Random foley advice thread! Thread

If you record yourself ruffling around an empty plastic zip-seal bag then record that many times on a track, and cutting the 'silence' you can make a convincing fire sound effect

I hear splatting macaroni cheese with your fists makes for great gore and impact sounds.

Running while recording will make a good running sound for
your mod.

There are plenty of tricks you can use to make convincing sounds. Cellophane rustling can make for a good fire sound, plus a few cracks and pops. Or just light a fire.

Not if you run in an airless environment.

I went to a firing range and and recorded a pistol.

Though it was an outdoors one, the wind was way too loud. I edited most of it out, but now it doesn't feel right.

On the bright side, firing a .380 is fun.
The cans and the crate didn't think so.

Good luck breathing.

Running sounds are usually not actually someone running, but rather just heavier/quicker footstep sounds manipulated and timed to make it seem right for someone whos running. Footstep sounds are generally easy to either record or get your hands on in some way. Its not hard to throw together a small wooden box and fill it with concrete or stones or . The REAL problem with Foley Effects is having a mic good enough to record all the subtle parts of the sound.

Run on the spot

Also
Punching yourself, makes for a good punching sound effect.

Edited by: TKAzA

Random tips and ideas on multi-track sound design.

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Record at higher sample rates (96khz ) for better results with destructive editing (pitch/time stretching) of a piece of audio. If you don't intend to do much manipulation of that kind, something like 44.1khz or even compressed (mp3/ogg/etc) is absolutely fine to design top notch game audio with.

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To get those cool WOOSH sounds for swords/poles/fists .. try dragging your foot or leg in jeans across carpet infront of the mic. Might cause wear and tear but you can get some cool tones from the friction... at least to mix in with your actual stick/pole recordings. Little additional audio to enhance a main sound is usually called a 'sweetener'.

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Don't be afraid to act out sounds with your mouth into the mic. Even if you just do this to 'pencil in' (so to speak) parts of a sound you are designing. Liken it to sketching out something on paper before attempting the 3d model, except you have some extra audio which could actually work...hurrah!

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Remember things can sound different EXTREMELY CLOSE. For example, I recorded my bathroom tap with it barely on and straining to let out water, the sound was useful in some futuristic sci-fi plasma gun sounds.. ..almost like electricity. The point is, close mic things, get sounds the ear doesn't usually pay attention to and embellish the crap out of them.... if not only for your own fun "tap gun?".

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If you need to create an area to record in (to avoid damage to carpets!) try to record foley on cardboard/old carpet instead of plastic (unless it's super wet).. plastic tends to make a lot of crinkly sounds. On a similar note, think about the clothes you're wearing, do they rustle when you move and do stuff?... are there creaky floorboards? You might not be aware of these annoying extra sounds being captured when you're concentrating on your foley.

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Try sounds ingame before finalizing them. What you're doing is creating a library of sounds that are going to playback in a game all over each other right? So if you make the most chunky, big, thick footstep sounds of all time, think about how they might compete with your weapons which also need to sound like the biggest slay0r tool ever. This mixing is NOT just about volume, it's about frequencies. Give everything straight forward and standard FX, EQ... length (nothing too long, or too short..).. put them in game. Check them out and then get your editing ideas from there. An obvious one, but if you're coming from a music production background, you might be used to writing/producing 1 whole song at once instead of developing. It's like testing a model with an engines ingame-lighting.
This will save you time in the long run when trying to get everything heard. There is nothing worse than spending hours on a sound.. looping it over and over.. annoying neighbours ...and you think it's perfect!, then you put it ingame and it's completely lost because it has too much bassss, or not enough basssss... or isn't loud enough yet it's as loud as you can make it but still eaten up by all the ambience, playersounds, voice,blah blah.. so on. Make sure it has information across all frequencies if it needs priority, weapon sounds for example.

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---and on that note--->

volume or loudness is about frequencies too!
some games have these super loud and 'powerful' weapon sounds. As someone with common sense, you'll want to achieve powerful sfx without destroying peoples speakers by simply upping 'volume/gain', which can distort horrifically. After applying a limiter/compressor, you'll find that if you are bias towards a particular frequency range, say the lower bass, then all the power is transferred there and the more audible mid-high range gets lost.
So just to say, if you're trying to squash everything into a sound, say a fire sound made of 11 gunshots, 5 kickdrums and a hammer on kitchen sink, make sure you don't give even one of those samples too much of one frequency, it'll eat up goodness of the others and your pallette of frequency information is muddied.
you can try to break your sound up into layers, a sound for the low end, the middle, the high end....extra sounds for little details...and roll off frequencies they won't be needing. This can keep your design clean instead of filling it out too much with garbage noise and undecipherable audio information. Not every sound needs to be enormous.
-------> on the flip side... if your sound is too thin and weedy, try generating some pure white noise and slip it into the mix... it can really fatten a sound out.
hope some of that is useful to someone. Just late night thoughts.

Edited by: stringed_Evil

Hey guys awesome tips.  I'm just getting into sound design so this is very useful for me.

it's tough to foley with a built-in laptop microphone though

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