TONSTURM Releases Electricity SFX Library, Q&A Included

TONSTURM is announcing the release of their second library, called Electricity, loaded with 192kHz recordings of amazing high voltage devices and crazy experiments with electricity.

This soundpack is all about high voltage. We risked our lives to serve you highly unique and exciting electricity sound effects. All sounds are recorded, edited and mastered in High Definition Audio @ 24 Bit, 192 KHz.

The recordings for this soundpack took place at three different locations. One part of the soundpack features good old arc welding. We had a couple of extensive free field welding sessions where we performed on different kinds of metal and used mixed types of welding rods. Really cool, rich and almost rhythmical sound effects derive from this session.

The main part of this soundpack is the result of an extra long and challenging session we planned together with Stefan Reißig. Through him we were able to record climbing arcs from a jacob´s ladder, manually pulled arcs with a stick, electrical discharges around a glass plate, capacitor discharges and electrified objects like wood branches, apples and bones. The special thing about this Jacob´s Ladder is that it can be modulated in speed. This produced very extreme and expressive sounds. Stefan studied electrical engineering and collects all this crazy high voltage equipment. Big credit goes to him and be sure to check out his youtube channel Teslalabor, where he posts all his crazy experiments!

Our third session took place at the university of applied science in cologne. Here at the institute for energy management we were able to pick up an other awesome sounding jacob´s ladder, a huge marx generator and big sounds of electrical discharges.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQtCQPDuRjE[/youtube]

Prices and Quality:

• 192 kHz Resolution –  59 € | 24-Bit/192kHz | 221 Sounds / 4.89GB on disk | Soundminer and PT metadata ready
• 95 kHz Resolution – 49 € | 24-Bit/96kHz / 221 Sounds / 2,33GB on disk | Soundminer and PT metadata ready
• Both includes MS and LR versions of the stereo recordings

Electricity is available for purchase now at the official site.

And yes! I had a Q&A with the Tilman of TUNSTORM, talking about the making of this fantastic and crazy library. Let’s read:

Designing Sound: How dangerous were the recording sessions? Any particular life risking story?

Tilman Hahn: One could say that death was always a few feet away from us. Besides the excitement there was a lot of tension in the air. One of us was always standing at the circuit breaker.

During the recordings we worked together with Stefan Reißig who owns all this crazy equipment. He always checked if things were safe and how close we could come with our microphones.

I guess Emil and I were more afraid about our equipment. One or two times the SD 702´s stopped while recording.
That was the most dramatic accident :-)

DS: What kind of devices did you use and what kind of electricity sounds you found in them? How was your approach on each different element and electricity sound?

TH: At our first session we recorded good old arc welding. Through performing different moves with the welding rod we had
quiet an amount of control over the sound. We got some nice, rich and almost rhythmical sounds from this session.

At Stefan Reißigs place we did the recordings of electrified objects for example. After a lot of research I was really happy that we found this method to record exciting sparks and zaps.

The great thing about his Jacob´s Ladder was that it could be tempo controlled. Through this we were able to modulate the sound pretty drastically.

It reminded us of turning the LFO knob on a synth. These particular sounds are very aggressive, resonant and sparkling like a raging TB 303 that comes to life.

We also recorded arcs pulled manually with a stick. This way again we had possibilities to perform the sound. Very nice snappy zaps and buzzing were the result.

DS: How was the microphone setup like?

TH: We used Emil’s Sennheiser MS-Set and my Schoeps MS-Set. For this Soundpack we also rented a Sennheiser MKH70 because we wanted to eliminate as much of the room characteristics as possible. We brought a lot of thick molton cloth with us, too. Before the recording we carefully treated the room with it. For some of the sounds in this library you will get the recordings of both microphone Setups. In these cases it made a lot of sense to us because the microphones
have quiet a different character and we also chose different positions for the microphones. Personally we like using MS a lot for recording sound effects.

When you buy our sound pack you get a MS version and a decoded LR version of the sounds. When we do sound editing we prefer to work with the MS version because you can always choose wether you want a real mono or a stereo signal. But for convenience we also decoded all the MS sounds to LR stereo sounds. Both formats are available for download.

DS: Is there any of those “happy accidents” included in the library?

TH: Definitely the bones :-) We wanted to have big pieces of meat but only got those bones from the butcher. We thought they
could not be electrified as they would isolate too much. But as you see in the teaser they reacted like hell. Not so happy was that disgusting smell and the fact that we could not open the windows during the recordings.

DS: How much experimentation was present on those sessions?

TH: We brought bags full of vegetables, fruits, flowers, bones and even meat with us because we were so curious to see how it would react under high voltage. But not every object was so responsive. For every recording session there is experimentation involved which makes it so much fun. We love it!

DS: Whats next for TONSTURM?

TH: We have a lot of ideas and do record more and more stuff for our own projects anyway. But at the moment we have nothing particular in development.