Having Fun with Rockets [Review & Video]

Following my limitation challenges, I wanted to do another one. This time is a video where I had to re-design all the sounds using only the Rockets library from Rabbit Ears Audio, a new sound effects company from Michael Raphael.

The Library

Well, Michael did a terrific work with his new company, an independent model of online sfx distribution, similar to Tim Prebble’s HISS and a ROAR, Chuck Russom FX, etc. Rabbit Ears Audio’s Rockets library was more than a perfect pack to LAUNCH the new project.

The download process was really quick, and all the sounds come perfectly mastered and tagged. All the sounds included are really great and the quality is just amazing. There you can find all kind of amateur rockets, with different sizes, types, and of course a lot of diverse sounds, tonalities, etc. I think this library is a must-have for anyone!

Let’s tweak it!

The sounds respond really well to any process, app integration, etc. I played with almost every sound on the library, tweaking them in different ways. You can make a lot of cool things with these rockets.

For showing that and also test the library in action. I decided to re-design the sound of two scenes from Iron Man, wich I found interesting for the job. Let’s check the video and I’ll talk about it below…

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/13914452[/vimeo]

So, as you read, I didn’t use any other kind of sound sources. It was about processing and tweaking those rockets recordings and doing different things for each element of the video. It was a little crazy to create all this different types of sounds and layers using pretty similar sources.

These are the main categories I worked with:

• Main character (Suit flight-bys) – I decided to work with the rockets launches for the main character. I find useful the K and J series of the rockets for this task. I also used the exploding sounds for the impulses and launches, and full sections of the rockets for the flighting stuff.
• For those flying movements I used some doppler and manual panning. This kind of sounds already come with a natural doppler, but I needed more drastic pass-bys and movements, so I added them “artificially” and worked very good.
• Main character (Propeller sounds) – This one was a little crazy to design. I started combining some parts of the rockets’ flights and also playing with pitch/time tools, but I wasn’t happy with the result, so I tried a different way.
• I created a palette of noises obtained from looping and freezing parts of the samples, then it was about modeling the noises and making them sing into different tonalities with unique character for each one, depending on the scene, of course. With those different modeled noises I layered all the propeller sounds.
• Jets – Another big challenge here. The jet sounds are made using practically all types of rockets. I knew that I had to make the jets sound different than the main character flights, so the processing and tweaking here was heavy. I layered some different kind of rockets sounds, each giving something to each of the jets.

On each part of the layers I played with different effects including some flangers, resonating modulators and pitch shifters. Each jet was treated different, to give a sense of “group”. The rest of the process was just tweaking and processing the samples to enhance the perspectives and powerful of each element on the videos adding more color and crunch.

I’m not totally happy with some cuts… I’d have liked to add some specific sounds there but you know, rules are rules :-) I really enjoyed this exercise, so expect more videos and demonstrations like this soon!

Hope you liked it! If you have any question or suggestion, feel free to speak! Your comments will be really appreciated.

Special thanks to Michael Raphael and Bryan Jerden for their amazing feedback!