Sound Design Demo Reel

A showcase of my best sound design work - A demonstration of what I am able to produce.

I particularly enjoy creating sound to add depth to fantasy and sci-fi settings. While making sound for for fantasy worlds I enjoy recording and experimenting with organic textures to create lush magical shimmers, hard-hitting elemental FX.

When working on the futuristic side of things I enjoy using heavy processing to transform source material and bring life to the scientific and technical.

Push Gaming Reel

A showcase of some of my sound design work while working at Push Gaming.

For each game shown audio direction, SFX creation and implementation, and music implementation were all solely completed by me.

Push’s target audio aesthetic is punchy, modern, and highly synchronised to gameplay while also matching the aesthetic dictated by highly-specific themes and artwork.

Because each game implements simple themes as 2D art and animations there is a lot of space for abstract and high-quality thematic sound to provide polish and enhance the production.

Sam Merryweather

Hey there! I’m Sam and I’m a sound designer in the game and interactive media space.

Since I was a child I’ve been obsessed with the sensation of sound. From impersonating bus doors, learning the clarinet, all the way through to using digital audio workstations - my life has seemingly constantly revolved around the ever-important sense our ears allow us to experience.

My interest in sound ignited fully as a teenage as I taught myself guitar, experimented with synthesisers, and began following whatever sounds intrigued me in the world of audio.

My most recent chapter takes me into the world of game audio, which I have been working in professionally since 2022 - my current role is Senior Audio Designer at Push Gaming.

Sound Design Portfolio

Here you can see some of my favourite sound design projects

Some of my favourite sound design work alongside other cool sound-related projects. Enjoy!

Airwiggles x ASoundEffect Sound Design Competition

The rules for the competition were to produce sound for the clip using only the source material provided. Using Granulator II in Ableton I processed pieces of source material to create lots of new audio textures to layer and edit together. My efforts were recognised by the judges and I won the Production Award in the contest [LINK]

Black Myth: Wukong Trailer Sound Re-design

Showcasing impressive spell and attack animations, I wanted to try my hand at creating hard-hitting elemental magic and staff weapon sounds. This design relied heavily on creating my own source material processing sounds from Soundly, followed byprecise layering and editing to be fluid and impactful.

Demon’s Souls Trailer Sound Re-design

As a passionate FromSoftware fan I was elated when BluePoint dropped the trailer for a completely refreshed version of Demon’s Souls with contemporary graphics and animations. I was really impressed by the quality of the magic, weapon, and character sounds and wanted to try my hand at design sound for a clip of the trailer.

Armored Core VI - Announcement Trailer Sound Re-design

I was incredibly excited when the trailer for Armored Core VI dropped I had to put some sound over the impressive animations produced by the FromSoftware team. I used a lot of metal, destruction, and explosion sounds to produce an intense industrial aesthetic - I also used extensive processing on my chosen source material to produce a bank of electricity, impacts, and buildups that could be edited to follow the action-packed movements of the mechs.

Dead Space UI and Atmosphere Sound Re-design

The Dead Space remake has a rich and truly scary soundscape that places you right in the heart of the Ishimura mining ship. It also does incredibly immersive work the with game’s UI. I wanted to try and create and fit some UI sounds around a similarly scary atmosphere with the goal to keep the player fully immersed in the game world even while doing something as game-y as saving their progress.

Gris - Sound Re-design

Nomada Studio’s Gris really resonated with me when I played it - particularly the beautiful score and lush sound design. It inspired me to try and create some of that audio beauty myself so I did a short re-design using lots of wonderful chime-y pads and warm synth layers.

Moving Meditiations VFX Competition Sound Design

Moving Medititations was a competition run by a community of VFX artists who had to use the same animation in creative renders. I wanted to add sound to a few of them, drawing from and adding to the imaginative worlds created by the artists.

Sniper Elite 5 Slow-mo X-ray Kill - Sound Re-design

Here’s a nasty one! A truly disgusting audio re-design I did for one of the X-Ray kills in Sniper Elite 5.

Thin Air Exhibition Audiovisual Project

I visited Thin Air, an Audiovisual exhibition, showcasing atmospheric installations from 404.zero, S E T U P, and Matthew Schreiber.

While there I experimented with long exposure photography. The images you see are straight out the camera with no editing, which had me very excited when peering at the small LCD on my camera in the dark.

I also made some audio recordings of the exhibits which were processed and combined with my favourite photos from the day to create dark and synthetic sci-fi atmospheres.

Secret Level: And They Shall Know No Fear Sound Re-design

In the show edit, this particular section pulls back almost all of the FX and focuses on music so I wanted to see how it would work the other way around with only sound FX. I wanted the Space Marines to move and fight with massive weight and try to communicate just how truly unstoppable they are. The big metal lads win again.

Demon’s Souls Trailer - Creature Sound Re-Design

As part of my ongoing obsession with the Souls series I wanted to try and create some epic and terrifying creature sounds to fit against the Dragon God from the Demon’s Souls Trailer

Behind the Sounds

Here is a look behind the curtain, into the DAW, at how some of the sounds I create come together. There’s cool synth patches, editing run-downs, and breakdowns of my approach when making nice noises!

Organic Whooshes using Tonsturm Whoosh, Phase Plant, and Tech Audio’s XY Pad

I wanted to produce a bunch of airy organic whooshes for general use on a game project. I had the idea to smash together a few sound design concepts I’d learned to create the whooshes. The first is routing Reaper tracks into the inputs of Whoosh, which I learned from David Dumais’ video. This allows much more flexibility when choosing what audio to turn into a whoosh. I thought one way to get the ultimate amount of constantly-changing source material to route into Whoosh would be to use four instances of Phase Plant running the granular engine. Finally, I used Tech Audio’s Reaper XY Pad to modulate the Phase Plant macros to allow me to perform changes in whoosh.

David Dumais - Whoosh with Reaper track input: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceC_RDgx71s

Phase Plant (the GOAT): https://kilohearts.com/products/phase_plant

TechAud.io - Reaper XY Pad: https://techaud.io/projects/xy-pad/

DOOM Machine and Voice Processing

I love the crunchy and powerful sound of the recent DOOM entries by iD Software - particularly the music created by Mick Gordan - I wanted to try and follow his philosophy of transforming pure sine waves to filthy bass sounds through extensive colouration and processing. In exploring this idea I created my own “DOOM Machine” Ableton FX rack. I also had great fun doing some voice processing creating an homage to the iconic monologue introducing the Slayer - nasty!

Food Death! Gore Recording Session

Using some fresh crispy peppers and some very well-done sourdough toast I created some brutal and crushing gore sounds! The raw recordings where extensively processed to bring out the low-end in the recording.

An important note: no food went to waste during these sessions. Most of the peppers were roasted and turned into a delicious pasta sauce although some were consumed with hummus during the recording process.

Below you can find some footage from just a few of the projects I designed sound for while working at Push Gaming. You can also find links to demos of each game to play them for yourself. Enjoy the Sounds!