley of some of the pieces that I wrote for EA's game "My Garden", which has been cancelled, sadly. I hope you like them.

03.08.11 My lecture at GDC went really well. Our audience seemed to enjoy our panel and eveything went according to plan. In the next couple of weeks, the video will be available at the GDC Vault, for those who couldn't make it to San Francisco this year.

And I have some exciting news – I am now officially an in-house sound designer for legendary game developer Ubisoft. I started working at their Toronto studio this week, and I'm loving it. I'm on the audio team for the latest Splinter Cell installment, and it will be an awesome game. Due to NDAs I won't be able to post too much information about it, but I will be giving you updates as often as I can.

01.10.11 A couple of months ago I helped my friend and fellow composer Jeff Ball with some live guitars for his score for the indie XBLA game Astroman. He has just released said score for free download from his website. You can hear my playing on the track 'Dark Caverns'–I played all acoustic and electric jazz guitars.

11.20.10 I have been officially notified that I will be a speaker at next year's Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

A few months ago I assembled a panel with some fantastic colleagues, and our submission has been approved. It's called "Casual Moods: Creating Sound And Music For A Booming Field", and it will cover tips and tricks for working as an audio contractor on casual video games, as well as a ton of inside info about the creative, technical and business side of the casual games industry. My fellow panelists are the awesome Laura Shigihara, Adam Gubman and Sean Beeson. If you're attending GDC 2011, make sure to drop by and say hi.

10.14.10 One of the games I worked on a few months ago, "Littlest Pet Shop 3: Biggest Stars", was released on October 5th. Counting last year's "Littlest Pet Shop for iPhone", this is the fourth title in the LPS franchise I have designed sounds and/or composed music for. Those titles combined have sold more than 4 million copies so far. This new title is available for the DS only, and it consists of three separate DS products, each with its own pets and levels.

I have uploaded a medley with several of the music tracks I composed for this game to the Portfolio section of this website. The track is called, not surprisingly, LPS3 Medley. I hope you like it.

10.09.10 I recently finished writing three music cues for Non Stop Music, the prestigious Warner/Chappell division of stock music library. Those pieces will be included in an upcoming CD soon, and they will be available for use in any commercial production.

There is a brand new sound design replacement demo in my Portfolio section, which you can also watch on YouTube. My old demo reels were getting a bit stale, and this one is more representative of my current sound design skills. It's heavily focused on guns and warfare, but it also includes a lot of small details and aural perspectives, so it showcases my mixing skills as well. A quick disclaimer: I took the original video clip, stripped off all the audio and replaced it with my own. I wasn't involved in the trailer's production or in "Brink", the game it promotes.

09.15.10 The latest game I worked on for EA has been officially announced at the Tokyo Game Show. It's called "My Garden" and it will be released for the 3DS, the upcoming new platform from Nintendo.

I was fortunate to be chosen to compose all the music and design all the sound for this game, and am very pleased with the results. According to EA's website, it will be released in North America and Europe in the Spring of 2011.

06.07.10 Last week I started working on a new unannounced video game for EA, as Audio Lead, Composer and Sound Designer. This is a really interesting game, and I'm very excited to be part of it even though I only had two days off in between projects! Also, in the next few days I'll also make another cool announcement, if things go as planned.

05.28.10 Just returned from working in-house for four weeks at EA Salt Lake on one of their upcoming titles, "Littlest Pet Shop 3: Biggest Stars", which is actually three separate video games for the Nintendo DS. It was great to finally meet in person a lot of the people I have been working with over the past couple of years, on a bunch of different projects.

EA Salt Lake's prestige is growing by leaps and bounds, so it has been an honour to be able to provide them with my services, especially on-site in the middle of the action. I'm very grateful for the whole team's kindness and friendliness - they made me feel at home, even as I was almost 1,800 miles away from Toronto. It was a very enjoyable experience and I hope to repeat it sometime.

04.22.10 I have just posted a new video demo in the Portfolio section of this site. It's a real-time gameplay capture section of Audiokinetic's sample game Cube, which I used for training in game audio implementation with Audiokinetic's Wwise middleware.

It was a lot of fun to work with, and it did give me a deeper understanding of how an interactive audio engine works. The game is pretty simple in terms of graphics and gameplay, especially for today's standards, but it contains the basics for interactive design and how sound fits into it.

03.19.10 A few days ago I got back from GDC in San Francisco. It was a great experience, once again - met with a lot of colleagues and friends, and made a tonne of new contacts. I can hardly wait to do it again next year.

On some semi-related news, I just finished my Wwise training with the amazing Damian Kastbauer. Damian has implemented audio for many cool games like LucasArts' "The Force Unleashed" and Pandemic's "The Saboteur". He also publishes a fantastic podcast on sound design and implementation for video games called Game Audio Podcast. Check it out!

02.17.10 The Game Audio Network Guild has just announced that my article "Surviving Your First Composing Gig" has been nominated and declared a finalist for the 2010 G.A.N.G. Awards in the category of "Best Game Audio Article, Publication or Broadcast". The award ceremony will take place at the Game Developers Conference on March 12th in San Francisco.

Also, it has been announced that Chance Thomas' music score for "James Cameron's AVATAR: The Game", which I edited, is a finalist in the category of "Music Of The Year". Although the voting for the G.A.N.G. Awards is only open to G.A.N.G. members, you can view the nominations here.

01.07.10 Shockwave-Sound.com has just published another one of my articles. This one is about cleaning up noisy production dialogue for film or television. It is written mostly for the one-person sound department on a project, and the process described in the article can help save a soundtrack from sounding cheap and messy.

12.23.09 Another video game I worked on has recently been released. This time it's iLPS (a.k.a. "Littlest Pet Shop for iPhone"), and I'm proud to say that I composed all of the music on it. I worked directly with EA Salt Lake's producer Sarah Nelson, who did a fantastic job fulfilling several roles, including acting as Audio Director for the project. As with all iPhone games, iLPS can be purchased through the iTunes Store or directly from the App Store on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

I was recently interviewed by fellow G.A.N.G. member George Hufnagl for his audio and music-related blog, in a very interesting and cool format which he calls "3 x 5". You can check out the interview here.
Finally, I was extremely surprised to find out that I was mentioned by composer Chance Thomas in his keynote at GameSoundCon 2009 this November in San Francisco. An article on G.A.N.G.'s website has coverage of the event, and here is a brief excerpt:

"The first day wrapped up with an impressive key note address from accomplished composer, Chance Thomas (who scored the upcoming James Cameron's AVATAR game). While most of the first day was filled with technology talk, game business and economics, Chance Thomas shared some "Stories from the Road", in which he picked several stories from throughout his career that helped illuminate some of the mysterious avenues one travels within a career in music, games and audio. One of his stories featured GANG's own Richie Nieto, as Chance demonstrated 5 qualities that Richie was able to bring to the table in becoming a valuable asset to an audio team, and not all of them were audio related."

Well, that's it for 2009. Have a happy holiday season!

12.01.09 "James Cameron's Avatar: The Game" is out in stores today. I did most of the music editing for it, cutting the in-game loops from the amazing music pieces by award-winning composer Chance Thomas. I also contributed with sound design to complement some of Chance's music stingers. The game is available for most current-gen systems out there.

This video game, created by developer Ubisoft Montreal, is a tie-in to the film "James Cameron's Avatar", which comes out on December 18th. Both the game and the film were developed in stereoscopic 3D, and they feature well-known actors like Sigorney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi and Michelle Rodriguez.

On news related to a different project, I'm still working on an unannounced game for EA Salt Lake, composing most of the music and designing a lot of the sound effects. Very cool stuff.

11.10.09 I wrote an article for the website Shockwave-sound.com on how to succesfully complete a first paid composition project. It's written for composers who have the necessary musical skills, but have never had to deal with a real client before. It's funny, because this article also is my first paid writing project, so I guess I'm a real published author now. I hope this one is the first of many, as I enjoyed doing it very much.

11.02.09 Here's a gameplay clip from the THQ video game "Marvel Super Hero Squad" (via GameSpot), featuring a piece of music I composed for it called "City Battle". You can listen to it in its entirety in the music player in the Portfolio section of this website, along with another piece from the same game.

Also, EA has graciously allowed me to show in my demo reel a few tracks I wrote for their video games "Littlest Pet Shop" and "Littlest Pet Shop Friends". They can also be found in the Portfolio section of this website. Enjoy!

10.27.09 Another game release day. Today it's EA's "Nerf N-Strike Elite", for which I designed a lot of sound effects. This one is out for the Wii only, and it comes with a real Nerf gun that shoots foam darts when you switch the Wiimote for a dart cartridge.

This game is the sequel to last year's bestseller "Nerf N-Strike", another game I worked for, doing sound design and additional music. This was the last project I did with Audio Director / Composer Chance Thomas at EA's Salt Lake City studio, although we worked together again on Ubisoft's "James Cameron's AVATAR: The Game", which comes out on December 1st for the PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, DS, PSP and the PC.

On other news, I'm still composing music for an upcoming game from EA and also doing some additional sound design for the same title. As usual, I can't mention its name, but I will as soon as the official press release is made by the studio.

10.20.09 Today's a very exciting day! Not only has this new website launched, but also two games I worked on are being released on this very same date. The games are "Littlest Pet Shop Friends" from EA, for which I designed sounds and composed additional music, and "Marvel Super Hero Squad" from THQ, on which I was an additional composer as well.

Also, I uploaded four new music pieces to the new Portfolio section. They are called "City Adventure", "City Battle", "The Voyage Begins" and "The Grand Party".