WRITTEN BY JEFF SHIFFMAN, CO-OWNER OF BOOM BOX POST
So I’m getting in to work… normal day, pretty routine. Except I see this shopping cart in the corner next to our parking lot. It gives me pause. In my nearly two decades in this business, I’ve always struggled to find good shopping cart sounds. Some context for you: back in the day I cut an episode of “Kick Buttowski” with an intense shopping cart race through the aisles of a grocery store. After dozens and dozens of series, some with hundreds of episodes, I remember that one because it was a stretch to find materials to make it all work.
And there’s a shopping cart, right there.
My day is kind of light... so I grab the cart and wheel it into the studio. This was the birth of Boom Box Library’s newest library Shopping Carts.
At first, the idea was just to beef up our library, filling a gap that’s always existed. I spent the next few hours recording rolling, drops and various movements on our mix stage. After that, I wheeled the cart around our parking lot to get some great long steady recordings of rolling at different speeds. As I cleaned up the recordings, I was really happy with the results, but I wanted more. A few months later, there was another shopping cart! This time I took it as a sign, wheeled it into the parking lot for safe keeping and planned out multiple days of recording.
Using my shoes to pad the boom stand.
With the second cart, I wanted to really expand the recording set. Again I started on the mix stage, this time using a stationary microphone to record the folding and unfolding of the child seat; both with and without the plastic flap. That sound is so specific and one I definitely wanted to include in the library.
As I was maneuvering the cart around, the wheels got caught making a fantastic drag/skid sound. This is again something we have all experienced, moving shopping carts around with broken wheels. In order to capture this sound, I needed to mount the microphone on the cart itself. I ended up mounting a boom stand on top of the cart with my shoes as impromptu padding. I already had my shoes off to avoid footstep sounds while I moved the cart, so two birds, one stone! I rounded out my interior recordings with start/stop sounds as well as very long steadys at multiple speeds, which I accomplished by running around in circles. I definitely got my cardio in that day.
Next up, I once again took the cart outside, recording tons of steady rolls on different pavement textures all around our building. I finished the day by recording multiple crashes; accomplishing this by simply throwing the cart into the back wall of our facility. A concerned neighbor checked in on me but I assured her that we own the building we are repeatedly smashing with a shopping cart. She remained dubious.
As a sound editor, I really can’t think of a better way to spend these few days. It was so incredibly rewarding to take these recordings back to my rig and clean them up to share with the world. I’ll never again need to seek out great shopping cart sounds! Now complete, Shopping Carts consists of 185 sound effects, coming in at just under 333MB. You can see the full list here.
You can get your own copy of Shopping Carts as well as all of our other original libraries over at boomboxlibrary.com.