Making High Budget Sound FX with a Low Budget Setup · 1018 days ago
This past week I took some time to work on new sound effects for UnEarthed Gods and thought you might be interested in the process I go through to get decent sounds out of a low budget system.
In my experience, you don’t really need a fancy system to get decent sound effects. Mainly you need a little confidence, some time, and creativity.
I worked on some jump vocalizations this past week so I’ll use that as an example. It’s a fairly simple effect that you can put together quickly.
The tools I’m using:
- Microphone: I use a very simple wand mic that came with my computer, about as low-budget as you can get
- Wav Editing Program: I use Cool Edit 2000 – a relatively old wav editing program, although any one will do. The main feature that’s useful in Cool Edit is a good noise reduction filter. It looks like this has been re-dubbed Adobe Audition
and has a lot of new features. It’s tempting to get that surround sound encoding, but I’ll do fine with what I have for now.
- Headphones: I do have some nice AKG K240
headphones, although any set will do.
- Effects program: I use Propellerhead Reason 3.0
from Propeller Heads for mastering, mixing, and fine tuning the sound effects. This program wasn’t necessarily meant for this, but it’s got a lot of features I really like. I use this prog to make and master all the music for UnEarthed Gods too. Lets not beat around the bush. I love this program.
Gathering Raw Takes
The first step is to record some raw data for the sound effect. Get your room as quiet as possible. Close your door and windows, turn off the TV, etc. Don’t worry too much about this; the noise reduction filter will help us get rid of computer hum etc.
Really don’t worry too much about quality, the main thing we want to do here is get a quick variety of takes to find the right sound we are looking for. Once you get the style you want you can always go back and record higher quality takes. Getting the feel right is more important. For the jump sound I load up my game and run around a bit, jumping and making the sound myself to find one that seems about right. Now that I have an idea of the type of sound, I record a bunch of takes in a single long wave file leaving a little silence around each take. I keep a close eye on the recording levels to make sure my takes don’t go into the red. If you’re recording a breathy sound, you might want to put your hand in front of your mouth a little to break up the wind pulse hitting your microphone. This serves the purpose of one of the foam discs you see in professional studios. I’m sure you could make something nicer, but in practice fingers spread apart about halfway between my mouth and the mic worked fine for me.
Choosing the ones that work
The next step is to pick out the takes that sound the best. The way I do this is to set up Cool Edit to play the entire long take repeatedly. I let it run in the background and load up my game, then run around jumping. The purpose here is to hear the takes playing in the environment they’ll actually get used in. Sometimes a take sounds good when you are listening to it by itself, but then in the game with all the other sounds and music it just sounds silly. UnEarthed Gods runs fine in windowed mode so when I hear a take that sound good, I can quickly toggle over to the sound editing prog and pause the playback. Then find the take that sounded good. Jot down a note of the time in the wav file so you can locate the start of the take later.
Do this over and over again until you are satisfied with some good candidates, and have a list of times for each of them in the long takes wav file.
I ended up with about 10 different takes that I liked.
Now that I’ve identified the takes that sound good to me, I can splice up the wave file into individual sound waves.
Noise Reduction
I need to talk a little bit about noise reduction before we move on. In Cool Edit when you want to apply a noise reduction filter to your sound, you select a portion of the sound that should be silent. This portion will have all the computer humming and other ambient noise in your recording room. With what should be silent selected, you can get a noise profile that will be used to reduce the noise in the wave, and leave you with just the sound you intended to record. When getting the noise profile you want to make sure that it doesn’t have you breathing or clicking keys or mouse buttons or anything other than the ambient noise.
My first attempt at noise reduction was to do it on the long takes wave file; reducing the noise on all takes simultaneously. This worked ok, but all the sounds were left with a tinny ring to them that sounded like crap. I’m not sure, but I suspect this is due to the variation of ambient noise in the room over time. It could also be a side effect of Cool Edit’s noise reduction filter. I don’t know, but I did find a way that works.
Split into individual sound effects
Cut up the waves first, but make sure to leave a little bit of silence before and after the take you are slicing out. We’ll use that silence to get the noise profile right next to the take we want. This is a more accurate representation of the noise at that moment, and the noise-reduced sound would be more pure. This is why you should leave a little silence in between all your takes.
Okay, now split up your long take into the individual takes that you liked. I have g1.wav through g8.wav. When splitting up the sound I noticed that two of them sounded more like the player was getting hurt than jumping, so I get bonus damage sound effects gdmg1.wav and gdmg2.wav
Making the take production ready
For each wav we need to do a few things.
- Reduce the noise.
- Trim out the beginning and ending silence.
- Normalize the volume.
Reduce the noise using a noise sound profile created from the beginning silence. Play it and if it sounds weird, undo and try using the ending silence for the noise profile. If it sounds weird, you might want to undo, play the sound with noise in it, then redo and play the sound with noise taken out to see if there really is a difference. Sometimes your mind makes up weirdness that is not there! This worked really well for me; I was able to get a surprisingly pure sound.
Now that I’m happy with the noise reduction I need to trim up the wav file so that it begins immediately with the effect and ends after the effect finishes. Get rid of all that silence. When you play the effect in game, you don’t want any delays in the beginning of the wav file. Watch out for click and pops when the trimmed sound starts and stops. Zoom in close when selecting the wave before you trim it. Make sure you start on silence, end on silence, and that there aren’t any sudden vertical rises or drops in the audio. If you aren’t careful you’ll get an annoying click each time you play the sound effect.
The last thing to do is to make sure the volume is at some standard level. I’ve taken the practice of normalizing the amplitude to 50%. This means all my sounds have about the same raw maximum volume. I can adjust the in-game volume of entire groups of sounds instead of having to micro-adjust every single sound.
Plug the sound into your game and try it out.
I ended up with one of the sound effects being a bit too quiet, so I had to normalize the amplitude to something higher, about 75%. It fit nicely with the other jump sounds after that.
Tweaking
The sounds are usually ok to use in game at this point. After a while you’ll probably want to tweak the effect more: changing pitch, maximizing volume, adding a little reverb, etc. I do this in Reason
In the pic above I was working on a sound effect for running into a wrought iron gate. I had made the effect using various synths in Reason, and then decided it needed some more punch and rumble.
Here is another interesting article on sound fx design.
edit: just ran across this article on mastering that was pretty enlightening for me.
Remember, you don’t need any expensive setup to make cool things. There are plenty of freeware and shareware wave editing programs, synthesizers and effects devices. It just takes a little confidence and ingenuity.
-Clint
— The Masked Tennessean Feb 20, 07:59 PM #
— Clint Feb 21, 12:05 AM #