Creator / SoundSmith

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SoundSmith (real first name Ethan) is a YouTube content creator, most well-known for videos based on Team Fortress 2. His most popular video sagas include TF2 Stereotypes (to his chagrin) discussing stereotypes associated with specific hats, weapons and miscs in TF2, Mann's Guide videos that demonstrate "pro" gameplay gimmicks with various TF2 weapons, the How to Trolldier educational series, MVM Shenanigans that shows his exploits in the Mann vs. Machine gamemode, and various gimmicky videos of him goofing off with his friends. He's attempted at various points to branch out into more variety content, most notably with Sandbox Shenanigans in Garry's Mod.

Oh, and he also does music. That's where the name comes from.

Series Created with their own pages:

• Mann's Guide
• TF2 Stereotypes

Tropes:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: In Monthly Meatloaf: The Edgy Banana, Sound calls himself a "sucker for alliteration", as to why the series was named "Monthly Meatloaf".
• Anti-Humor: In this promotion for the video sponsor, one of the reasons why Soundsmith vouches for Opera GX is because other browsers tend to explode his computer when he tries to open them while playing graphically intensive games. Opera GX's process limiter prevents this, so Soundsmith "[doesn't] have to worry about [his] computer exploding in a comically large fireball." His computer doesn't explode into a comically large fireball, so the scene just depicts him standing next to his computer for an extended moment while nothing happens.
• Author Catchphrase:
  • "We take those!" - after a kill he thinks he didn't deserve.
  • "I respect that." - after the enemy player does something stupid yet worth admiring just for the sheer ballsiness of it.
  • "This is cursed!" - whenever something exceptionally weird or stupid happens.
  • "What a gamer."
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: He's primarily focused on doing stupid gimmicks and tactics for the hell of it, but considering he mostly plays on Capture the Flag servers - the casualest Team Fortress 2 can be - it can end up being surprisingly effective, and he's genuinely quite good at the game once he starts playing seriously.
• Burger Fool: Invoked with "Tower Unite is Ridiculous":
  [In response to Soundsmith saying he saw animatronics at Sisi's Pizza]: "Those aren't animatronics, those are cashiers, Ethan."
  "No no no no, they gotta be animatronics, dude, they looked so dead inside, it was crazy."
• Casual-Competitive Conflict: invoked Discussed in "Tryhards, Friendlies, and the 50/50 Rule", where Ethan details the longstanding animosity between people who play TF2 as a silly, casual experience where they can mess around and not take it seriously and the people who play it precisely because it's a Hero Shooter and always try their hardest to win even when the stakes are low. Even though he very clearly slants toward the "silly bullshit" side himself, he brings up a variety of reasons why common arguments and rhetoric thrown around over this topic from both sides have a kernel of truth to them but otherwise aren't productive^note e.g. the mirroring arguments of "just go to a silly server" and "just go play competitive" have similar problems; being silly in a dedicated server isn't as special or memorable as doing it in regular Casual and TF2 Competetive is a severely flawed and all-but-abandoned game mode that no one really uses. He proposes something called the "50/50 Rule" to try and help defuse arguments of this sort between players—basically, the onus is on you to read the room and follow the general tone of a server if at least 50% of it (12 out of 24 players) is behaving a certain way. For example, killing friendlies in a server where most people are goofing off and not fighting each other is just as annoying and toxic as outright throwing a game by giving an enemy medic with Uber prepared a Sandvich where most people are actually playing the game and trying to defeat each other.
• Chekhov's Gun: The flash grenades in Himbo Man, which starts as the friends questioning why the bank guards would have them.invoked Ethan uses them to get past the final group of guards between him and the escape point.
• Censored for Comedy: In one of his Human: Fall Flat videos, he gets asked "what's your fetish?" as a part of a gag. The answer got bleeped out, and then his friends suggest replacing the answer with a long bleep for that exact reason. By SoundSmith's admission, his response was "the most vanilla shit ever", but bleeping it out made it sound much more depraved.
• Crazy Enough to Work: The point of the "Casual Meta" series; Ethan and his friends taking silly-looking class compositions and insane tactics that in no way should work on any serious server, but a combination of playing gamemodes as far from serious as you can get and the strategies just being too ridiculous for any reasonable player to expect typically results in the gang performing well.
• Cyanide Pill: He's incredibly fond of using a killbind whenever something mildly amusing happens, or just for a quick laugh.
• Death from Above: Soundsmith's preferred playstyle is this, jumping high with loadouts on Soldier and Demoman to soar through the battlefield and nail unsuspecting players.. He also pulled off a similar trick in Valheim.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In some of his earliest videos, he claims to be a Heavy main. Considering that in the modern day he's universally known as "the Trolldier guy", has made dozens of informational videos on how to play Trolldier, most of the background footage in his videos is of him playing Trolldier on Hightower and/or 2Fort unless it's supposed to be something specific and supposedly his very first time playing TF2 ever had him inspired to play Trolldier, this can seem strange to contemporary viewers.
• Failed a Spot Check: In the "Sentry Placement" Casual Meta, Ethan and KJ are experimenting with unusual places to stick sentries. At one point, KJ is looking for a place to set his sentry down, completely oblivious to all the players right beneath him, all the while Ethan repeatedly warns him that he's about to be blown up. After he predictably gets blown up, KJ still insists they "just appeared out of nowhere."
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: During Recreating an Average Episode Of Johnny Test, Gunk changes his screen name to "Nae Nae sfx" to Ethan's amusement. Paying attention to the chat in the previous clip lets you see the exact moment Gunk makes the change.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: "10 Tips To Improve Your Audio For TF2 Content", as the title suggests, is less about the game itself and more about audio recording, editing, and processing.
• Hard Work Fallacy: This underlines his opinion on game balancing, a perspective perhaps rooted in his less-showcased enthusiasm for certain "children's fighting games": Success in killing enemies and winning the match should depend on the effort and skill you put into your gameplay, "earning" your success. This leads him to have some strong opinions on some of 'Team Fortress 2's mechanics:
  • He's openly opposed to random crits and wishes Valve would remove them entirely, and outside of most melee fights he'll kill himself and apologize if he ends up killing someone with a random-crit kill. This extends to melee crits as well, as the first part of "How to Counter Trolldier" demonstrates:
    [Sarcastic] Hey Soldier, that's a nice earned crit you got there. I got something better! [Random-crit kills a Demoman while "ISNT RNG GREAT?!?" flashes on screen]
  • Prior to Jungle Inferno, the infamous effectiveness of the "Reserve Shooter" on Pyro (being able to crit-attack players made airborne by an airblast) and the ease of abusing the Dead Ringer to evade being killed on Spy felt so unbalanced to him that he refused to use the weapons on actual players. Even after the nerfs, Soundsmith admits he still feels a little dirty using the latter.
  • Between TF2's Jungle Inferno update in October 2017 and the Blue Moon Update of March 2018, he felt terrible playing Pyro due to base flamethrower damage across all flamethrowers being strong enough to heavily wreck multiple enemies just by charging forward and flailing the mouse around.
• In-Joke: "Wasting My Money Unboxing 117 Summer Cosmetic Crates" has Soundsmith learn about one particular inside joke with his friends: Slender Man apparently stalks Lee through various forms of media, to which Lee gets annoyed and considers him a Sitcom Arch-Nemesis.
• Insistent Terminology: He tends to call any shovel he finds a Market Gardener, and any sort of melee Death from Above "market gardening", even if he isn't playing TF2.
• Lethal Chef: "DYNAMITE SPAGHETTI" has Soundsmith and friends imagining a invokedSpin-Off Cookbook detailing their various misadventures in food, Real Life or not. Of the three suggested recipes in it, a chocolate chip cookie recipe with black beans substituting the chocolate is the least harmful dish. The other two recipes are "good spaghetti with a cartoon dynamite stuck in it" and "burnt hot pocket with glass shards in it".
• Made of Explodium: In Every Early 2000s Discovery Channel Show, The Stinger features Bob Fart visiting a military surplus store and learning that they're selling a bomb. As if on cue, the bomb explodes right after Bob exclaims that it's a bomb. An outtake just before the video ends has that same bomb exploding in reaction to a glass bottle rolling off the shelf that it's resting on.
• Manipulative Editing: Parodied with Wolf's callout video in The Scoundrels Return, where Wolf claims Ethan confessed to manipulating upgrade prices. Said confession is a Discord message where Ethan's response has "Yes" covering it and the rest crossed out with two thin lines, leaving the original message extremely clear.
• Metaphorgotten: The stereotype for Ze Ubermensch, a cosmetic giving Medic the mustache reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche:
  He stared into the abyss and the abyss stared back. [Beat] The abyss was a sniper sightline. He's gone, he game-ended.
• Ragdoll Physics: Ethan has an affinity for this, and loves funny ragdolls of all kinds. He even dedicated an entire video to them. His love of funny ragdolls is so well-known that animator SilentManJoe made an animation lampshading it and poking lighthearted fun at Ethan for it.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: One of Soundsmith's friends and regular collaborators, OrnaBug, uses an orange Lurantis playermodel wearing TF2's "Company Man" ballcap while taking part in Sandbox Shenanigans video, giving him a very cute-looking appearance admist all the stupid/weird shit the gang does in Garry's Mod.
• Schmuck Bait: One Trashmann video has him use a cancellable taunt after "killing" a Dead Ringer Spy. He takes the bait and dies for real as a result.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • At one point in "Monthly Meatloaf: The Legendary Quadruple Doink", a player named Overlord deduces that SoundSmith is on the server^note Ethan was using the alias "Epic Gamer" during the match and promptly asks him what his hat stereotype is. Ethan then promptly disconnects without bothering to respond to him.
• Shamu Fu: He's fond of Scout's Holy Mackerel. One of his videos is titled "Fish" and consists of him and his friends slapping people with it for 14 minutes.
• Shout-Out: Lots of them.
  • Too many JoJo's Bizarre Adventure references to count, bordering on Author Appeal.
  • Bordering on Take That!, he did two episodes with Johnny Test-based titles. Both videos were focused on the Disciplinary Action as nods to the show's infamous overuse of whip crack sound effects.
  • All three Trashmann videos begin with a bit featuring The Trashman from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
  • Casual Meta: Garbage Day is a Whole-Plot Reference to Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2.
  • When talking about Cyberpunk 2077's acceleration bug, he describes it as flying before changing his tune, saying "To be fair, it's not flying. Jump good".
  • Tons in the Human: Fall Flat videos, mostly regarding the skins used by the group, including The Purple Guy, Handsome Squidward, and The Nostalgia Critic^note To make the reference even stronger, Doug's screaming and the beginning of The Review Must Go On is played during the short clip where the skin is revealed.
  • The sponsor segment for I'm Not Built for Casual at 3 A.M. Anymore has Ethan and Chris talk while the "da da da" scene from The Krusty Krab Training Video plays outside their door with a Soundsmith plush replacing the Krabby Patty.
  • In "How to Trolldier: Direct Combat Techniques", Smith up ILDPRUT's in-depth document on jumping in TF2. Immediately after revealing he used it as a source, Smith puts a faux-citation on screen whilst saying "Please don't kill me, H.Bomberguy!"
• Shovel Strike: As a general rule, if a game features a shovel as a weapon, he will make use of it. In Team Fortress 2, the Market Gardener is his weapon of choice, and he has made several videos about using it more effectively.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Tends to happen whenever Soundsmith's friends/fellow TF2tubers are part of the video, especially with Bearded Expense.
• Stylistic Suck: In The Scoundrels Return, Wolf makes a fake YouTube video accusing Ethan of manipulating the in-game upgrade costs with this quality.
• Take That!:
  • ENHANCED FLAVA (Safe for YouTube Edition!!) is a jab at YouTube's excessive demonetization systems, with Ethan employing equally excessive censor bars that sometimes cover the majority of the screen for even the smallest pieces of player gibs.
  • The sponsorship segment for The Fragile Spy contains a brief segment where fictional characters talk about their experiences on the sponsored website, sneaking in a couple of quick shots in the process:
    • Dallas from the PAYDAY games ends his segment by claiming he made enough money to buy a "good sequel to PAYDAY 2".
    • Streamer Guy is a thinly veiled caricature of PirateSoftware, with Streamer Guy mentioning how he used to work at Bungie while also claiming he rarely mentions that about himself and calling himself a "cool and awesome" guy on his virtual blackboard.
• "Truman Show" Plot: One series of VPN sponsorships sees a duo of cybercriminals (represented by the PAYDAY gang) trying to steal peoples virtual information but getting stopped at every turn by the sponsored VPN. The first criminal is soon revealed to be in league with a mysterious corporation trying to get his partner to use the VPN himself before a series of events including multiple random people bringing up the VPN unprompted to the partner causes them to get suspicious. Lampshaded by the first criminal in the segment in Sniper Roulette, who name drops the Trope Namer when warning his bosses about the partner's doubts.
• Where's the Kaboom?: In Every Early 2000s Discovery Channel Show, Alan picks up one of the unclaimed packages he's selling as mystery boxes in Alan's Antiques. He casually remarks that "it could be a bomb" three times in a row, dramatically throwing it against the floor each time. The mystery package doesn't explode.
• With This Herring: invoked The "Trashmann" video series is a series of frag montage compilations of him using weapons considered, well, "trash" by the TF2 playerbase to get genuinely impressive kills as a joke:
  • The first video has him using the Back Scatter on Scout, generally considered to be Scout's weakest primary weapon because rewarding mini-crits for hitting enemies in the back at the cost of being an overall less effective Scattergun just isn't worth it.
  • "The Trashmann Returns" has him using the Enforcer on Spy, usually taking top spot for Spy's weakest revolver because its literal only upside at the cost of all its downsides is that it does an extra four damage when Spy is disguised, which is when he should be backstabbing people anyway.
  • "Trashmann Rising" has him using the Equalizer on Soldier, a melee weapon that deals more damage the lower Soldier's total health is at the cost of doing less when it's fuller. Using your melee weapon at low HP, especially as Soldier, is suicidal, and the weapon is usually regarded as Overshadowed by Awesome in comparison to its sister weapon the Escape Plan, which allows Soldier to retreat faster while the weapon is drawn.
• Your Costume Needs Work: "I'm Fake (PSA)" focuses on people accusing Ethan of being a fake SoundSmith even though he's wearing his signature Time Warp Dr's Dapper Topper^note Pro tip: there are only like three or four Time Warp Dr's Dapper Toppers in existence. If you see someone wearing one in-game, odds are it probably actually is him.