The sound of rain in movies? Frying bacon.

I have maybe 2 gigs of rain sounds. None of them are bacon. Frying bacon sounds like frying bacon.

Car engines revving in a chase scene? It’s partly engines, but what gives it that visceral, gut-level grist is lion roars mixed in.

This is a gross misquote of the sound design of Batman Begins, which has a Batmobile that sounds like a roaring growling tiger even to the untrained ear. My wife actually turned to me while watching it and said "why is the batmobile growling?" It was in all the literature at the time because whoa - innovative! but nobody does it.

Looking at the IMDb page for Batman Begins, I notice that the sound department has 47 credits. I've mixed six movies now, and only one of them had me farm out foley to another person. That's me, replacing three rooms full of people. "But kleinbl00! You do tiny shitty indie things that get sold directly to video!" True dat, straw man. But I still have a job.

“What separates tremendously gifted designers comes down to taste. Skip has an unfailing sense for the right sound, and how to be simple and precise. He’s not about sound by the pound.”

uhmmm...

The two men stood with their arms crossed and heads cocked at the same angle, reviewing a scene in which a sound cue they had designed had gone awry. The sound, originally of vintage tape decks turning, had ended up evoking a sci-fi odyssey rather than a jazz biopic. One of the problems, it was agreed, is that to the untrained ear, 1970s tape decks sound a bit like lasers.

Lol.

Look. Ostensibly, this article is about my job. But it's all ZOMG UNSPOKEN GENIUSES AMONGZUS. It doesn't take a prodigy to layer three broken glass sounds and drop in door handle foley (know how many different door handles I have?). The real problem with articles like this is every indie shithead that thinks a lego follow focus is a good idea reads this shit and assumes they'll never be able to afford good sound so they might as well mix it themselves. Which is almost always a catastrophe and means that the audience gets a shitty movie, I get no work, and the whole market craters to the point where Skip Lievsay isn't getting work, either.

I use a nifty little piece of software called soundminer. it's the stone shizzle for when you need to build up a commercial in half an hour or a movie in half a month. Someone on the Reddit sound design forum asked if there was software that existed that did exactly what SoundMiner does. Two important takeaways:

1) People in an internet sound design forum had never heard of SoundMiner

2) Once I suggested it I got nothing but downvotes because it costs $800.

“The easiest thing to do would have been to get a manhole cover and record the real thing, but in those days location recording was considered to be too hard in New York City, so I had to do it in the studio,”

You're talking about an $800/day technician in a $2500/day facility burning half a day to get the sound of one mutherfucking manhole cover.

Not even Martin Scorcese gets to make Martin Scorcese movies anymore. It sorta sounds like the object of the article gets this:

Underlying Lievsay manner is his belief, firmly held, that his work is craft, not art. “It’s like making a piece of furniture, or building a house.” As such, he – and the team he leads – has a workmanlike quality.

But The Guardian has to get all

At almost any time of any day, you can find Lievsay seated before a sound console that he designed himself.

Bitch, that's a 16-fader Icon. You could buy that shit at Guitar Center if you were rich enough. And sure - you can build your own console but it's not like you had to get out the soldering iron.

There is something very slightly unnerving about spending time around people whose powers of perception suggest the existence of an entirely different layer of reality that you are missing.

So take a cold shower, come back down to earth, and write about the process you watched, not the process you imagined. Articles like this? They mean some shithead on Reddit is now going to accuse me of not being a real sound designer because I don't have a studio full of manhole covers.