Dialogue Editing by John Purcell (via sonicskepsi)

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Other parts here.

Pro Tools Editing Bootcamp (4-part series) by Brent Heber

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Part 2 | 3 | 4

We take libraries of a certain theme and put them through some experiments. Think about not only what you will learn, but also for what your ears are obtaining. Some time ago, I read an inspiring interview of Walter Murch, where he said:

“Never before in history, before the invention of recorded sound, had people possessed the ability to manipulate sound the way they’d manipulated color or shapes. We were limited to manipulating sound in music, which is a highly abstract medium. But with recorded material you can manipulate sound effects—the sound of the world—to great effect. In the same way that painting, or looking at paintings, makes you see the world in a different way, listening to interestingly arranged sounds makes you hear differently.”

So, that’s the goal of this. To never stop hearing new sounds and researching them in depth. Exploring from these thematic libraries is a great way to train ourselves and teach us a lots of new things about the sounds we use, the many things we can find in a single collection of sounds and what we can derivate from them, etc. If you don’t learn anything from the text, just think about this section as an art gallery in the street. You can go there to hear see the pieces and allow your mind to explore.

HISS and a ROAR Pressure

One thing I love from these kind of sfx packages is that you never stop exploring the content. Think about this as not only a variety of material for fabricating new designs but also about how much you can explore such a complete palette of sounds and learn what these objects can do.

The variation of performances, perspectives, tools, gear and processes are really valuable things that teach you a lot about real life sounds, and of course when it comes to design, what you have is a lot of control and more accurate sources.

Pressure is a perfect example of this. Just imagine that you need to find 50 different ways of demonstrating pressure with sound and record all these variations. Then, you end up with a wide palette of pressure sounds that will teach you a lot of things they can do. The list in this case includes interesting triggers, shots in resonant tubes, paintball guns, air compressors, trains and a wide variety of amazing air release sound effects.

Air Release Experiments

As almost any sound, this material can be turned into a lot of different things. However, here are some things I’ve done with the sounds of the library that demonstrates some of its potential. Just some ideas and examples.

Cutting the Air

Any kind of long air/hiss release sound can be very cool for making whooshes, swishes, and those kind of sound design elements. The recordings included, feature sounds with several tonalities and movements, which means variety in the results as well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can get instant pitch-amplitude variations using a doppler plugin like GRM Tools Doppler or Waves Doppler. There’s also another cool doppler for Max for Live and made by Robert Henke. It’s also good to use automated/modulated filters to cut frequencies over time, create some cool filter sweeps, etc.

Also, a multi-effect or some crazy effect that allows to change pitch is also very cool for shaping your whooshes. Some examples would be GRM PitchAccum, SoundToys Crystalizer or Audio Damage Discord.

Some Blasts

These kind of triggers, gun shots and fast attack sounds are wonderful material for weapon sound design, mechanical stuff, etc. I’ve recently used these kind of sounds for making some interesting layers for some alien weapons. Some layer blasts below:

Can’t remember exactly how was the processing on those sounds. I first make a chain on Soundminer using GRM Reson and SoundToys PhaseMistress on several of the paintball gun shots. Then it was just about experimenting with PhaseMistress modulation and frequency.

From that process, I got several sources with variety of tonality, resonance, etc. Then I processed that palette again, obtaining sounds like those blasts you just listened. Many of the effects obtained are just by performance, since I like to ReWire Pro Tools and Soundminer and tweak parameters in real time; but also some modulation was present, both on pitch and frequency. Keep in mind that my goal this time was to get cool and unexpected weird blast layers, so I just experimented and combined different values and processes, without caring where I was going.

As IRs

Many of the sounds included in this library, and particularly sounds with fast attacks and natural decay are great for using as IRs in a convolution reverb such as Altiverb or other convolution processors. For example, in the library you can find some recordings of a paintball gun being shot though a pipe, so the gunshots are recorded with a natural resonance which makes a cool “ringing” reverb in Altiverb.

The process is pretty simple. You place stereo split files (L and R separate) of the sound in your Altiverb Impulse Response folder. In my case:

You can also add images in that folder and Altiverb will link them automatically to that IR. So, with the paintball gun shot, it looks like this:

Finally let’s hear an example of the reverb obtained. Here’s a recording of a big creaking door I captured some time ago. I processed it with the reverb (using the paintball gun IR I just created) and did some pitch variations.

Experiments on Nature: HISS and a ROAR Blow Holes

Blow Holes is another library loaded with really fantastic recordings. It’s loaded with sounds captured by Tim Prebble at four different locations chosen especially for their sonic characteristics.

The recordings are so alive and unique. Its a pleasure for the mind to just think about those fantastic places where the sounds were recorded. There are some long recordings with soft nice waves hitting the rocks, but there are also aggressive water releases with a wide variety of perspectives and tonalities.

The library is very dynamic, allowing to obtain really detailed and diverse ambiences, but also a lot of interesting sounds if you process them in some ways, such as a short and simple rumble layer, obtained just with EQ and pitch shifting:

Or a long one, more earthquake alike:

drones, perhaps? (obtained with the hits of the waves on the rocks)

dark?

bright?

Torture Chamber

On each article of this series I’ll also include a video where I start to play the sounds of each library with an specific tool. The goal is to just tweak anything and hear what sounds start to appear.

In this case I’ve processed the sounds of Pressure with Scapes, a powerful multi-effects created by Twisted Tools. It runs on Reaktor, combining lots of effects and processing types (delays, reverb, granular synthesis, various of filters, etc) with crazy modulation and sound generation. It’s really cool for making crazy noises.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Blow Holes was also tortured, this time with one of the new plugins included in the GRM Tools collection, called GRM Evolution, used to obtain continuous evolution of timbre, by frequential sampling of the input signal. In this case the process was done using Evolution as standalone, but it also works as plugin.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Links: Scapes | GRM Tools | HISS and a ROAR

Learn more about GRM Plugins in this fantastic article by Jamie.

That’s all, folks!

[Feel free to share any tip or trick you have for designing sounds from air sources or pressure release sounds. I'll add your tips to the post, so you could browse the stuff in the future and learn]

[Ric Viers has prepared a series of quick videos, where he will be sharing some useful tips and tricks for anyone who records sound effects in the field. All the videos were produced directly from the Detroit Chop Shop and will be published exclusively on Designing Sound TV during this month]

Today, Ric shares some tips for organizing your batteries by colors.

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Today, Ric shares some tips on cable repair, directly by professionals of the matter.

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Today, Ric shares some tips for dealing with cables.

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More Videos

[Ric Viers has prepared a series of quick videos, where he will be sharing some useful tips and tricks for anyone who records sound effects in the field. All the videos were produced directly from the Detroit Chop Shop and will be published exclusively on Designing Sound TV during this month]

Today, let’s go with the second part of tips for using mic stands.

Watch the video on DSTV

If you want to stay tuned for new videos, just check here.

[Ric Viers has prepared a series of quick videos, where he will be sharing some useful tips and tricks for anyone who records sound effects in the field. All the videos were produced directly from the Detroit Chop Shop and will be published exclusively on Designing Sound TV during this month]

Today, He give us several tips on using mic stands.

Watch the video on DSTV

If you want to stay tuned for new videos, just check here.

Ric Viers has prepared a series of quick videos, where he will be sharing some useful tips and tricks for anyone who records sound effects in the field. All the videos were produced directly from the Detroit Chop Shop and will be published exclusively on Designing Sound TV during this month.

Today, He give us several tips on dealing with boom poles.

Watch the video on DSTV

If you want to stay tuned for new videos, just check here.

Recording sound effects on a stage is much like eating at a fine restaurant. You know the fancy kind with fresh baked bread and a different piece of silverware for each course. Recording sound effects in the field is more like hunting for food with a rock and then eating your kill in the middle of the woods raw with your bare hands. One method is obviously preferred. However, not everyone can afford fine dining.

For Christmas this year, we gave away a free copy of the Sound Effects Bible Hard Drive to the winner of a video contest we held. Michael Chobot’s video “Sound Hunter Promo” perfectly demonstrated what field recording is all about. In the sound effects world, sounds are not handed to you on a silver platter. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty and go primal with your microphone. Let’s discuss some hunting techniques.

Hunters head out into the woods wearing camouflage to blend into their environment and not be seen by their prey. Recording is the opposite. When recording, you want to camouflage the background noise or acoustic environment so that it can not be seen (heard) by your microphone. In my experience, the single biggest challenge in field recording is isolating the sounds.

Here are a few examples and tips to help you bring home the bacon.

Turn the lights off!

Recently we were recording net swishes in a basketball court. The sound itself is fairly quiet, so we needed to make sure that room was quiet. The problem we encountered was the buzzing light ballasts overhead. So, we recorded in the dark – a little tricky when trying to make a basket, but very effective for isolating the sound. It’s a good idea to bring a work light and a flashlight to locations where you anticipate turning off the lights.

Turn everything else off!

Last month, my team and I headed out to “Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum”  to record an insane amount of arcade games, including some rare antiques from the turn of the century. This place was a gold mine! They had ski ball, vending machines, change machines, candy machines, antique bells, phones, even an ATM machine. The problem was there were too many machines making noise all at once. So, we cut the power to the building and worked in the dark. But, we needed to run power to each machine we were recording. To do this, we kept one breaker on and used a hundred foot extension cord to supply power to the machines.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Turn off the heating / air conditioning!

Nothing will spoil your perfect take of an office phone ring than the low rumble of heating and cooling systems. Instead of recording in an office, it now sounds like you’re recording in a hallway aboard the Starship Enterprise. Some buildings have zoned systems which will allow you to turn off the heating and cooling systems for the area where you are recording. Other buildings work on a single system that might not allow you to do this. You can try closing the vents in your area as well as stuff blankets or other items in front of them to stop air flow. In a pinch, you can use low cuts on your recorder, but this will affect your recordings.

Sound blankets!

Sound blankets (a.k.a. furniture moving pads or “furni pads” for short) are wonderful tools for damping reverb in a room, reducing vibrations from a rattling object or to even catch the shells being ejected from a gun while recording. They’re pretty easy to get a hold of (www.markertek.com/Acoustic-Materials/Sound-Blankets/VAN-PAD-BLACK.xhtml) and can be very useful problem solvers. Mic stands with boom arms can make nifty stands to hold your sound blankets if you turn the boom arm perpendicular to the ground, forming a “T” shape. Spring clamps can also be helpful for mounting sound blankets in difficult places.

Use a shotgun mic!

Shotgun mics are my personal favorite mics to use in the field for isolating sound. Their polar pattern allows you to point the mic at a sound source and virtually focus only on that sound. When recording at a location with distant traffic, positioning the mic in the opposite direction of the traffic can greatly diminish the noise produced by the cars. Once you arrive at a location, turn on the mic, put on a pair of headphones and point the mic in every direction. Sound comes from 360 degrees, so don’t forget to point the mic up and down as well. This will help you determine what directions to avoid when recording.

Loose the shotgun mic!

Like all superheroes, shotgun mics have their weakness. Reverberant rooms can create weird and unpleasant artifacts when using a shotgun mic. If this is the case, swap the shotgun out for a cardioid mic. Your recordings will sound more natural. Use your ears to make this call. Sometimes, shotguns can work well indoors. With recording, there are no absolute rules, just guidelines.

Get up close and personal!

The inverse square law is your friend! This mathematical formula basically states that sound pressure level is reduced by half (-6bB) every time you double the distance of the source to the microphone. In practice, this means that your sound source will be louder if you place the microphone closer – common sense, right? The benefit of doing this is that you are increasing source level and therefore reducing the background level. The drawback is that if you get the source too close to the mic, you will get the proximity effect (an artificial increase of lower frequencies). This can be a good thing and a bad thing depending on your sound source. Paper movement miked too close can produce enough low frequencies to rattle your fillings loose in the edit suite. In these cases, you’ll need to roll off the low end to make the sound effect seem more natural.

Point the mic at the sound source!

Duh! But, it’s not always as obvious as you might think. When miking a drawer, don’t point the mic at the handle. Instead, point the mic at the source of friction, which is where the sound is actually coming from. If you can mic the drawer from underneath, as with some desks, you’ll achieve better recordings. With other drawers, such as dressers, you’ll need to mic near the side corner that exposes the track that the drawer is riding on. The same technique can be applied to door squeaks. The hinges of the door are what usually produces the squeak. With some doors, you might find that there is one hinge that is more vocal than the rest. So, point the mic at the noisiest hinge and not the door itself. This falls into my “listen with your ears, not with your eyes” mantra. When deciding mic placement, experimentation is key. Find the sound. Don’t assume where the sound is coming from.

Listen critically!

As humans, we quickly adapt to the acoustics of the environment that we’re in. It only takes a minute of being in a noisy environment before our brains begin to tune out the background and focus on certain things. This is why bars and restaurants get away with playing obnoxious music on Friday nights. People go to these establishments to socialize – to communicate with each other. This is possible because after a few minutes, the music becomes less intrusive on their conversation. Of course, they’ll wake up the next morning with hoarse voices from shouting all night. It’s easy to get lulled by the background noise or acoustics of the location where you’re recording. It’s important to take a moment at the beginning of the session to really analyze your location with headphones. What do you hear? What can you change? It can be a bummer to record for several hours only to come back to the studio and notice background problems in your tracks.

It all comes down to trial and error. With practice and lots of experimentation, you’ll start to get the hang of it. The secret to becoming a good field recordist is to keep recording. Record everything! Then listen to what you’ve recorded. What could you have done differently? Learn from your mistakes. Its one thing to read about recording to get the basics, but it’s another thing to put those basics into practice in the field. Who knows, you might even come up with some cool tricks to share with the rest of us!

Recording in the field is like camping: you only have the supplies you take with you! When you go camping, you are separating yourself from your daily amenities. For me, I think camping is a little funny. Most people want to ‘get away from it all’, but when they go camping, they bring it all with them. Why? They need their creature comforts!

Nothing can spoil a camping trip like forgetting the right supplies. For example, you can spend all day searching for the perfect campsite, but that trip can quickly turn into a nightmare if you forgot your tent! So, it’s important to plan ahead and pack accordingly.

Smart campers will air-out their camping gear. When they get ready to pack, they’ll line everything up outside of their storage bins and work a checklist to make sure that everything is accounted for. Experienced campers will even return from a camping trip and make a list of things they forgot to bring or didn’t even think about bringing until they went into the woods.

Here’s a list of ten things that I recommend you take into the field when you head out to record.

1. Mic Stand

A microphone stand is a very useful tool when recording in the field. If you are recording alone, you can use the stand to hold your microphone for you while you perform with the item you want to record. It can also be helpful when recording long ambience tracks. During long takes, your arm will get tired, especially if the bulk of your day is dedicated to ambience recording. A mic stand will give your arm a break and will also make sure the mic doesn’t move or pick up any handling noise. Don’t forget mic thread adaptors if you plan on mounting a pistol grip or blimp on your mic stand. These items have special threads for a boom pole that will not fit standard mic threads.

2. Boom Pole

A boom pole is basically a handheld mic stand that can put your mic closer to the sound. This can be useful for miking birds up in a tree, extending your mic towards a basketball net or following someone on ice skates as they pass by. There are two types of boom poles to choose from: cabled and uncabled. A cabled boom pole provides the convenience of having a coiled mic cable mounted through the inside of the pole. This allows the pole to be extended and retracted with the cable. The catch is, if the pole moves too abruptly, the mic cable bounces against the sides of the pole introducing handling noise into the mic. An uncabled pole reduces this problem because you wrap the cable on the outside of the pole. You loose the convenience of simply extending the pole at will because you have to wrap the cable each time. Wearing gloves can help reduce handling noise when working with a boom pole. Newer boom poles eliminate this problem by providing foam handles on the end of the pole.

3. Gaffer’s Tape

This heavy duty, non-stick adhesive is the Porsche version of duct tape. It’s found on every film set, theatrical stage and television studio the world over. Gaffer’s tape (a.k.a. movie tape or g-tape) can help quiet objects, mark out action areas (e.g. drop that television set right… here), and of course, hold things together. I always carry a roll with me and I even leave little strips on gear so that if I forget the roll, I still have something to work with. It comes in many colors, but trust me black is the best!

4. Leatherman / Multipurpose Tool

These little lifesavers are great for repairing gear, loosening stubborn mic stand adaptors and tightening or loosing objects to get that perfect squeak to record. The Leatherman brand claims to be indestructible, but I’m already on my third pair (the first one broke and the second one is… well, I can’t remember). Keep in mind, they have a knife inside, so don’t try to bring one on a plane or in a courtroom.

5. Extra Batteries

Back in 2000, I was working with MSNBC traveling around with Al Gore while he was campaigning to be president. I had packed everything I would ever need for the trip, including cases of batteries. At one event, literally minutes before Al Gore took the stage, the batteries in my field mixer died. I was shocked. These were brand new batteries that I just checked five minutes before hand. So, I grabbed a new set of batteries from a brand new case. The new ones were dead too! Two more sets later, I realized that I had been sold a case of dead batteries, despite a valid expiration date. A fellow sound mixer noticed my plight and gave me a fresh set.

I always tell that story to new interns who come to work at the Chop Shop. Just last week, we were packing for a location that was an hour drive to the middle of nowhere. I asked if he had extra batteries. He didn’t. I grumbled a little bit and grabbed an extra case of batteries for him. He politely protested, telling me that he had enough batteries. Sure enough, we got on location and his ‘fresh’ batteries died within twenty minutes! Had I not packed enough, we would have been screwed. The point is, bring extra batteries!

6. Extra Media

Media, like compact flash cards, is less likely to randomly die on you. You should bring extra media for two reasons. One, it’s cheap but priceless if you need another hour’s worth of record time. You never know when you’ll hit pay dirt with a location and need to extend your session. Two, if something happens to your media the show can still go on. For example, you accidentally drop your media in water, the card craps out for some strange reason, or gets confiscated by border patrol (which happened to a Chop Shop crew once).

7. Extra Mic Cables

Okay, so I’m going a little heavy on the “extra” factor, but unfortunately, this is because I’ve learned the hard way! I’ve had brand new cables that shorted out on me. I’ve had cables get cut by falling objects, sharp corners and even by a mindless stage hand once at a Limp Bizkit concert that resulted in Fred Durst calling me nasty things from the stage (long story…). The point is, without a cable, your microphone is useless. And of all the gear you have, the mic cable is the most likely candidate for failure. Think of an extra cable as a $20 insurance policy.

8. Cell Phone

Insert random “Ric’s an old fart” joke here. Okay, you youngsters! I’m fully aware that everyone has a cell phone nowadays. I didn’t see my first cell phone until years after college when the bass player of my band bought one. And yes, he was rich.

Ok, so everyone’s got one, including your Grandma who insists on texting you every Saturday to ask why you won’t come over to visit. Why would I suggest one? Well, because cell phones are basically really tiny laptops that carry very useful apps that you can use during your recording sessions. You can use map and GPS apps to find places to record or places to avoid. There are notepads to help log interesting things that take place during your sessions. And, of course, the camera!

Taking pictures of everything I record was a pipedream when I first got started. Today, I take pictures of just about everything, including useful information like model numbers of electric tools and motors that I’m unfamiliar with. This gives me a reference to Google later so I can give the sound file the proper description. Plus, you can take pics of your gear in action and post them on the Sound Effects Bible Facebook page!

9. Quiet Clothes

A few weeks back, I was recording some ambiences out in the snow. The snow turned into sleet and suddenly, my mic started to short out. My perfect forest ambiences were littered with this high pitched crackle noise. I headed back to my truck to see what was wrong with the mic. Surprisingly, the crackle went away once I got into the truck. What? I stepped back outside. There it was again! A few seconds later, I realized that the leather coat I had on was giving the sleet a hard surface to land on, thus creating the crackle noise.

Wearing soft and quiet clothes is important when recording. Most of the time, you want to avoid moving and creating the sound yourself. In the case of the sleet, my clothes became a surface that was creating the extraneous noise. When choosing clothes to wear remember that you might have to move your arms during a take. This is especially true if you are performing the sounds in front of the mic. So, pick something that gives you a little flexibility to move without making noise.

10. Creativity!

Gear is useless if you don’t know what you’re doing. But, knowing what you’re doing is useless if you’re not creative. Bring your thinking cap! Choose a quiet one, though.

(Play inspirational military music while reading this next paragraph.)

In the field, you will face challenges. You will be forced to think outside the headphones. Things will go wrong and gear will break. But, you can still bring home useful recordings if you use your creativity.

(End musical cue.)

More times than not, I’ll leave a location with a ton of material that I didn’t plan on recording. A few weeks back, we went to a YMCA to record fitness sounds and came back with an hour’s worth of mechanical motors from a large maintenance room that we were given access to. Survey the location with your ears, not your eyes. Your eyes can quickly discourage you from choosing a good location. Your imagination and creativity is the most important thing you can take with you in the field.