Creature sound design tutorial

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In this post, I want to show a little sound design demo I have done utilising material from the awesome new Boom Library release, Creatures. I was a beta tester for this library. As the name of the library suggests, it’s intended to create Creature vox with, and that’s exactly what I’ve done.

The purpose of this demo is to show how important it is to work with high resolution audio, and also to share a few tricks that I have learned with regards to vox processing. One of the great things of the Boom Library products is that they’re all recorded in pristine quality at high sample rate and bit depth (192kHz/24 bit), and made available at 96kHz/24 bit. This means that for a sound designer, there’s a lot of possibilities to tweak their material, as the high resolution audio means you can pitch and process until the extremes whilst still keeping good quality sound. Conversely, if the same source samples were provided at ‘standard’ or CD quality (44.1kHz/16 bit), you wouldn’t be able to do the amount of extreme pitch shifting shown in this demo without a significant quality loss.

So, basically this demo is going to explain how to get from this:

to this:


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Hydrophones – beginner experiments

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Today, I made a little trip to the beach. Earlier in the morning I had received two hydrophones in the post that I ordered from Jez riley French, and I was eager to try them out.

I’ve never owned or used hydrophones before, so this was all purely an experiment. I pretty much plugged the two of them into the pebbles, spaced approx a meter and a half apart, rolled back the cable towards the recorder, and hit record, whilst adjusting the levels. I clearly need some practice with all of this – these cables are 10 meters each and I was fiddling about quite a lot before I had them untied.

When I was finally ready to record, I noticed there was some sort of buzzing tone or interference in the signal which I couldn’t directly locate – and I didn’t feel like getting my shoes off again to go back into the cold British sea’s water and mess with the hydrophones to see if it had any effect. I decided to just let the recording roll.

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