Sound Design tips from Create Digital Music

FOLEY IS FUN!

Create Digital Music has some great sound design tips up on their site. What's great is they also include some pictures, so you can see what's involved in getting sounds for media. Pretty funny stuff too.

It's all really crazy, and is some of my favorite recording. We all know the basics, punching a steak for realistic body hits, breaking celery for bone and tissue damage, but I had to come up with some fun ones for my last animation project. Sound effects rule!

Here are just a few.

A slinky and a dollar store toy microphone made great high tension lines and steel cabling.

Slamming a bottle of juice into our apartment's stove became the footsteps of a giant killer robot (and pissed off the neighbors).

Our old ink jet printer/scanner became the motors and servos of the killer robot (think robocop).







And of course there's our in house space alien:



Check out Create Digital Music's article for even more great sound design tips!

Thanks D4Dirty!

In Response to Using your Camera as a Field Recorder

A member of ProAudioNews responded to my post about using your camera's camcorder mode as a field recorder.

JQB:
Interesting idea, however walking around with a massive camera around your neck makes you look like a tourist. Also without a decent mike with mufflers you will can get lots of problems with wind and movement crackles.

I felt like responding to JQB's response!

First off, my camera is not "massive" thank you very much ;-), and I live in LA, so people walking around with cameras [shrug] tourist, paparazzi, whatever. Everyone walks around with cameras here, ya know.

So without going and actually reading my post, the point was to be able to get clean, decent, usable recordings with a minimum of fuss, expense, and without calling attention to yourself. I needed outdoor ambiance, and I couldn't get the results I wanted with voice recorders, mp3 players, or cellphones. I didn't want to haul my laptop, soundcard and mics out to Santa Monica (where with that kinda kit I could just imagine being asked for a permit).

I was able, though, to get what I needed from a Powershot S2 in sound recorder mode.



Just as an example I took a recording of our apartment's fountain using my PPC6700 in voice memo mode, and my S2 in sound recorder mode. Both were recording in stereo, 16-bit @ 44.1K, and both held from the same distance. There was no post done to the sound at all other than to convert to 320Kbps mp3's.

PPC6700:


Powershot S2:


Just for kicks I took the S2's recording and made it into an underwater ambient.


Thanks for reading JQB!