Wave Group Sound is a company you may never have heard of, but whose products you've likely touched make times over in the past 10 years. WaveGroup is an audio production company specializing in sound for games, IVR (interactive voice response), and Audio UI. A few of the products they've helped build include Guitar Hero, Jambox, and Rock Band.
Co-founded by Will Littlejohn in 1996, the company has taken a series of twists and turns to become one of the premiere audio creators in the world. After 10 years of performing as a professional musician, Will decided to make a new career out of his passion with audio and music. He jumped back into school and literally took every class the teachers would allow him to sit in on.
He eventually secured an internship with the audio post production team behind Bump in the Night, a stop motion animated TV series produced in a 40,000 sq ft building in Brisbane. "I went in as an unpaid intern at the age of 30, and sucked in every bit of knowledge that I could."
After Disney acquired ABC and subsequently cancelled the series, he went into business with his former boss, continuing on at WaveGroup (the company that had originally hired him) and started doing audio work for companies in Silicon Valley. Within a year he had bought out his former boss and found himself the sole owner of the company where he had started as an intern.
Now established in the valley, WaveGroup rode the dot com roller coaster, working with some of the iconic names of the time. He still has a Pets.com sock puppet and an Aeron chair from Quokka Sports in his office to remind him of the times.
In 2003 WaveGroup partnered with Harmonix (Rock Band creators) to create the music for Karaoke Revolution, the groundbreaking singing game published by Konami. That game turned into a series, and by the time Guitar Hero came along they had produced hundreds of songs for the music game genre. Will's and his team created almost all the music for Guitar Hero 1, 2, and GH: Rocks the 80's, as well as songs for Rock Band, Beatmania, Dance Dance Revolution, Samba De Amigo, Dance Central, and many others.
Their team has produced all new, high quality recordings of virtually every style of popular music. They've recorded over 600 songs since 2003 ranging from full big band and orchestral based classics to speed metal, country, rock, R&B, and hard core punk. If full horn and string section were necessary to get the job done, then Will's team brought them into the studio. At the height of production, they were averaging 8 completed songs per week with close to 20 people working around the clock. This is the equivalent of producing a full album every week and half, week in and week out. Without a scrap of sheet music, WaveGroup meticulously arranged, produced, recorded and mixed many of the iconic songs of the twentieth century for the game industry.
Will and his team never produced low quality cover band music, they approached every song like it was the original recording. "We would hire the very best talent for every instrument, including voice." For a classic funk duet, Will convinced the lead singers from both Tower of Power and Santana to participate. "The people we worked with were amazing," Will says. "Ultimately these games are a gateway drug to real instruments. We wanted to inspire people to pickup a guitar or bang on some drums and learn how to play. That was a big motivation for everyone involved."
The music game genre has died down somewhat, but WaveGroup has never seen a slowdown in business. Besides being a leader in music creation for games, the company also is a leader in the production of IVR systems for major companies such as American Express and Fidelity Investments. Over the years, they have produced millions of lines of dialog with a very high level of accuracy.
On producing great work, Will told me "I think it's difficult to produce great work in general. The product itself isn't really the challenge, it's creating something special that achieves the need the product creates. In my case, it never seems to come easy."
As if this wasn't enough, Will and his team have created the user interface sounds used in millions of phones, audio design for theme park rides at Epcot Center, and even the audio UI design for Jawbone's latest hit JAMBOX. When he met with Jawbone, Will was tasked with creating the same level of high design aesthetics for the audio interface as famed product designer Yves Behar was creating for the outside of the box. The Jambox is the biggest selling bluetooth speaker in the U.S., and the only one that communicates with you through voice prompts and descriptive audio tones.
When your client list includes Apple, Microsoft, NASA, Oracle, Activision, HP, MTV, and LucasArts, you know you're doing something right.
On his flexibility to be adaptable and go after new opportunities as they became available, Will says, "It's easy if you are passionate about a particular thing. In my case, I love sound. I'm always looking for ways in which I can apply my passion to new and interesting problems and opportunities."
Q: Has it been hard to produce great work in so many different types of products?
But how do they maintain such a high quality bar across ?
"I like to envision the end result of a project as the perfect design. I imagine how people will respond to the audio we are creating, how it makes them feel about the technology with which they are interacting. Of course we never reach that perfect design, but it helps to push our team closer to that ideal and not settle. Also, it helps that hate bad audio."