Having Fun with Creatures from BOOM Library [Review & Demo]

My friends of BOOM Library released a new sound effects library in the last monday. I’ve been beta testing and having fun with the library from some days ago, so I’d like to talk you about it and also show you some works that I’ve done with it.

This package is huge! As the same as the Cinematic Metal library, you can get a Designed version and the construction kit with tools. By getting the bundle you get more than 7000 single sounds in over 1000 files in the construction kit, and more than 300 designed creatures ready to use. All the material was recored at 96kHz/24-Bit and is perfectly tagged (metadata ready) and named.

The designed sounds are really good, but what I’ve been using this days is the construction kit, which I find awesome because of several reasons:

— The wide variety of performances. Each single file comes with several performances, with lots of variations and different options.
— Searching/filtering words inside the library is fantastic. The files and metadata works very good. This is something that the guys at BOOM tried to do as good as possible, and they definitely achieve their goal. All the stuff is classified in a lot of performances and descriptive attributes, including the performances (growl, hiss, screech, blow, roar, etc), intensity (hard, soft), tone (low, high) and size (large, medium, tiny, etc)
— You get a lot of different sounds, from low and big roars to high screeches and weird screams. These guys had really crazy recording seasons… there are a lot of weird and amazing noises.
— Outstanding quality. I’ve been stretching and processed the sounds in a lot of different ways and all the stuff worked great. This material has really good quality

Working with the sounds

I liked to do a video where I can feature a lot of the sounds from the library, so I picked up a video and did all the sound design of it. Let’s hear:

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/16957429[/vimeo]

As you can see, there are three main creatures. For demonstration purposes (and also to put some limitations myself), all the sounds of them were done using the Creatures library only, plus processing and layering.

— Orcs – I wanted variation here, while maintaining a similar style in all their voices. I used a lot of different sources here, from roars, to yells and screeches. I did several processed and I liked the final result
— Spider – The spider has a high pitch sound, with some magic powers. It comes from a woman so I tried to keep some human factor in the throat, with some growls, but also a put some high pitch screeches and squeals to make it squeaky.
— Dragon – This wan was the difficult thing of this video. It’s a really huge creature, so all its sounds had to be treated in a special way. This one has a lot of different sounds from the library. I never felt the necessity of using other sources. All the stuff from BOOM was perfect for my purposes. Here you can find a lot of sources, from heavy processed screeches, to big roars and huge cry/yells.

Conclusion

This is definitely a must-have for any sound designer working on creature design. I know we can use animals, our own voices, and lots of unusual sources; but this library can provide really unique elements and a wide variety of high wuality sources that you’ll love! It’s fantastic.

Useful links: BOOM Library | Interview with Axel Rohrbach on Designing Sound