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As many of us travel to San Francisco for GDC this week, some of our fellow sound designers won’t be able treat it as a vacation with assets to create and soundscapes to design. If you are in need of endless gore, futuristic weapons, granular loops, quick and dirty waveshaping, clicking and grinding bicycles gears, whooshes of every sort, and cinematic suspense and punch, look no further than these recent libraries from SoundBits, New Sound Lab, SoundMorph, Audiomodern and StrangeLines.
Just Gore | Add On by SoundBits
Do you find yourself overwhelmed designing sounds for zombie and horror games? If the sounds of bones crushing and limbs avulsing are your bread and butter, SoundBits has a new add-on pack to breathe fresh life into your festering undead. Just Gore | Add On contains 790 sounds of blood-soaked sadism with splattering lacerations, squishy impacts, twisting rips and tears, flowing blood, clean stabs, and bone marrow cruelly exposed to the light of day. All that’s missing is your katana and a Cornetto. While this library focuses on R-rated gore, the sounds are dry enough to be added to any film or game that wants the audience to feel their characters’ pain.
(790 WAV files, 553.7 MB, 96-192kHz/24bit)
Just Whoosh 3 | Whoosh Essentials by SoundBits
SoundBits has expanded their Just Whoosh series with their most worthwhile installment yet. Just Whoosh 3 | Whoosh Essentials has the sounds you find yourself needing every day. Whether you’re working on a film with exciting scenes of hand-to-hand combat or a social media app that notifies its users of their best friends’ every move, this library can find its way naturally into the soundscape. With 575 sounds of chafing cloth, jeans, leather and nylon, swishing bamboo, wood, metal and plastic sticks, twirling ropes and chains, and even cars passing by, there are very few projects that couldn’t immediately benefit from these mastered sounds.
(575 WAV files, 873.4 MB, 96-192kHz/24bit)
Cinematic Hits & Transitions 2 by SoundBits
SoundBits has also continued their Cinematic Hits & Transitions Series with a second volume. With 222 impacts, you receive hard-hitting, distorted attacks, deep impacts with massive reverb, and tension-filled strikes that build in unsettling ways. Also included are 111 transitions that show off SoundBits’ mastery of suspense with haunting transformations that will quickly alter the mood of your scene. If you’d like to simulate a cinematic punch to the guts of your audience members, this library is a go-to choice for an instantly professional sound.
(333 WAV files, 1.9 GB, 96kHz/24bit)
NSL014 Wheels and Gears by New Sound Lab
New Sound Lab got to know two bicycles very well in the making of Wheels & Gears. Featuring the Specialized Carve Expert mountain bike and the Bianchi Campione road bike, Tor Johnson covers nearly every square inch of sound-producing mechanisms within the tires, freewheels, gears and chains. The library ranges from the everyday actions of riding a bike with sounds of shifting gears, coasting and accelerating to treating the bike as a foreign device through experimental recordings of cardboard, shoe soles, paper and guitar picks placed in the spokes and on the tires. Even if you don’t have a bike in your scene, there are sounds of sentient machines roaming around within this library.
(170 WAV files – 132 mono/38 stereo, 2.8 GB, 192kHz/24bit)
Modularps by Audiomodern
Audiomodern knows how to present their samplers; just take a look at this delicious demo video. Each loop feels organically attached to the beautiful frozen 3D models, thanks to sound designer Adam Ritchie. He creates thick, grainy ambiences to blur the line between music and sound design while maintaining an effortless flow through the glitches and the static. While this library gives a sense of chaos, each element is designed to fit together, playing the roles of beats, basses, melodies, textures, drones and rhythms. With several filters – stutter, convolution reverb, delay, EQ, drive, lo-fi, etc – you can make this library as smooth or as distorted as you’d like.
(350+ loops in Kontakt, WAV, AIFF and REX formats, 1 GB, 48kHz/24bit)
Streakulator by Audiomodern & StrangeLines
Streakulator, created by developer Ernesto Cecco D’Ortona of StrangeLines, is a special plugin for Ableton Live. Its interface allows you to create new sounds in no time with its straightforward visual interface. You can trigger any synth, vocal, drum loop, etc., via MIDI and see exactly how it’s affected by your waveshaping or side-chaining filters on the timeline. Simply put in a MIDI track, lay down your piano roll, and trigger your filters, envelopes and effects in Streakulator. It’s that easy!
(Ableton Live required)
Future Weapons 2 by SoundMorph, Principle Sound Design and Victor Ermakov
It’s the year 2252 and the world is still recovering from the Drumph Era. A fleet of fascist robots approach, having divided and conquered the other rebel forces through the covert force of endless little passive aggressive lies. You pull out your taser, ready to disengage their amygdala switches, but what does your weapon sound like? More likely than not, you will find it in this new library. SoundMorph’s reign of fire is back with Future Weapons 2. Designed in collaboration with Principle Sound Design and Victor Ermakov, this library includes blasters, reloads, foley and beautiful sounding guns. Packing futuristic heat never sounded so good.
(500+ WAV files, 1.2 GB, 96kHz/24bit)