A collaborative post by BOOM BOX POST
With a seemingly limitless number of plugins at our fingertips today, it's easy for the most rudimentary tools to go under appreciated. Among the Avid stock plugins, one of THE most frequently used, yet lesser discussed is the 'Reverse' AudioSuite. This tool is as simple as they come, but what it lacks in bells and whistles it makes up for in creative potential. Today I thought I'd discuss a few ways I like to use it and demonstrate with examples.
1) Reversed Vocal Reverb and Delay Tails
One of the most common reverse effects we’re all familiar with is pre-reverb/reverse reverb. We’ve all heard the famous “Poltergeist Effect” (check out this post Katie did on horror sound design), but outside of the horror genre you’ll hear this effect all the time in music and all styles of animation and film. The basic idea: traditionally, you select a sound (long or short) run it through a reverb, delay or other time-based effect and print the tail. Now reverse this tail and have it lead into the original sound. It’s very effective on vocal designs but can come in handy for creating transitional effects on musical instruments and non-vocal sound effects.
I’m sticking with the horror genre for this demonstration. Let’s create creepy, ghostly breath effects using this reverse technique!
Here’s an example of a single breath with reversed reverb and delay:
And below is an example of a breathing sequence with a similar design process. For this I printed a the stereo delay and reverb effects in that order. Then reversed and added more effects to taste.
2) otherworldly warping transitions
The possibilities with these style of effects are endless. The general approach to this design is to select a few layers of sounds that span the length of your desired effect. Reverse these layers to create surreal and otherworldly transitions. You can play with all sorts of unique and out-of-the-box combinations of effects here or keep it more straightforward, but we recommend you combine layers that will come together to fill out the frequency spectrum (low, mids, highs).
Here’s an example of an otherworldly warping transition I designed by combining a thunder crack, a debris crash/explosion and glass shatters. When reversed, the thunder crack and explosion act as upward swelling sounds that do the heavy lifting of the transitional quality. The debris and glass shattering sounds act as the textural element; in this case they sound like particles warping in time.
Here are the source layers:
And here’s the build after reversing these elements and layering them together:
3) Change the spirit of a Pitch shifting sound
It’s no secret that sounds with descending pitch over time tend to convey a negative tone or loss in energy while sounds ascending in pitch over time convey the opposite. For pitching sounds over time on a budget, we’re fans of the Waves SoundShifter plugin. However, sometimes it doesn’t always create the results you’re looking for…or you’ve already found a sound or group of sounds with the timbre you desire but need to convey a different action or mood. Reversing these sounds can instantly give you the inverse of the sound’s current energy or create variations. These are just a few examples, but this technique can be applied to vehicles, whooshes, explosions, etc. for effective tonal changes and variation.
Let’s say you found the perfect power down layers for your robot, but what if you also need to power it back up and retain the same tonal characteristics?
How about creating various movements for your robot’s servo motors? Transposing the pitch can help with this but will retain some familiarity whereas reverse can help with more variation:
Or maybe you found the perfect bass dive for a slo-mo transition, but now you’re transitioning back to normal speed?
I know these are quite simple. You may be thinking “well duh,” but exploring these simple concepts with more unique and complex source material can quickly lead to powerful results in your sound design. We hope this inspires you to test out reversing sounds you haven’t thought to try. Thank you for reading!
If you enjoyed this blog, take a look at these:
MAKING A MAGICAL ARTIFACT - CENTAURWORLD EDITION
CREATING SPOOKY VOCAL SOUND EFFECTS FOR HALLOWEEN
HOW TO DESIGN AN INTERDIMENSIONAL TIME JUMP