Recording Sound Effects: Avoiding Unwanted Background Noise

When recording sound effects, usually a clean isolated sound is required with no unwanted background noise. Even noisy ambiences can suffer from undesirable noise and once it’s been recorded, it’s usually very difficult, if not impossible to remove. With increasing traffic on our roads and more and more aircraft in our skies, recording outdoor sound effects can be tricky. But even the natural sounds around us can be undesirable too. Insects, birds, wind, the ocean... We can’t control them so how can we eliminate them? .....

Recording Sound Effects: Onboard a Commercial Aircraft

Recording on commercial aircraft is a complicated and time-consuming task. It involves planning, special equipment, time and money. Although the price of commercial flights has dropped massively over the last few years, security is now tighter than ever making this task even harder. If you are planning on taking a trip by plane in the near future and want to record some on-board ambiances, then there are some important considerations to make. .....

Sound Effects: Enhancing Your Movie Going Experience

Imagine this scenario. You have been anxiously awaiting the release of a particular movie in the action/suspense genre. The day has arrived and you are sitting in a darkened theatre, snacking on popcorn, and sipping a large carbonated beverage while thoroughly engrossed in what is transpiring on the “big screen”. In an often-used scene in many suspense thrillers, an unsuspecting victim (usually of the female persuasion) leaves work and walks to her car in a deserted parking garage .....

Sound Effects: The Five Categories that Bring a Movie to Life

In Merriam-Webster’s On-line Dictionary, sound effects are defined as “effects that are imitative of sounds called for in a script of a dramatic production (as a radio show) and that enhance the production’s illusion of reality.” This definition first appeared in Webster’s New International Dictionary issued in 1909 .....

Sound Effects 101: Introduction to Sound Waves

To appreciate what goes into the making of sound effects or if you are looking to create them yourself, it is important to have a basic understanding of sound waves. This knowledge will be especially crucial when recording sounds to create various sound effects .....

Frequency Manipulation to Create Sound Effects

Before you can begin creating professional, top-of-the-line sound effects, it is imperative to have a basic understanding of sound frequency. Generally referred to as “audio frequency” or “audible frequency,” sound frequency is simply the range of vibrations heard and/or discerned by the average human ear .....

Sound Effects: The Importance of “Giving Space”

When creating your sound effects library, you may feel as though your efforts are more trial and error than anything else. Because of this, it may appear you are wasting time and effort producing sub-par effects that are garbled, cut-off, distorted or otherwise unusable. Professional sound engineers the world over will generally .....

Sound Effects: Recording on Location

While a having a studio and digital sound manipulating and editing equipment can give your sound effects library a professional sound, the fact of the matter is that a comprehensive sound effects library is going to require a lot .....

Sound Effects: All about Sample Rate

When creating, recording, storing, and replaying your sound effects digitally, it is vitally important that you have a basic understanding of sampling rates. Quite simply, the sample rate of a digital sound card is the number of audio signal samples taken per second .....

Sound Effects: Audio File Formats 101

When creating individual sound effects or beginning or adding to a comprehensive sound effects library, chances are you are going to be using digital audio files to house your sound effects .....

Sound Effects: The Importance of Metadata

Metadata or “information about information” has simplified the process of filing and retrieving sound effects. Think of it this way, without metadata, or descriptive information about the contents of an audio file, your sound files would be a bewildering, nondescript collection of audio waveforms .....

Sound Effects: Dynamics and the Role of Compression

Dynamics, with regard to sound effects, is essentially the audible relationship between loud and soft, low and high volumes in a recording. Since it will be each sound effect’s dynamics that help define what is being heard, dynamics is vitally important to the creation of professional, realistic sounding sound effects .....

Sound Effects: Creating Professional Crash Sounds

In popular cinematography, crash sounds are very important. When you think about it, there is not a single movie, TV series, cartoon or animated feature film where you do not hear something crashing. Car chases include car crashes; action movies have plenty of crashing noises .....

Sound Effects: Introduction to Layering

While watching modern movies, TV series, documentaries or even cartoons, you may or may not be aware of the multitude of sounds that coincide with what is being viewed. Since audible sounds are an integral part of the human experience .....

Sound Effects: Using Pitch Shifting and Pitch Layering

Back in the day of reel-to-reel tape recording, pitch shifting was primarily performed by lowering the speed of a multi track machine or recording one sound source on high speed while recording other sounds on regular speed ....

Sound Effects: Recording and Creating Realistic Animal Sounds

If you are working as a sound designer for a documentary featuring animals, you will find that most sound effects used in the finished product will be created artificially or recorded elsewhere and added to the mix .....

Sound Effects: Creating Ambiences for Your Sound Effects Library

Creating ambiences or background sound effects requires a lot of legwork, persuasion and ingenuity. Depending on how your ambience sound effects will be used, it is important to pay close attention to the environment and the requirements involved to record in that environment. To begin, you will need the necessary equipment .....

Sound Effects: Recording Scorching Hot Fire Sounds

Most sound designers are aware of a particular dilemma. Fire, even when recorded well, does not sound genuine when played over common loudspeakers. Even in theaters where top-of-the-line sound systems provide the best .....

Imaging Elements in Sound Effects: Adding Color, Texture and Accent

Imaging elements are basically sound bites placed behind a visual such as a logo or animation to set a particular mood, make a statement, or add accent. Although these elements are sometimes derived from real world sounds such as explosions, they usually consist of man made sounds created from synthesizers, layering multiple elements, and sound pitching to name a few .....

Sound Effects: Recording Professional Crowd Sounds

Recording your own crowd sound effects is a process that will take time. Unless you have a large budget to hire voice artists to orchestrate crowd sounds, you will need to locate large gatherings and record everything that takes place .....

Sound Effects: Creating Larger Than Life Impact EffectsEvery sound effects library should have a good selection of impact effects. These sound effects are often required in motion pictures, TV series and even commercials. Impact sounds occur all around us .....

Sound Effects: Scenarios for Creating Foley Sound Effects

Jack Foley, a filmmaking sound effects pioneer and father of the Foley art developed many techniques that are still used today. Others were also vital in developing the art of Foley, like Walt Disney who blazed a trail in the sound department by releasing the first animated feature with fully synchronized sound .....

Sound Effects: Use of Low Frequency Effects

While it is widely believed that the widespread use of low frequency sound effects became popular with modern cinematic surround sound such as Dolby, 5.1, THX, SDDS and DTS, this is not the case. In actuality, the use of low frequency sound effects originated in the field of Foley .....

Sound Effects: Using Multimedia Effects

Multimedia sound effects are any effects used to dub a multimedia gadget or computer, including cellular phone sounds. Numerous multimedia sound effects were used in the romantic comedy, “You’ve Got Mail.” In this film, the main protagonists spent much of their time online and many .....

Sound Effects: Getting Around Using Musical Effects

Using music to create sound effects is not a new idea. If you think about it, musical effects have been used since sound first began being added to moving pictures, beginning with a piano player in a theater providing music for silent movies. During this time period, music was composed to .....

Explosion Sound Effects in Modern Cinema

It is no coincidence that a successful movie is called a blockbuster. Many movie goers consider films without explosions and their associated sound effects to be no movies at all. As long as there are explosions and plenty of action, the movie will undoubtedly make money .....

Horror Sound Effects: Heightening a Movie’s Realism

The end of the twentieth century brought a revival of the horror film genre. Outfitted with highly improved special effects and sound effects, the new wave of horror found an avid audience with today’s youth .....