All kinds and thicknesses of ice was recorded and at many different temperatures. It was kicked, cracked, hit with a sledgehammer, crushed into itself and smacked with heavy chunks of ice. Ice debris was dropped and tossed around at many locations for a unbeatable, multiple take set of crash effects. When all these styles of frozen water and air vapor are pitched around with your favorite audio mangling tool, you will be amazed at the broad spectrum of sounds that can be created with the ultra high frequency response of the microphones.

Sound designer John Leonard has started an independent sfx library called ImmersiveFX. There are two releases available at the moment and for being reader of Designing Sound, you can get a special discount price. Use the code DFSX50 and you’ll get 50% off on both libraries:

• Sounds of Flight - An eclectic collection from my extensive archive Jumbo Jets, Military Fighters, War-birds, Helicopters and Bi-Planes From an F-16 to a Tiger Moth – it’s all here. 48/16 WAV files with embedded Soundminer Metadata – $25
• The Voice of Poseidon - 101 effects of seascapes and some river and waterfall sounds. From the gentle waves on a sandy beach to the crash of breakers on the Pacific shore. 48/24 WAV files with embedded Soundminer Metadata – $80

Sound recordist Mikkel Nielsen runs a library called Sonic Salute, where he has released four sound collections so far:

• Metal Scrap – 97 stereo/MS recordings of metals. Clink/clank/crash/boom
• The Shipyard – 16 stereo/MS recordings captured in the summer of 2011, at the commercial port of Copenhagen. The area is filled with giant cranes, trucks, and containers, and is closed to the public.
• Pigs FX – 246 recordings of all kinds of pigs, recorded at Pigfarm Esrumgaard, which has close to 1000 pigs of all ages and sizes.
• Footsteps Snow - 25 minutes of long walks in cold and snowy conditions. Recorded during tree winters from 2009 to 2011 in a remote deserted Swedish forest, miles away from the nearest road.

EFX has new changes on the site and also a new library: Colombian Countryside, including 35 nature atmospheres recorded and remasterized at 48 kHz 24-bit.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Affordable Audio 4 Everyone has released The Hud Menu Interface Toolbox, a library of 700 interface sounds. All proceeds above $5 will go to The National Federation of the Blind.

The Hud Menu Interface Toolbox features various sounds that can be used for various menus, Game HUD’s, and also small object interface interactions. It is a great tool for building, and creating response sounds to player interations, or for any type setting that may need some additional sounds for a character or actor to make when interacting with something.

Click here to view the embedded video.

BOOM Library has released free Flamethrower SFX pack.

Remember the video from Chad Thunberg, who really knows how to do some little DIY-Engineering? He’s the guy that built an epic FLAMETHROWER out of plastic pipes and a garden hose. Luckily for us, Axel was around to point the microphone towards this “eternal flame”. Guess what: It sounded just awesome. We gave these SFX away for free during our advent calendar weeks. This awesome SFX pack is now available for EVERYBODY.

Rob Bridgett has released a digital ePub version his book “From the Shadows of Film Sound“. It’s available now at $9,99.

As a practitioner in video game development, Rob Bridgett has explored and written about the connective tissue between film sound production and a newly emerging video game audio production culture. This new volume brings together, for the first time, freshly edited writings with many previously unpublished articles, documenting his work and thinking over the past ten years. This book is equally suited to film sound designers intrigued by game sound production as much as those in game sound wishing to further explore the meaning of cinematic sound. A fresh, insightful, and long overdue volume offering nourishment for students of sound as well as ammunition for sound artists working on the front line of development.

Buy it here. Printed version is available at Blurb.

You can also check the interview we did in 2010 when the book was released.

The episode #14 of the game audio podcast is available for download now.

In this episode we discuss story telling techniques and development, get our geek on with control surfaces and try to solve some music challenges. Anton & Damian are joined by our special guests:

Mike Morasky – Valve
Emily Ridgway – Emily Industries
Lucas van Tol –  Guerrilla Games

Listen

Soniccouture has started an interesting crowd-source project called CrowdChoir.

We are going to build a unique sampler instrument  – a choir / vocal ensemble made with hundreds of voices from all around the world.

We need a a minimum of 500 notes to layer in the instrument, so please help us if you can.

Everybody that sends us a recorded note will receive the CrowdChoir instrument free, in Kontakt /EXS & Ableton Live format.

The project will run for 2 months, until March 31st 2012

One participant chosen at random will receive a custom-made, 5 octave cherry-wood bcustom array mbra (worth $2000)

North Country Trains HD, new library available at The Recordist.

Presenting North Country Trains HD Professional Sound Effects Library. 117 High Definition diesel train beasts from the wilds of North Idaho. Recorded at 24Bit 96kHz at various locations in the pristine panhandle of Idaho.

Included in this collection are pass bys with and without horns, cranky rail car movements, under bridge perspectives, slack take up metal impacts, screeching wheels, locomotive engines, horn blasts and much more.

Many perspectives were captured to give you a wide variety of source to work with. Recorded almost entirely with the Sennheiser MKH-8040ST microphone for incredible low and high frequency sound design flexibility. On occasion a Sony PCM-D1 and D-50 were used on the “oops, I forgot to bring my Sennheiser MKH-8040ST” recording sessions.

Blog posts about the trains:
North Country Trains HD Videos
North Idaho Train Recording
Train Tension Symphony
Train Railroad Track Tickle
Crazy Train Doppler Pass Bys
Train Railcars Bump And Grind

There’s a new version of the hard drive, The Sound Effects Bible LE, available at $299:

The Sound Effects Bible Library LE is a collection of 5,000 sound effects recorded by Ric Viers and his team at the Detroit Chop Shop including close to 2,000 new and previously unreleased sound effects. All of the sounds were recorded at 24/96KHz, along with a small selection of unique 16/44.1KHz sounds that were pulled from the Detroit Chop Shop archives.
The sounds are delivered as MP3 files (16/44.1KHz at 128Kbps) complete with metadata that is compatible with your favorite search engine and are neatly sorted into 25 category folders: Ambience, Animals, Cartoon, Emergency, Explosions, Fire, Foley, Food, Footsteps, Horror, Horror Production Elements, Household, Humans, Impacts, Industry, Multimedia, Office, Production Elements, Science Fiction, Sports, Technology, Vehicles, Warfare, Water and Weather.

There’s also a special holiday package available, including The Sound Effects Bible Hard Drive, the book, and a Rode NTG-2 microphone with Rode WS-6 Windshield. It’s available for $799.

SPRINGS is a diverse new library of sound design source material released by HISSandaROAR and recorded by Tim Prebble.

Traversing from literal & very powerful trampoline springs & impacts through very strange bowed & manipulated extention springs all the way to abused outboard hardware (AKG BX5, Vermona Retroverb, Doepfer A199 with an Accuphonics tank) and of course, the classic slinky – but in this case stretched across a room and recorded with a contact mic at each end! Three sizes of thunder drums (long flexible springs attached to a drum resonator) were also hit, bowed & scraped to capture physically useful sounds as well as more evocative abstract material. This library is a diverse and inspiring collection of material that is incredibly fun to play with!

Available at $79 until December 25th (Regular price $99). Delivered at 24bit 96kHz. Includes 1,100+ sounds (6.9GB).

Below is a q&a with Tim, talking about the springs and some HISSandaROAR news:

What inspired the library?

Tim Preble: Being a bit of a dub-head I’ve always been into spring reverbs – I bought an AKG BX5 off ebay a decade or more ago, and I always remember almost blowing my speakers when I had it cranked up & accidentally moved my rack! But it was when I was working on the Cirque De Soilel 3D film that I had an epiphany. There is a scene in the film with some super hero characters doing totally outrageous moves on trampolines and despite being told the scene would be a music montage, I decided to try augmenting the rhythm with trampoline sounds. Next door to my studio is the rehearsal space for local circus group Fuse Circus, so I borrowed a small trampoline from them and recorded it using contact mics as well as normal mics. As soon as I listened to the contact mics I realised it was basically a large scale spring reverb – every hit made the all of the springs resonate! We did end up using some of the recordings in the final mix, and after I uploaded a video of recording those effects a few people contacted me, wanting access to the sounds. I couldn’t give them those particular sounds as they were specifically for the film, but I made a mental note to revisit that particular prop. And as always I started researching other elements I could record….

Click here to view the embedded video.

What else did you find?

TP: Good characterful springs are not actually that easy to find, but one source that proved useful was from exercise equipment – I disassembled a few chest expanders, and spent a bit of time attaching them to objects in ways that would encourage resonance… I also bought an old kids toy – a ride on horse, that was suspended by nice creaky springs. I explored other spring reverb outboard effects – I also own a Vermona Retroverb which is great – it actually has a ‘crash’ button on it that sends an impulse to the springs, but it also has a really nice resonant filter. My modular synth has a spring reverb, a Doepfer A199 module, so I bought an old Accuphonics 3 spring tank and used the module to get clean audio output from it, and I beat the hell out of that tank! I’m surprised it survived, but it was worth it. Some of the short sounds make me think of retro weapons, but some of the flickery sounds I got from it by applying friction along it, I have never heard before!

And of course I messed around with some slinkys – I hunted for the biggest/longest one I could find and then tensioned it horizontally across my studio, with a contact mic at each end, 20 feet apart. Another device I messed with are called Thunder drums – I bought one when I was in Bali a few years ago, its basically a long small tightly wound spring that is attached to the skin of a drum. If you shake it, it makes a sound a bit like thunder and hitting the spring has an almost flangey tone to it, but I discovered a few other interesting ways to extract sounds from it. Bowing the spring while varying the length created some really interesting pitch bends, but so also did rubbing or scraping your hand along the spring. A few times I’ve had to make sounds for someone suddenly abseiling or lowering down & I’ve always struggled for source material with that constant descending friction, but I’ve found a great element now!

Were they difficult to record?

TP: Some props really took some thinking about, because the sound they produced was acoustically very quiet but attaching a contact mic to the primary vibrating element meant the mic itself would absorb and/or stop the resonance. I think there is a concept in physics, where the act of making an experiment alters the circumstances or environment to such a degree that the experiment itself is no longer valid – it was a bit like that! I also soon learned that it is difficult to keep a contact mic attached to moving objects, so it took different setups and strategies depending on the specific sound I was after, even within the same prop. That little wood block with the tiny spring at the start of the video is a good example. I could get tone from it but I couldn’t record it – it just didn’t vibrate enough to excite the wood it was attached to. It was only when i clamped it down & actually attached the contact mics between the wood & the spring itself that I got interesting results. But, as you see (backwards) at the start of the video, it eventually flew to bits!

What are your favourite sounds? Any happy accidents?

TP: This library is full of happy accidents! Someone on my blog asked how I go about choosing what sounds to record, and I had to confess its half intent and half happy accidents – experimenting & being curious. The last prop I recorded for the library was when I revisited that trampoline, and having spent so much time recording other springs I had a few more ideas about how to get some new sounds from it. One aspect I now know is that to get ‘big’ dynamic sounds often requires gentle technique and hitting that trampoline gently with a gong beater, and being mic’d up and gain staged accordingly allowed me to get some huge subby sounding impacts, which feel more powerful than the hardest hits that I did later. But going back to that tiny spring, I now knew that attaching the contact mics on to the spring itself led to interesting sounds (it just couldn’t be the spring that was doing all the work, or the mic would detach) So the last sound I recorded was one of my favourites: attaching the contact mics directly to the springs and then very gently hitting other springs & elements of the trampoline. I swear there is an entire gamelan orchestra inside that trampoline when it was rigged this way – I could have sat & played it for hours. Over-recording was actually a real problem with this library, not over-level but content. I’d find a sound that I loved, that was really evocative or interesting and I could easily keep playing with it for hours! Must. Stop. Recording.

It’s been a great year for independent sound libraries – do you think its reaching saturation point with all these boutique library start ups?

TP: To be completely honest I think we’re barely scratching the surface. If you combined all of my libraries with all the great libraries released by Frank, Michael, Chuck & all the new sites, we would hardly match 5% in terms of quantity of the old school libraries such as Sound Ideas CD collections or whats on the Sound Dogs site. But in terms of quality, resolution and providing unique, characterful and interesting sounds I think at times we surpass them… Every time someone releases a new collection of recordings, whether you buy them or not, you know they are a resource waiting to be called upon. I sometimes dream about the huge library resources studios like Skywalker Sound must have, and while we’ll never get close to that, at least we’re slowly providing more diverse options, and they are options available to anyone.

Whats next for HISSandaROAR? Are you having a holiday??

TP: Indeed. This is my last library release for the year. As 2012 is a busy year with films for me I’ve deliberately been recording as much as possible and I have another couple of libraries recorded. The last task for me for the year is to finish the HISSandaROAR Christmas present, which is a free 24bit 96kHz collection of Tortured Cymbals, a preview of a library for next year. It will get sent out to everyone on the mail list next week, as a small gesture & to say a huge thank you for all the support this year. And thanks to you, Miguel and everyone at Designing Sound for an inspiring year!!
Happy Holidays!

Echo | Collective is a new independent sfx library created by sound designer Rene Coronado and composer Brad Dale, from Dallas Audio Post Group.

Their focus is on uncommon sounds. Found instruments and tools that can be manipulated and recontextualized sonically into a film or music project. The project starts operations with five releases:

• Forgotten Zither
• Antique Accordion
• Oliver Typewriter
• Borroughs Protectograph
• RR Adding Machine

All the sounds are recorded and delivered at 24-Bit/96kHz, with detailed metadata and unlocked .nki files for Kontakt.

Below is an q&a with rene, who shares more information about the project and their first releases:

What inspired you for starting echo collective?

We love finding interesting sounding things and recording them so that we can have fun bending them around. We have always done a lot of recording for our various projects, so we’ve been using the cataloging and metadata workflows of sound effects libraries for a long time, and there’s some different stuff in our work from what’s already out there.

Do you have anything to say about the independent sfx world?

The market is actually pretty saturated right now, so that affects how we approach things like pricing and what we include in each collection. Also, quality and usability can vary from library to library, so we work hard to make our stuff the best it can be. With all of that said, the guys that do this stuff are incredibly cool and supportive of others. We got lots of great feedback on our sounds and design from the guys that do this at a high level, and we’re aiming to put stuff out there that lives up to the standards that they have set.

Click here to view the embedded video.

How was the work with the typewriters and protectograph? could you tell us about the variety of sounds you obtained and how you manipulated the devices?

These turn of the century business machines are so unique, and when you run across one you jump at the chance to grab it and record it. I lucked out and found the typewriter, check printer, and adding machine all in one booth at an antique shop.  Once the owner of the booth plugged them in and showed me that they worked I was sold. After a little research I discovered that each of of those machines was over 70 years old, which made the perfect working condition of each even more impressive.

For the most part they all just click and whirr and chunk, which doesn’t create much of a stereo field. Given that, I decided that it would be far more useful to roll 3 unique mic perspectives on each one. I close miked the front and back of each, and also put up a wide mic in omni so that I could potentially drop those sounds into a bgfx track.

The case on the protectograph actually comes off, which changes the sound of the stamping mechanism pretty dramatically so I recorded it both ways. The adding machine had some moving plates that got sticky with age, and they would occasionally jam and then release with a big metallic ring out which was pretty great. I turned that ring out into a musically tuned Kontakt instrument that sounds very unique. The typewriter had the most moving parts, so after all of those were covered pretty thoroughly I did a bunch of drops and rattles for good measure. It was a lot of fun recording all of them.

I wonder how was the setup and recording process on the zither. I understand you used different mic options, positions, as well as some unique performances on the instrument.

Both the zither and the accordion were recorded a little bit non-traditionally. We would mic them up, and after a fair amount of general coverage and manipulation I’d crank some long reverb into Brad’s headphones and we would really start exploring the textures of the instrument in a very different context. The result is a set of really musically inspired manipulations that go in a different direction than just a bunch of clinical coverage.

The zither also got some extra love as a stringed instrument because we were able to both bow it and use an ebow in combination with some props to really get some unique sounds out of it. It has lots of broken strings and we would do things like scrape broken strings together and thump on the exposed wood that the strings would normally cover. We’d bow the broken string that was still attached to the tuning peg for some really freaky horror sounds, and yet we could still get these great angelic sounds out of the single strings resonating with the ebow.

We actually did the zither in three different long sessions because we just kept finding new sounds in it.

Also, I was inspired to build a stethoscope mic after watching a few Diego Stocco videos. Mine doesn’t really record anything above 200 Hz, but man it really extends the low end of the stuff we stick it onto. I hadn’t built it when we did the first zither session, but once I had put it together I knew we had to use it. That thing in combination with the xy overhead mics really turned the zither into a different instrument.

For the other mics we used a pair of line audio CM3s in XY and I had a COS 11 inside the sound hole and a 4050 wide in omni. In the end, the amount of stuff recorded made offering every mic perspective prohibitively complex (and redundant) so we did what we felt were the best mixes of each combination of mics per performance. The room mic was use judicially to add some air, and really gave a nice character to the samples.

I see there are Konkakt patches including in the libraries. Any special thought about this feature or the software?

Our goal is to make libraries that are not only useful to sound designers, but also to musicians and game designers. We feel that Kontakt is a good way to extend the libraries beyond just what the sounds are and into what they really can be. Having the sounds preprogrammed into an industry standard sampler really allows users to get into things like layering and pitch manipulation very quickly. Kontakt also has a powerful set of design tools built in that let us explore ways to bend the sounds into new forms with eq, distortion, delays, etc – all without having to render the effects for the end user. Also, the Kontakt sets are completely unlocked which means that the presets that we’ve designed can act as a starting point for even further manipulation.

With all of that said, we’re coming at these instruments from a sound designer’s perspective. This means that even though we have a musical instrument programmed into a Kontakt patch we focused more on making unique textures and noises than on things like multiple velocity layers of individual string plucks.  Also, we spend our time building and recording cool sounds instead of Kontakt interfaces. There are many very good straightforward zither libraries out there, and we’re not trying to replicate those at all.

Any plans for the future? What kind of things are we going to see on echo collective?

We have a ton of ideas and projects in the works, but we’re going to keep them under wraps until they’re ready to go. Also, the feedback that we get on things like our musical approach and our Kontakt instruments will influence the way we prioritize things.

Frank Bry released Thunderstorm 2 HD library. Available for $50.

At long last, it’s here! Presenting the sequel to Thunderstorm HD: Thunderstorm 2 HD Sound Effects Library. Over two years and dozens of storms in the making, this 24-Bit 96kHz collection of thunder and lightning is just what you need to make any storm soundscape complete. Included among the 55 Broadcast WAV files are extremely close lightning strikes, booming rumbles, heavy claps, rainstorms and special LFE tracks for you to drop in your session with no fuss. Over 900 megabytes of pure North Idaho thunder at your fingertips. Mix and match the tracks together to build the perfect storm boomers. Also included are specially designed lightning strikes using analog style compression, multi-file layering and pitch change.

The last two years here in North Idaho have been quite interesting with many types of storms blowing in. Thunderstorms were few and far between but when they rumbled over the ranch I was there, Single Malt Scotch in hand with my MKH-8040ST and Sanken CSS-5 microphones and recorded some of the most fantastic thunder I have ever heard here. Now, with the release of this library you don’t have to suffer through the hours and hours of waiting and waiting for the next storm to show it’s stuff… it’s all right here in Thunderstorm 2 HD. Enjoy! -Frank

Pro Sound Effects is hosting a webinar called “Why Sound Matters” (part 2), presented by sound designer Stephan Schütze. It’s tomorrow, no cost.

After high demand, Stephan Schutze of the Foundation Sound Effectst Libraies and PSE are hosting a second webinar about the importance of sound in education. This webinar will focus on sound production in the field, and is geared towards educators in media production. However, anyone interested in sound recording techniques will learn a great deal as well.

Register