This week was a busy week with my time spent planning a load of new free sound effects, both from some local locations and some Foley recorded in our studio. I also have spent the remainder of the weed becoming compliant with the new GDPR regulations which I’ll talk about in a different post. But as always, here is a quick run down of just 2 of the new free sfx batches just added to the library:
Underwater sounds
I love the creative process of working out ways to manipulate recordings into something else. In fact, this week I used some above water recordings to create underwater sounds. This was actually one of the first techniques I ever learned and it is still one I use regularly. While we have a hydrophone for actual underwater recordings, it’s also possible to create realistic submerged sounds by simply taking water splashes, movements and flowing and pitch them down and play with EQ to get an authentic underwater sound.
I set up my microphone about 2 foot above the surface of a swimming pool and used my hands to make several splashes, swirls and other movements. I then took some plastic tube and blew bubbles both deep and shallow and recorded these too.
Back in the studio, I imported all the recordings into Adobe Audition and mixed them into a single two track file. Then using some simple pitch shifting I lowered the pitch by about 20 semitones and applied a high-cut filter. This produced a long file of underwater movements and bubbles that was very realistic. I edited the file into several shorter sound effects and added them here.
Cinematic hits
I probably have been missing a trick or two since upgrading to Logic Pro X which I use for creating our royalty free music as it comes with two fantastic multi-effects plugins great for sound design, Step FX and Phat FX. I think it’s probably best to write a separate review of these 2 plugins due to their complex nature, but let’s just say that they come jammed with reverbs, delays, filters and more plus the former has a step sequencer that is great for modulating the parameters and generating some great sounds.
I took lots of glass impacts and smashes, metal and other impacts and loaded them all onto a single audio track. Then I set up Logic’s AutoFilter, ModDelay, Chroma Reverb and some other effects and ran the sounds through them. I could go into great detail about creating these sounds, but it’s probably just better to let you here them, which you can (and download in mp3 or wav formats for free) here.
In fact this is a brand new category just for cinematic sound effects for movies and trailers (and anything else) which I’ll be working on adding new sounds to regularly.
Comments are closed.