Some weeks ago, Tim Prebble went to a Cape Palliser, New Zeland to record a family of Seals. He released all his recordings as a new HISS and a ROAR library called Seal Vocals.
General Toughts
Well. The download and delivery system was great, as always. I have the MAX version of the library, which comes with a total of 210 sounds at 96kHz and 24-Bit. All of them perfectly tagged and ready to use.
The sounds are simply outstanding. Those seals make a complete palette of amazing sounds, including bites, all type of growls, calls and also a lot of weird and funny sounds. Tim recorded the seals really well, using a very directional microphone to avoid the huge amount of external noise in the place. I have some seal sound effects from other libraries, and I can assure that Seal Vocals is totally unique.
The Challenge
The wide variety of sounds taken from a single type of animals and the unique quality of them deserves a more detailed review, that’s because I set myself a challenge with this library: Design three different kinds of new species, using only the sounds included in Seal Vocals. All kind of processing is valid, but nothing about samples from other libraries or my own recordings. My goal is to show you the big potential of the library and talk about the lot of different things you can do with a single group of sounds.
Would you like to
Design this kind of sounds without references is somewhat crazy, so I created three different stories for three different characters respectively, giving different emotional and physic characteristics of them. I’ll telling you all the stories in the next posts. Fro now here is a summary of the character descriptions:
- Boh – A sad monster that was a dog in the past but becomes an ugly and dangerous beast result of a mutation
- Tuk – A wild and prehistoric bird, similar to a pterodactylus. Tuk lives in volcanic zones and kills other live beings using supersonic powers
- Zip – A little alien investigated by NASA in a secret lab. Zip has a paranoid behavior and becomes desperate at times searching for other beings of his planet. So he is constantly sending signals to the space, trying to contact his people.
The real challenge was to give totally different sonic identities to each specie using the same kind of sources for all of them. I really enjoyed the experience and already finished the sound design of almost all the sounds.
I’ll be publishing three dedicated posts talking about the sound design process on each one and how I used the Seal Vocals in the process. I’ll start on next monday, but I’ll give you a sneak peek of some of the sounds I created:
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[Notes: Creature sounds designed in Pro Tools using Seal Vocals SFX Library]
Do you have Seal Vocals? Would be great to hear your creations too!