One of the sounds we often get requested by users are whooshes, sweeps and other transition sound effects. They are popular because they have a wide range of uses, from scene transitions, recreating the sound of an object passing by at speed, to enhancers for trailers, animated objects and more. As someone who loves experimenting with editing sounds, mixing and layering them up and generally playing around with synthesis, I have already added several hundred of these sounds to the library over the years. However I have found myself feeling the limitations of the software and techniques I use and wanted to find a new way of creating such sounds.
A little while ago I discovered the Whoosh sound design instrument by Tonsturm, which, by all accounts has already been used by many in the sound design, film making and other creative industries to create some stunning whoosh elements. I decided to purchase the plugin and give it a whirl.
Please note: This isn’t a review of the plugin, but simply a quick blog post to tell you about how this exciting plugin is helping us to design and create our own unique sounds. Also, I want to point out that this plugin comes with some default stock sounds and presets. We haven’t used these, but instead loaded our own source sounds and played around with the parameters of the plugin to design our own unique whooshes. The license agreement for Whoosh quite rightly states that you can not use the included sounds for distribution. So if you decide to try it out, bare that in mind if you plan to create sounds for sale or distribution, you must use your own source material.
I started out by loading in several wind, train passes, other whooshes I have created in the past and also some drones, again ones I created myself previously. Secondly, Whoosh provides a second module for impact sounds. I loaded in my own crashes, explosions and other impact sounds here. You can load up to 12 sounds for each, over 4 sound banks. Then I simply played around with the impressive effects and time/pitch parameters on offer (I will provide a review of the plugin at a later stage, but suffice to say at this stage, they are powerful and provide plenty of options for sound manipulation).
Then I simply recorded the output in Reaktor and edited the results down in Adobe Audition. I have experimented with around 150 of my sounds in the plugin so far and produced some amazing whooshes. The other thing Whoosh is fantastic for is impacts, magic effects and other sound movements. I also find this a good way to create some extra source material that you can then run through other plugins and effects to further manipulate, distort and mangle.
You can check out and download the whooshes I have created so far, most of which are in our Cinematic category.
Just a side note: We have been really busy recently with several new features and also bug fixes on zapsplat.com and an exciting new design will be coming in the new year. We are now back to adding free sound effects to the library at our usual output, so expect several hundred per week from now on.
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