Sound Effects

[Darramouss]

Hello all.

What do you guys use for sound effects generation on a Mac? I'm looking for a program that can create sounds, not packages of pre-made sound effects. Not fussed whether the program is freeware or not either as I'm always happy to pay for quality programs.

Hope you guys can help!!

[heyvern]

What kind of sound effects do you need? If you don't want "canned" effects you could record your own. A half way decent mic would work. I do this myself sometimes. You can get a lot of interesting sounds from around the house or if you have some portable digital recorder you can get environmental sounds outside.

I use Audacity for sound editing. It's open source and runs on Mac, PC, Linux. It doesn't have any type of specific tools for creating sound effects but it has a lot of filters for changing sounds.

I can tell you from experience that it's difficult to "make" sound effects from scratch without starting with something "real" first. I'm not an expert though. For instance you could record some simple appliance around the house that has a motor, slow it down, change it with filters... and create a sound effect of a large machine or vehicle. Just an example.

One of my inspirations was the sound guy for the original Star Wars movies. He would just go everywhere with a microphone recording all kinds of weird things and mix them together, slow them down, manipulate them... and created all the sound effects for the Star Wars movies.

-vern

[slowtiger]

I create all my sounds by hand, or get a recording from elsewhere. Only very few sounds can be generated within the computer (aside from some SF beep beep).

For editing sounds I use Audacity, Logic, and even FinalCut (which has some special filters).

Recording sounds is something I started as a kid. Even today I run around with a cassette recorder (a Sony TC-D5M), since all the digital recorders I tried weren't satisfying. At home I record directly into the Mac, with a good microphone and a pre-amplifier. Fortunately my PPC G5 is silent, so just two blankets left and right from me are enough to create a good studio environment even without a separate sound booth.

Canned sounds can be found at the strangest places. I still have old cassettes and LPs with sound effects for amateur filmmakers from the 70's, most of them pretty unuseable. Lots of animal and environment sounds can be found in the web, either recorded by enthusiasts, or by scientific researchers.

For one of my last films I needed some sub-sonic grumble, indicating vulcanic activities. I found a nice soundfile on the NASA site, just a recording of a descending probe, which I slowed down and tweaked a bit to get a perfect grumble. Other sounds in that film, mostly steam and smoke, I did with my mouth and a broken bike tire inflator. I run the film and perform "live" to it, several times, then select and arrange the bits.

[dm]

Like synthesizers/processors? (or something else?):

http://www.discodsp.com/discoverymac/ (windows too)

http://www.alphakanal.de:4356/

http://www.arturia.com/evolution/

http://www.linplug.com/Instruments/instruments.htm

http://www.soundhack.com/

http://thirdcog.eu/apps/cfxr

[ingie01]

Garage Band has the capibility to use foley sound that ship with it. With care you can record over or under a main sound track. Narration can also
be added.
Keith

[Darramouss]

Sometimes I get in to things without looking for the simple methods...

I never thought to record things and speed up/slow down the sound or put filters over it. Very cool. I have audacity and have been playing around with everyday recordings since reading your responses and I'm liking very much!! For recording I use a Olympus Linear PCM recorder and the clarity of its recordings are allowing me to do some cool stuff.

Once again you guys have saved my day!!

P.S. The Star Wars info was interesting and very surprising!!

[funksmaname]

http://www.freesound.org/

This is a pretty cool resource of random sound recordings shared by its community [/url]