I’ve spent the day today working on more requests and adding loads of new sounds to the library. I also spend the evening out in the sub-tropical rainforest recording creeks, waterfalls and insects (and some birds) which I’ll be adding tomorrow. But just for your reading pleasure, here are some of the sounds I’ve been working on and added in the last few hours:
Cartoon impacts, ascends and descends
Now before I go into detail on this, I just want to say I am not keen on breaking or smashing musical instruments that are perfectly good. It seems such a shame to do so, but in the sound design world, sometimes these things happen. My kids were given an old ukulele that while worked fine, was old and battered so today it got smashed up. I obviously smashed it up to record the process, but before I did that I gave the old thing one last go… not playing it as it was supposed to be played, but using a knife, pencil and hairbrush to get some good cartoon sounds from it.
I found purely through experimentation that by tapping, scraping and manipulating the strings while sliding the objects up them I got some great cartoon style ascends and descends. It was very much trial and error, but I think there are around 5 or 6 good sounds I got from it. They are here if you would like to listen and download them.
Rubber squeaks
These sounds were created as I was asked if we had some specific rubber stretching sounds which we only had a couple of. So I was asked to create some more. This was actually done using duct tape, by folding several sections over and over creating a thick strip. They I taped each end to the stairs on a bunk bed and rubbed my hand over it to get some good squeaks. Then I used the strip and bent it, stretched it and made some random movements with it to get loads of other versions. They can be found in our Foley library
Soda cans and frothy burps
I decided today to record the sound of a can of cola being opened, put down on surfaces and then me drinking it. I performed loads of sips, slurps and other drinking sounds and then obviously some burps. Most of you will know those disgusting frothy burps that come after drinking something like cola so it was great fun to spend a few minutes recording them. Some of them sounded so much like vomit, they were used for that. I know this is not the most highbrow work, but needs must. That’s the beauty of running a sound effects library…. You literally have to cater for everything!
Removing hair with a wax strip
You know the sound well, when someone goes to have their hair removed and ripped off with a wax strip… the sound and the screams make me squirm, but when this sound was requested via email, I just decided the only way to get the sound was to actually go for it. In this case I used the same duct tape as for the rubber sounds, but used a fresh large strip, stuck it to my hairy leg and performed several rips. I have to say it was painful and luckily the hair remains. But it sounds great and can be found here.
So that’s all for now, but I’ll be uploading the rainforest sounds tomorrow among loads of other new cartoon sounds and more!
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