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Answering Your Questions: Glossary of Sound Effects

In the original post, we get a ton of questions asking what keywords should be used when trying to find very specific sounds. While a quick peruse through parts 1,2, and 3 of this series would help, I decided to relay a few of these questions to our editorial team. I’m very curious what buzzwords they will recommend. Continue reading to see if your question was answered!

Let’s start off easy

What do I write when someone quickly grabs someone’s arm?

Brad: face slap

Tess: pat

Katie: body hug, impact body, skin, smack, slap

What should I search for if I want a sound effect for grabbing a bag of chips?

Brad: cellophane

Tess: crinkle, plastic bag drop/impact

Katie: mylar, crinkle plastic, foil, crumple, junk bag

What sound would you use when someone starts to walk?

Sometimes it is easy to overthink search terms when trying to find the perfect sound effect. A lot of the time there isn’t a fancy word for the sound you’re looking for. For example, a footstep would do just fine for this request.

Brad: For this, you’d need to know the surface, but I’d start with a quick scuff or foot drag if you’re trying to highlight the sound

Tess: scuff, skid, lino squeak, basketball squeak

Katie: scuffle, scrape, dirt slide, a cement slide, gravel

What sfx do I use for quickly grabbing an elevator door to stop it from closing?

Brad: metal hollow, metal ring, metal lock, metal latch

Tess: metal hit/impact

Katie: metal duct, container hit

I need a sound for someone sitting on a bed except for the word “creak”.

Sometimes you need to get creative with the words you use when searching for a specific sound. If you are looking up “bed” and not finding anything, think of works associated with a bed or a similar material.

Brad: couch sit, couch plop, cloth hit, cloth impact, cloth movement

Tess: hinge

Katie: springs, pillow hit, cloth drop, laundry, couch

What sound would a bouncing grenade make?

Tip: Doing a quick search on youtube for a reference clip can really help spark inspiration. Listen to examples of the sound you are trying to replicate and try to deconstruct what you hear. A lot of the time there is no one specific sound and what you’re looking for requires a build of multiple sfx’s. Don’t limit yourself!

Brad: metal drop, gun drop, metal hit

Tess: tink

Katie: shell drop, bullet case, metal debris, shiny, solid

What sound would you use when someone grabs your hand and it startles you?

How do you translate emotion into sound? Sometimes trial and error is the only way to find the perfect sound effect. Let’s see what our editors came up with…

Brad: horn, violin pluck

Tess: In my head, this needs to be a build of sounds, maybe a BONK plus a TWANG, and a COWBELL. Other options are POINK, DOINK, or PLUCK

Katie: gasp, surprise, shock, emote, fear, anxiety, curiosity, inhale short

What sound does sushi make?

Context is everything. This type of sound could go in multiple directions; realistic, toony, surreal.

Brad: goop, goo, slime

Tess: splat

Katie: rice cake, squish, wet, slimy

What would I write for an angelic noise?

Brad: angel chorus

Tess: choir, ethereal

Katie: heaven, drone, symphony, gliss, harp, ascend

 

In Search of the Perfect Whoosh: 5 Great Sound Effects Resources

As a sound designer, my sound effects library is one of my most significant resources. It is slightly insane how much time I devote to finding the perfect whoosh, drone, hit or random squishy sound for my sound design work. I can demo hundreds of versions of the same type of sound for hours, looking for one that’s got just a bit more HF or is half a second longer or is a touch more organic than electronic.

I’ve built up my sound effects library with love and care over the years and like most designers, I have my favourite places to find new sounds. Here’s a few:

Pro Sound Effects 

There are two reasons I love ProSoundEffects. One, the single-downloads library is comprehensive, well-organised and the sounds are high-quality. Two, the PSE Hybrid Sound Effects Library is one of the best investments I have ever made as a sound designer and my starting point for creation or inspiration for almost every project. The number of sounds is staggering (tens of thousands), the audio quality is excellent, and it has a good range of more specific sounds not included in a lot of other libraries, underwater, subwoofer, and surround recordings in particular. The Hybrid Library isn’t cheap but you can get a significant discount through the Freelancer Program.

Sonniss 

Sonniss is a great place to find more creative sound effects. I mainly use it to source sound design elements like hits, tones and rises and for interesting atmospheric ambiences and textures for gaming demos. You have to purchase sounds by collection, which can be a little annoying if you’re only after one or two files, but the prices are reasonable, and they do regular sales and giveaways.

A Sound Effect 

A Sound Effect offers libraries from independent sound designers, which means their content is always pretty unique, even if it’s not as comprehensive as some of the other larger websites. It’s also great as a central resource for content that’s otherwise scattered across individual websites. Keep an eye on their social media feeds for sales and free stuff, in particular, the free downloads, which are great for discovering new designers and libraries that you can then explore in more detail.

Freesound 

Freesound is a hidden treasure trove of audio recordings and created sounds. Free to join, it describes itself as a “collaborative database” and as such, although the amount of content is vast, the quality is vastly variable. I use Freesound to find the everyday and the exotic, particularly location recordings of various countries. I’ve found great recordings of medieval battles, Antarctic penguin colonies, Japanese markets and African villages all on Freesound. All sounds are available under a Creative Commons License, so be mindful of this when using the sounds and always attribute as required.

Foley It Up!kirsty-gillmore-aug-2016-pic3

When you can’t find what you’re looking for, record it yourself! It’s fun, free (once you have the kit) and you’re adding to your own FX library. Some of my favourite sounds are ones I created myself and after hours of robotically demo-ing hundreds of sounds, you’ll probably be glad of the fresh air, or at least the blood flowing back into your legs. I created the sound of a girl drowned in a bath with me, my partner, our bathroom, a Zoom H4 out of splash range and well-rehearsed safety signals. Who says sound design isn’t edgy?

There’s a great list of suggestions to get your Foley juices flowing here 

There are tons of sound effects libraries out there, and I’m sure you have your own favourites to add to this list. Once you start building up a collection, the next step is organisation. It’s not as exciting as the sounds themselves, but just as important if you want to avoid hours of trawling to find a precise sound in your database. Expect a future blog post about my journey into audio asset management, but until then, happy whooshing.

 

QLab: An Introduction

 

QLab is my software of choice for playback in musicals and plays. QLab is a Mac-based piece of software that I have found it to be robust, flexible, and quick to program. If you need a playback engine for music tracks or sound effects and you have a Mac, then it’s absolutely worth looking at.

When you first open up QLab, you will see an untitled workspace (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

In order to optimize things while you are programming, it’s wise to set a few preferences. These can be changed later, but I’ll share the way I set things up. At the bottom right-hand side of the workspace is the icon of a cogwheel. Click that and you get to play with the settings behind the screen. (Fig 2)

Fig. 2

If you click on the audio menu on the left-hand side, it will take you to the section where you can set the output device, label the outputs, and set the levels for any new sound cues. I set new cues to be silent with all the cross points in so that I can fade them up to set level rather than fade them down. Then I select the group menu and select the “Start all children simultaneously” option. Clicking “Done” will flip the screen back to the workspace.

Getting audio in is as simple as drag and drop. When you drop something in, a new set of tabs appear at the bottom of the workspace in the inspector. (Fig 3) The tabs I use the most are Device & Levels, Time & Loops, and Audio Effects. As this particular sound effect is something that will run continuously under a scene, I’m going to want to loop it. I’ll need to select the outputs it’s going through and I also may want to add some EQ. That’s all available there in the software.

Fig. 3

Playing just traffic on its own could get a bit monotonous, so I want to add a few car horns, but I don’t want to trigger them all individually. In order to do this, I need to create a group cue.  By clicking on the square outline on the top menu bar (or select it from the cues menu) a box will appear in the workspace. As I’ve chosen all children at once, it will be a green one.  Drag in the audio files you want to include in this cue.  They can now be treated together.

If I were to trigger this cue as it is, then both wavs would start playing at the same time and the traffic that I had looped would play forever. That’s not what I want to happen. To fix this, I’ll put a pre-wait in on the car horn so it starts a bit later. At some point, I’m going to want the traffic to fade out, so I will need a fade cue. I can drag the faders icon onto the workspace and assign the cue I want to effect by drag and drop.  The fade length can be changed, as can the fade curve. (Fig 4)

Fig. 4

At the moment, you only have a cue list and not really a show file, so you need to bundle the workspace.  This will collect all the audio files you have dropped onto the workspace, make a copy of them and place them together in a folder with the workspace.  When you do this, you can transfer the whole folder to anywhere you want and take your show with you. Fig 5 is an example of what happens when you don’t bundle a workspace. The red crosses show that QLab can no longer find the audio files.

Fig. 5 shows the preshow of a show I recently designed. The show was set at the end of World War II and you can see there are lots of loops triggering. In the pre-wait column, you can see the delay time I put in for each of the audio files to trigger. They then looped at various lengths until the next cue, which stopped the preshow and the SFX that started the show were triggered.

Fig. 5

QLab is made by figure 53. You can download a free version of it here: http://figure53.com/qlab/ The free version gives you two channels and doesn’t give you anything under the audio effects tab. You can still use it to create a show and then rent the software by the day from figure 53. Or, if you can make do with only two outputs, you can use it to run a show.

With this information, you can create a basic cue-list and get a show together. As you dig deeper, you will find you can vamp and de-vamp cues, trigger or be triggered by midi, and much more. QLab can also be used for video.  The complexity of your cue list is up to you, and everyone will use it in a way that suits how they create a show.

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