It’s that time again when I get to write an article on one of my favorite themes – welcoming a new contributor. This time I’m delighted to announce that West Wolf has added some excellent sounds to our growing library. The collection mostly comprises ambiences, with a few other categories thrown in and this article provides a quick summary of the sound effects on offer.
This new selection of around fifty sounds is diverse and what I particularly like, even before you get to listening to the audio, is that you can see what equipment was used to make some of the recordings just by looking at the links to the files. So right away you can see that the equipment quality is great. But what about the subjects chosen and the way the audio is showcased?
West Wolf has given us another fairly dynamic collection of sounds, which I personally prefer, rather than having everything turned up as loud as possible. The subjects are interesting, well-recorded and certainly fill some holes in my library.
The first sound on West Wolf’s contributor page is, at the time of writing this article anyway, a traffic recording. What sets this recording apart from so many of the countless other traffic recordings though is that it captures vehicles traveling through winter slush. Wet weather traffic recordings are few and far between in my personal sound library so I am very glad to have access to it. There is another capturing traffic going through a tunnel and one recording of traffic at night as well, which provide other interesting perspectives on a well-covered subject.
Another well-covered subject with some interesting new takes is nature ambiences. There’s a night ambience with crickets, I don’t think you can ever have too many of those in case your night scenes start sounding canned; a storm; you can never have too many of those either; a campfire with birds, a forest river, a very lush Spring ambience complete with prominent cuckoo sounds, which, at least in the UK, are becoming rarer and, lastly and most uniquely for me, a street ambience featuring one tree full of lots of birds as its center-piece.
There are also farm animal sounds including hens and roosters, which are recorded nice and close, but could equally be used as a background element in a dawn scene and some pigs feeding, which make a couple of interesting sounds, which, although the recording is an ambience and the vocalizations are mixed with the feeding sounds, could be used as source material for interesting monster sound design. It’s not often I say that about pig sounds, since I think their squeals in particular are rather over-used as a monster basis, but I found a couple of these sounds rather inspiring.
There are more industrial and urban ambiences such as a subway, a restaurant kitchen ambience, a construction site and, most interestingly, a woodcutter ambience. In addition, there are carpenter’s tools such as a circular saw and a belt-grinder.
In short, this contribution represents a very well-rounded, elaborately described addition to our collection of sounds and we want to thank West Wolf very much for letting us host them! Of course, the sounds I’ve highlighted above are just the ones that stood out to me. Why not browse West Wolf’s sounds for yourself and see how you can put them to work in your projects. Then, head on over to their corner at A Sound Effect to check out what else they has available.
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