Ready for you to download are 40 sparkly new free sound effects, available in the usual mp3 or wav format. Mostly these new sounds are a result of some experiments for an upcoming project and we thought many of you here will find them useful.
Rock movements
I wanted to capture the sound of some medium sized rock movements, like the kind of movements a rock climber or caver may make while moving rocks out of their way. Where we are based we do have locations that would be suitable for thi
s, but often you can recreate the sound with different techniques in the studio. So for this I needed to think about how to make the rocks sound bigger than they actually are (I was using two smaller ones) and how to get that gritty sound rocks make when they move together.
The answer was to use a resonating base to make the movements sound bigger, some salt for the gritty sound and to use two rocks and move them both at the same time. I used a wooden chopping board as the base, placing a layer of salt (not too much) for the grit, then placing a concrete brick on top. I placed another light layer of salt between this rock and another on top. I found the best way to capture the movements and make them sound bigger was to slide the bottom brick at the same time as moving the smaller rock on top. This combination gave me the exact sound I needed without any processing in my DAW after. Check them out here.
Cartoon Impacts and twangs
Experimentation is key when creating sfx and often I find myself doing some very strange things to create new sounds. My children often look at me as if I’m weird. Last night I was playing around with an ice lolly stick, explaining to my kids how it could be used to make twang sounds, when an idea struck. Using the old ukulele I found a few days before, I slipped the stick between the strings and gave it a pluck. Right over the sound hole came a great twang sound. I recorded a few versions and also played around with pitch after in my DAW, and the results can be downloaded here.
Yesterday I released some new metal impacts and explained how they had a classic cartoon hit sound to them. So I wanted to use these to create some cartoon falls or impacts. I only ended up making one so far, mixed with the sound of a siren whistle for the initial slip or trip over, but it can be downloaded here.
Body hits
Lastly I wanted to design some body impacts of the squelchy, gore kind. Body hits and impacts are often exaggerated for effect, so I used many different sounds to create these new ones. I already had many squelchy sounds, bone breaks and impacts I’d previously recorded, so I simply took a few of these and mixed them together. To create just one body hit with accompanying gore, I used some celery snaps, jelly, cooked rice and pasta movements, some generic hits and some kick drums. Mixing them all together resulted in some interesting sounds that you can grab here.
As always, please let us know if there are any sound effects we are missing and if we can, we’ll create them for free.
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