Sound Design, What is is,how to do it and what tools to use.

In this guide I will talk about the basic equipment and methods for sound design. Lets start with what exactly is sound design?

Sound design is the process of manipulating recorded audio or generating audio elements. For instance I used to do large amount of sound design when doing work on a TV show called Hercules: the legendary journeys. In this TV Show the director requested us to put together a sound each and every time a Greek Gods appeared , all those appearances included visual effects like lightning, sparks, flashes etc, I had to find sounds that can match everything you see on the screen. So you start with placing the sounds for what you see, like sparks and lightning , but here comes the challenging part,the things that don't make sound , like light ,smoke and so forth, for that you have two options. Use an organic sound ( real recording ) or use a synthesized sound. Synthesizer sounds rarely work for me, they are simply not rich enough, given that synthesized sounds normally made of simple waveform like sinus and square as opposed to an natural sound recording that is tremendously complex and more natural for our ears.

So what can we do for a flash of light ?, For me it's usually trial and error. I will start looking into swishes and whooshes those are recording of moving things like sticks, cars, airplanes, trains etc. After that I might look into explosions, fire, Screamimg, animal voices etc. The problem with all those is that they most times sounds like what they are, and here comes the manipulation part ( that is certainly the exciting part ). The first tool and it's not really manipulation but it's very important part of sound designing it's called layering, that means playing two or more sounds at the same time. layering itself can get you very far with regards to hiding the original sound, for example, sometimes when you mix car driving by with jets by and you also add fire or explosion it does not sound like a car and the Jets anymore but can turn in to a totally unrecognizable sounds. When I am sound designing I rarely not layering things. Other basic tools that I use are. Pitch shift, reverse, reverb, filtering and Already made sound design elements library.

1) Pitch Shifting : Probably the most effective sound design tool . Pitch shift can help a whole lot with making recognizable sounds much less recognizable. It can also make many small sounds sounding far larger. I recorded my son one day screaming, after pitch shift it it sounded like a huge monster. But there is how ever limit to how much you can pitch shifting before you begin hearing some side effects, you need to be careful. Also it helps significantly if you record the sound at high sample rate, 96khz and 192khz ( if you have the equipment to do that ). Another technique is that you should pitch down at small amounts, for example if you need a pitch anything 2 octaves lower you much better go 6 times 4 semitones instead of one time 24 semitones all at once. Another good use for pitch shift is if you need the sound to be longer or shorter.

2) Reverse : Tremendously useful tool when sound designing, extremely helpful to create a surreal sound. When you use reverse you do not reduce the quality of the sound but you allow it to be less recognizable and weird.

3) Reverb : Great tool to make sound biggerthan life, and change the ambient of the place the sound was recorded. for example, I once recorded drips of water in a small room, put reverb on it's sounded like drips in a huge cave.

4) Filtering : high pass low pass and bandpass are great devices to isolate a part of the Sound. For example if you need rumble for earthquake it is possible to record traffic use a low pass filter and you get good earthquake rumble ( of course you can add some things to make it greater like avalanche and explosions for making it more engaging ). I normally use high pass and high cut filtering only on a few of the elements and not to aggressively. Overdoing it might cause the end result to sound unnatural and unpleasantto the ear.

5) Pre-Made library of sound design elements: If you have to do lot of sound design and your time is limited you better have a good already made library of sound design elements, if you use a good sound design elements library it is possible to sometime cut sound design that can take all day in 2 minutes.

You can find other tools ( plugins ) that involve more sophisticated sound processing but when you look under the hood they usually use the same things which can be Pitch shift, reverse, reverb, filtering, modulation as well as delays. The great thing about those processors is that they're doing a lot of tasks for you, like slicing and dicing the audio to thousands of pieces applying effects to every piece dynamically shifting the pitch and so forth, if you try to do that yourself it will take you huge amount of time. The trade-off is usually that you may have a lot less control of what the end result is going to be, occasionally they are great but sometimes they are a waste of time. I personally go to those tools maybe 20% of the time, Almost always for sci-fi projects and less for organic real-world projects.

One thing I should say about sound design is that it normally requires time to arrive at great a result, you basically need to work hard and be patient until your criation will sounds beautiful.

David Mann is a soundDesigner with 20 years of work experience at the Los Angeles post production sound world. He is in addition the owner of Fresh Cut Sound Effects, an online sound effect Library.