Making Orcs with Chuck Russom FX's Dogs Library [Video + Review]

Some days ago, my friend Chuck Russom sent me an amazing library for beta testing and for doing a demo/review in the same day of the release, which is today. So here we go!

The Library

The library is called Dogs, and includes 158 sounds at 192kHz/24-Bit, recorded from 14 different trained dogs. The sounds are really great, include all kind performances and have a pretty good amount of different vocalizations and voices made by different kinds of dogs.

Chuck made a really fantastic work on this library, giving an amazing collection of animal sounds that can be used in a lot of different ways, including -of course- creature sounds. That’s what I’m going to show you today. I took this trailer from “Warhammer: Age of Reckoning” and redo all the sound myself from scratch. The challenge with the library was to made all the Orcs vocalizations using the dogs library only. This is what I got:

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/15418163[/vimeo]

Making the Orcs Vocalizations

First of all I started to listening to the dog sounds several times, to make me an idea of how were the performances and types of sounds included. Then I started to analyze each of the Orc’s performances, and stablished the following physical characteristics to build the layering of its voices:

— Tonal element that defines the timbre of the vocalization
— A dry sound to simulate the throat wear. A death metal approach
— A main growl that reflects the fury and size of the creature
— Breathing and saliva elements for the dirty side of the vocalization

So, with those elements I started to build a palette of sounds for each characteristic, and started to group some layers for the orcs. There was a lot of processing and morphing involved, mostly on heavy pitch/time variations and also some modulation of several sources.

Also, since there is no music, I felt the need to be expressive enough with the backgrounds, to recreate the fantasy war chaos. I combined several kinds of backgrounds with different tonal tweaks, EQ changes and channel variations. I tried to have a very “dynamic layering”, so I can control several elements of the ambiences individually, depending on the scene. I also used the dogs library to make some orc sounds in background.

The recordings worked really well. Having the stuff in such awesome quality gives the opportunity to stretch the sounds a lot, and get very cool new sounds from the dogs. I used almost any kind of sounds made by those dogs, from the great barks of  a golden retriever called Auggie, to the weird and incredible sounds of a pug called Lola. If you need high quality recordings of amazingly talented animals, you should pick up this library now.

Finally, if you want to know more about the process of the recording, I recommend you to visit a post I published on Sonic Terrain, containing lots of interesting information given by Chuck.