Discover the latest industry news and audio post production.
Discover the art of crafting unique cartoon sound effects, from whimsical Foley techniques to DIY props, to bring animated worlds to life with creativity and flair.
November 16, 2022
One of the most exciting but also daunting challenges that you'll face when designing the sounds for an animated project is the task of starting with a blank canvas. Because there is no actual location to hear how the environment sounds or how the space reacts to movement and speech, you’ll be building a sound world from scratch. It’s important to take care and be very intentional with the sounds that you choose to use.
You may be crafting anything from background sounds like ambiences, wind, weather and the hum of an interior, to foreground sounds like mechanical sound effects, vehicles, Foley effects and vocalizations.
With many cartoons and animations being set in incredibly surreal and abstract worlds, you may not be able to find the right sounds in a library. You’ll most likely have to go out to a location field recording or even build your own sound effects props.
For a lot of cartoons, you’ll want to avoid creating anything too realistic. Instead you may want to create more caricature style sound effects.
Here are a few examples of sound effects and how you would create them:
Bird Call Whistles: There’s a huge variety of Bird Call Whistles, perfect for composing your own Dawn Chorus.
Horse Hooves: Coconut Shells on various surfaces - gravel is a nice place to start. You can also use a Geophone alongside your microphone for some extra weight.
Slide Whistle: For that classic Eee-yoooooop! sound.
Soldiers - Use a Marching Machine / Troop Blocks on various surfaces - wood and metal surfaces work well. Like with the horse hooves, you can use a Geophone alongside your microphone for some extra weight.
Splashes: Use a large rubber tub, line the inside with towels to avoid plastic sounding splashes and fill with water. Submerging different objects like paddles, plungers or your bare hands will give you different sounds.
Tyre Screeches: Inflate a hot water bottle and drag it across various surfaces.
Wind: A Wind Whistle or you can build your own D.I.Y. Wind Machine using an upturned bicycle and sheet of canvas on the wheel.
Lots of Toys: Board Game Pieces, Chess Pieces, Guiros, Marbles, Slime, Silly Putty, Slinky, Rattles, Whirling Tubes and Classroom Musical Instruments are all great for sillier sound effects.
Signature Strings lends itself perfectly to cinematic trailer sound design projects. However, the wide array of files gives you the arsenal to design sounds for a variety of genres, including fantasy, sci-fi, and action.
November 2, 2022
Welcome back to the 344 Audio Blog. Today we have a review of a new sound effects library from the team at RT Sonics. The Signature Strings Library is an ideal tool in any sound designer, video editor or trailer music composer’s toolbox.
Company: RT Sonics
Product: Signature Strings
Price: $49
Our Rating: 4.8/5
This library contains 270 high quality sound effects in 96kHz 24 bit Wav Format. All the sounds were created using a double bass and a plethora of playing techniques including pizzicato plucking, arco, legato, staccato and tremolo bowing.
Sound design is an integral part of the cinematic experience. It draws the viewer into the world you created, amplifying your message and telling a story of its own.
As intended, Signature Strings lends itself perfectly to cinematic trailer sound design projects. However, the wide array of files gives you the arsenal to design sounds for a variety of genres, including fantasy, sci-fi, and action.
Some of the sound effects you will find in this library include:
All fantastic for trailer or VFX sound design!
The key audience for this product includes composers and sound designers who would like to integrate Wav based orchestral effects into their everyday workflow. RT Sonics supplies you with both designed and source folders for maximum creative freedom. Thanks to the high production value, detailed naming and metadata, these sound effects are easy to find and can be intuitively dragged and dropped into your timeline.
We recommend this product for any audio professional who is searching for that signature cinematic sound.
For the price tag, Signature Strings gives you a ton of tools perfect for crafting cinematic soundtracks. The production quality of the designed sounds is very high, and we love the inclusion of source recordings that can be manipulated further. This is a worthwhile addition to any sound designers, composers or video editors toolbox.
You can purchase Signature Strings here:
https://rtsonics.com/products/signature-strings
This blog is a guide for budding Foley artists on building a prop collection. From essential shoes and fabrics to classic props like cornflour for snow and celery for bone breaks, learn how to start and expand your Foley toolkit for any project.
October 14, 2022
For many decades, creatives have been telling stories with sound. But yet, from the early days of performing sounds to picture, right through to today, the dark art of creating sound effects and in particular foley effects has been hidden away. With most people unaware that a vast majority of the sound you hear when watching a film has been added in post-production.
Thankfully, more recently, the process of recording foley is becoming much more well known and more and more people are now able to dip their toes into this world.
However when a budding foley artist decides to take on the challenge of building a prop collection, it can easily become overwhelming when trying to decide where to start. So in this article, we'll share with you what we look for when hunting for props.
As a Foley Artist, you'll be recording A LOT of footsteps, so a good variety of shoes is really important.
To start, try building up a collection of one of each type of shoe:
Heeled Shoes can be the most difficult to get right on a project, so a variety of thick, thin, square, round, wedged, tall and short heels will be really useful. Once you have a nice variety of footwear, you can then start looking at building a range of each type of shoe, as one shoe can give you a different tone and character from the next.
Cloth recording, though often subtle, is still a hugely important texture within a mix, it's one of those sounds that you won't notice until it's gone, but when it is gone scenes can be oddly empty.
Like with shoes, it's great to have a variety of different fabrics to choose from, the types of cloth you might want are:
These can come in the form of shirts, jackets, trousers, jeans and coats, and in a range of styles and varying thicknesses of material.
The range of props you will need will drastically vary from project to project, for instance in an office scene you may need:
Prop collecting can easily get out of hand, so depending on how much storage space you have it's probably best to acquire some props as and when you need them.
But some classic props that you can collect are:
Depending on what you will need for your specific projects, prop collecting can be a mammoth task and your library will be ever-growing. But, hopefully this article has been useful in getting you started on your prop hunting journey.
We hope you enjoyed checking out this article! If you would like to stay up to date with all things 344 Audio then please follow our socials via the links below:
If you would like to learn more about foley, there are also articles about building foley surfaces here:
PART 1: https://www.344audio.com/post/article-how-to-build-a-d-i-y-foley-pit
Explore four top DAW control surfaces to enhance your studio workflow, from budget-friendly options to high-end professional gear.
September 2, 2022
Working within a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) offers the user unparalleled flexibility and ease of use when compared to the traditional world of analogue hardware. However, sometimes the experience of working fully "in the box" can feel limited, and we need to use tools that offer a more responsive that just the keyboard and mouse. This is where control surfaces and mixers come in.
External control surfaces can be extremely useful when it comes to mixing and general workflow, giving you a more hands-on, tactile experience. In this article, we explore a few different options for control surfaces that you can add to your home studio to enhance your workflow.
- Affordable price.
- Complete control for navigating your session, editing, writing automation etc.
- Footswitch input for hands-free start/stop.
Presonus have made a name for themselves in the world of pro audio, for providing affordable yet quality products that punch above their weight in terms of price range.
The fade port 8 continues this legacy, offering the user an all-in-one DAW control surface for what is perhaps the most accessible price on the market. This piece of kit gives you everything you need in terms of functionality, whilst remaining fairly simple to get to grips with for new user.
We would recommend this as the best budget option in this list, and perfect for users at the intermediate level who are looking to upgrade their home studio.
- Vibrant and colourful 27" touch screen display.
- Fully customisable batch commands.
- Touch screen gestures to open/close plugins, zoom in/out, select regions for edit etc.
- Integrated app for control with your smart phone.
The Slate Raven MTi2 gives you the power of a full production studio and packs in into a touch screen control surface. Working with the Slate Raven feels effortless and very intuitive. Its features are fully customisable allowing you to create your own shortcuts and batch commands which can be programmed onto a single button on screen.
We can personally vouch for the Slate Raven here at 344 Audio. Its been a centrepiece of our Stephenson suite, and we use it as both a controller for Pro Tools and also for riding faders when mixing. The MTi2 is the perfect option for someone who is looking for a touch screen control surface, or one that has large visual display.
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- Robust design.
- LCD display for real-time visual feedback.
- USB plug and play, no drivers required.
The Mackie MCU Pro-8 channel is a solid and reliable 8 channel mixer that is ideal for home and pro studios alike. Mackie have a well earned reputation for producing quality gear, and have been a mainstay in recording studios worldwide for several decades now. Whilst the design and aesthetics may look fairly rudimentary compared to some of the other options on this list, the MCU Pro 8-channel ticks every box in terms of functionality, including being 100% plug in and play with no drivers required. The price is on the higher side of this list, so we recommend this for more advanced users, and professionals who have previous experience with more traditional mixing desks.
- Sleek & compact design.
- Seamless integration with Pro Tools.
- Rapid Workflow.- High quality, touch-sensitive faders.
Last but not least, we have the AVID S1. This sleek and modern design gives you everything you need in terms of DAW integration and control, and being made by AVID gives this an edge in terms of pro tools compatibility. With the S1 you can easily create custom knob layouts for all of your favourite plugins, tailoring your setup to match your workflow exactly. If 8 faders isn't enough for you then the S1 also allows you to connect multiple docks together, which is a very useful and handy feature, especially for mixing drums, or lots of different mic signals. The S1 is a nice middle point between the Slate Raven and the Mackie, with a combination of traditional mixing desk features with a crisp visual display and modern design.
We would recommend this product for established professionals who are looking for a more compact controller surface, and something that they can take on the move with them if they are travelling.
Overall, there are a lot of different options out there when it comes to a DAW control surface for your studio. Ultimately, it comes down to what your budget is and how the surface fits into your workflow, so hopefully this list should give you some ideas of what to buy when you are ready to make a purchase.
We hope you enjoyed checking out this blog post!
In his new online course for Soundfly, Ryan Lott shares an incredible amount of detailed insight with regards to his sound and instrument design process
August 15, 2022
Ryan Lott is a composer, songwriter, and the band leader of Son Lux. As a composer, he’s worked with dance companies like Ballet de Lorraine, National Dance Company of Wales, and BalletX, and his film scores and arrangements include The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2014), Paper Towns (2015), Mean Dreams (2017), Looper (2012), and most recently, Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).
In his new online course for Soundfly, Ryan Lott: Designing Sample-Based Instruments, Ryan shares an incredible amount of detailed insight with regards to his sound and instrument design process, and how he captures original tonal and textural sounds to create custom, virtual, playable instruments which he then uses to build the foundations for his songs, film and dance scores, and audio-visual live shows.
More than anything, Ryan’s process reflects the endless possibilities inherent to using sound design as the starting place for “musical” composition, as opposed to the assumption held by so many producers that sound design exists solely as an additive, supplemental element to an audio production or film treatment already in progress.
Today we have the honor of sharing with you a newly released video from Ryan’s course, courtesy of Soundfly, that explores which elements he prepares for in creating new sounds and which he leaves up to chance; as well as how he mediates between those mindsets in practice.
Enjoy this exclusive video below, and if you’d like to check out the rest of Ryan Lott’s full online course, you can take 15% off your subscription courtesy of us! Just head here to sign up for Soundfly and use the following promo code at checkout: 344AUDIO
The practice of designing virtual instruments allows for so much discovery and introspection — two things that can lead to significant artistic growth. One good way to tap into that is to articulate a creative theory early on, and then prod or test it throughout your process, taking the time to reflect on the ways in which your expectations are met or the things that surprise you.
In this segment of the course, Ryan’s hunch is that if he can record three variations on the same piano note (we see him capture these notes in another lesson in his course), through sampling he’ll be able to turn that into a “wavering pitch” phenomenon, giving his virtual sample a lilting, emotive quality.
In the above video, as we see him play the pitch back in a chord dyad, you can really hear that emotionality come to life. Ryan describes the effect as almost like the sound is searching.
There’s so much information just in that single sound.
Ryan also talks about how making an instrument using a sample can be a “surreal experience,” because it involves listening to and then re-contextualizing an already played performance; with all its quirks and asymmetries intact.
You're essentially creating a new way to perform an existing performance, which is an awesome thought. You're able to respond to your original performance as a performer, creating opportunities for serendipity to occur.
Ryan says one of his goals in designing sample-based instruments is not only to have something that responds actively to him, but that he can respond to as well. For him, “imbuing chance into your programming is the key to that.”
When you layer that contour with itself, playing back at a different speed, you’re inevitably getting a lot of chance interaction. There’s an ongoing variability.
In another instance within this video, Ryan shows us how something small and unintended can become a source of sonic inspiration. He takes a closer look at a “squeak sound” that was achieved by accident on one of the piano’s strings during recording.
Because this sound is made of such a high frequency tone, we see him work through a hunch that playing it back at a slower speed might reveal something “invisible” hiding within the sound itself. Ryan prints the .wav file and imports it into Kontakt, mapping it up to C7 so he can utilize the lower registers of the keyboard to unveil what’s hiding inside the sample sonically.
Upon playing it back we see him visually excited to discover that the resulting sample produces a windy, breathing flute-like synth tone, which he describes immediately as “a rainy sound.”
This tiny experiment proves that even a veteran producer or sound designer as experienced as Ryan Lott can be delighted and surprised to discover totally new and unheard sounds, time and time again, by relying on chance encounters in his process and making sure to embrace happy accidents with an open-minded approach.
For even more insightful lessons and unique videos exploring composition and sound design, head over to Ryan Lott: Designing Sample-Based Instruments. And be sure to use our exclusive promo code for 15% off the cost of a monthly or annual subscription to Soundfly. Simply sign up here and use promo code 344AUDIO at checkout.
We hope you enjoyed checking out this article!
