Have you ever wondered about how sound technicians and engineers manage to catch the background noises in a film? Will it be possible to create all the sound effects from scratch? Where does the roar of a dragon, the sound of the fighting swords in Star Wars or the weird footsteps of a cartoon come from?
Though the list of the possible answers is very long, you will be surprised to realize that most of the sound effects and noises you need can easily be found and recorded at home.
This article provides some suggestions (not all, for the sake of our job) about one the most creative jobs, that of the sound designer , the person who is able to match the sound effects and the images to create the suitable atmosphere around what you are watching in a film or in a videogame.
There’s no need either to go to the seaside to catch and record the sound of the waves or wait for the bad weather for the rain; most of the so-called SFX can be definitely reproduced at home using the right devices just like a good microphone.
1. Waterworld
The sound of water, in all its forms, is a multifunctional element in the gaming industry. It represents one of the most difficult sound effects to record or create.
Let’s pretend we have to shoot a scene in a film where it is pouring down with rain for several minutes.
The first thing that would come up to your mind would be google to check the weather forecast, find out a day when it is expected to rain and stand with your waterproof poncho and a condenser microphone in the middle of the street, making a fuss about when the downpour starts. What if it doesn’t rain? A work day wasted and that’s all.
The home solution for the rain SFX is your home shower. Let the water run through the hand shower, place a directional microphone behind the shower box- or near the bathtub – and record as long as you want. The raw result will already be very close to the natural raining event. We only need some computer tweaking and we will finally have our own artificial rain.
Open your ‘shower’ file in any digital audio workstation, add a reverb on the track and you’ll immediately notice the difference. Reverb adds depth to the sound, progressively widening the width of the room in which the recording had been taken. It will be your personal taste that will determine how much reverb (or any other plug-in space effect you like!) the audio file needs.
What about thunder? Well, unless you are a skilled noisemaker/beatboxer, the easiest gimmick is to record a thunder with some makeshift object: a stack of books falling down to the floor, a box rolling down the stairs, a drawer violently emptied on your desk. The more complex the fall, the easier it will be to reproduce the crack of lightning.
This audio file (called ‘fall’ for the occasion) can also be worked on in any DAW. The basic effects to be included are the pitch shifter and reverb, again.
The pitch shifter will allow us to lower the pitch of the audio track to low frequencies, similar to those deep rumbling thunder sound, while the reverb add-on will work the same as we did on the ‘shower’ file: creating depth, length and space to a dull noise, which would otherwise immediately cease.
If we apply these rules to any other “water” field, we will have a wide range of examples:
- noise of a waterfall = bath tap at maximum pressure;
- anybody swimming in the lake = stirring water in a sink;
- crashing sea waves = abruptly pouring a basket of water into the washbasin;
- dripping noise in a cave = drops from a tap falling into a tub;
The last fluid worth a word about is magma, i.e. the emission of lava from a volcano. This is a characteristic geological element in some documentaries, fantasy films and video games.
In this case, if you don’t want to risk your life on the crest of a volcano during an eruption, go to the kitchen and cook a tomato sauce: record the cooking noise and enjoy the artificial lava with lots of lapilli. If the pot is big enough, the pitch shifter may not be needed just like a good reverb that we mentioned above.
2. Roars
The roar of both animals and imaginary creatures may seem at first something really complex to reproduce. Once again, it’s possible to avoid the trip to the Amazon rainforest and create animal noises either with household objects or with our own voice.
Let’s take the example to its extreme: how do we make the typical noise of a monster?
Our vocal cords are the first quick and available solution for creating funny – and creepy – effects. However, it doesn’t mean that you have to reproduce the roar vocally, because the result will always be far from realistic .
You’d better take into consideration coughing, sneezing, yawning grunting and even burping because they are what you need for your roaring sound design. Record as much material as possible when you are ‘inspired’ and upload all recordings to an audio program.
Is there anything more to create roaring ? Of course there is. Go through the doors and windows in your house and see which one squeaks, then record this sound while you move one of them with a directional microphone: the sound of the squeaking can recall that of the roar of a feline, if well adjusticed.
Budding sound designers, two small recommendations for those handling condenser/directional microphones when recording sound effects:
1- You must be still and mute, otherwise even a small itch becomes a car-wash brush heard in headphones.
2- Do not move air while handling objects or your SFX will be covered by an artificial monsoon.
Back to the roar: pitch shifter and chorus are the two essential tools for lowering (or raising) the pitch of the sound event and mucking up the sound, so that your voice or squeak becomes distorted enough not to sound human/real any more.
Anyway, the real core of this sound effect is the overlapping of tracks. For example, if you build several layers and put them together in your DAW in which you can hear all the three at the same time (remember, already pitched at low frequencies, otherwise you’ll only hear three cold idiots in sync), you will have already collected an incredible SFX.
There is no such thing as the perfect recipe for a dragon –like roar rather than a griffin. These tricks can be used according to your personal taste.
3. Footsteps
Foosteps are perhaps the most popular sound effect in the gaming industry.
The real challenge to reproduce the so-called footsteps is not who or what makes the sound, but where it is produced.
Example: level 1 of a shoot-em-up video game, we are in a desolate area covered with rocks and boulders. We have to make the sound of footsteps on the breach. How do we do this?
Well, we can go waking in a park in the middle of the night, putting on heavy boots and walking on gravel hoping not to catch bronchopneumonia and also a volunteer should follow you around with a microphone and a sort of windscreen, in order to avoid recording hours of strong winds at60km/h. Even though you want to record single passages and then edit them separately, outdoor environmental sounds caught with a directional or condenser microphone have a very disturbing background noise in nature, so that the acoustic performance can turn into a frustrating result.
You need the silence of a room in a house, away from the buzzing fridge.
Throw coarse salt mixed with fine salt on a table – with the permission of the superstitious – so grab any pair of shoes. Adjust the microphone in a manner that the gain is high enough (avoiding ambient humming) and let your shoes walk over the salt. The effect will be the same as on gravel.
If you feel like dirtying a square metre of room, pour the salt on the floor, slip on your shoes and walk on the spot, taking breaks between each step: better one or two individual footsteps to fit rather than 10 together. A single air blast, one step lower in volume than the other, or other impurities in the recording can compromise the effectiveness of the sound.
The same principle can be applied to the more classic and generic step sounds, suitable for any indoor scene: choose a room in your house without carpets and record as many steps as you can on wooden floor, marble, tiles – in short, any solid surface.
Pay attention to the pair of shoes you use: no canvas shoes, trainers or anything like that. Boots are the best of all.
Here is a series of steps on surfaces that can be reproduced completely homemade:
Sand
You need a thick layer of flour and a handful of fine salt. It is better to rub a little on them than to walk on them.
Rock
Walk over a few grains of coarse salt scattered on a solid surface. The individual grains can reproduce the sound effect of stones hitting the surface.
Mud
Mix a handful of flour and fine salt with some water, try to make the walking surface less solid. The thicker the fluid, the better the sound effect will be.
Grass
Walk on a mixed base of flour, fine salt and a little coarse salt.
Tip: Place window sill/terrace plants next to your pathway ( without stepping on them ) so that you naturally rub your legs against them every time you take a step. This will add the sound effect of tall grass.
What you have read is not aimed at starting a cooking class at all though the kitchen is a natural SFX goldmine.
Be ingenious with all the cookware in the cupboard, any gizmo can be useful in creating not only the different types of footsteps, but also other sound effects that we ‘d like to talk about in future articles.
Once we finally sit down at the computer and review all the steps we have collected, it will be necessary to do some cleaning for each recorded track .
First, we will need to apply a Gate to the track to eliminate background noise and inaccuracies caused by other sound sources. Then, what makes footsteps reliable and ready to be edited on the audiovisual is a good equalisation.
EQ will eliminate those useless frequencies (e.g. the hum of the fridge that we mistakenly filmed, or someone next door who shouted just when you pressed REC), including unintentional low-frequency hits from movement.
In conclusion this is what a sound designer does. This is not to say that taking live sound is useless, on the contrary, homemade tricks may concern the job of a sound designer when the available equipment doesn’t get along with the budget.
And last but not least, the ability to record millions of homemade SFX samples will save you a lot of time when it comes closer to delivering an assigned work .
Thus, once we have filled our sound stock with plenty of sound effects, we can finally leave home and catch the first flight to New Guinea in order to edt the sound of the Cockatoo on our microphone.
