Growing up in the Midwest, it seemed like everyone had a basement (not a thing here in LA). A basement is a bonus space the size of your entire floor plan. For adults, this means lots of storage (functional but boring); for kids, a giant playroom! When I was young, my dad bought two used pinball machines from a friend and plunked them down in our basement. These were mid-70’s era classics with all the (literal) bells and whistles. At any time of day you could hear these very specific sounds emanating from our basement, working their way into the consciousness of one young sound designer in the making (me).
Needless to say, these two pinball machines became family treasures. So when it came time for my parents to downsize their house (no room for pinball), I just couldn’t resist keeping one for myself and my family.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Pinball SFX Library!
The Pinball SFX Library features 830+ custom-recorded sound effects from a vintage pinball machine such as bumpers, pistons, coin return, bonus balls, game play, flippers, metal doors, jackpot, plungers, scoreboard ticker, power on, power off, startup sequence and more.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Typewriters SFX Library!
The Typewriters SFX Library features custom sound effect recordings from both manual and electronic typewriters. Models include the Smith Corona electronic typewriter, Olivetti manual typewriter, and Olympia manual typewriter. Sound effects include typing, page scroll, page return, bells, beeps, clicks, slides, levers, and more.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of ultimate Boom Box Library: The Everything Bundle!
The Everything Bundle includes all sound effects libraries released by Boom Box Library at the time of purchase. Click on the images below for more details about each library.
Recently, Boom Box Post co-owner, Jeff Shiffman brought in three different Typewriters for a recording project. We put our apprentice, Andrew Shirey up to the test to get all the sounds possible out of the multiple type writers provided. Let’s see what he was able to capture!
Last summer I found myself with a little extra time on my hands and a big idea. Coming on the heels of an original Boom Box Library offering, “Magic Chimes,” which I recorded back in 2021, I wanted to expand on the idea of an all encompassing percussion library. I received classical training as a percussionist at the Indiana University School of Music (now the Jacobs School). We would spend hours in master classes focused on one instrument, perfecting for example, the ideal triangle performance. Hours. On the triangle. Needless to say, I felt qualified for the task. Here’s my chance to revisit those roots and put together something really special.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Percussion SFX Bundle!
The Percussion Bundle includes all four sound effect libraries in the Percussion Collection: Cymbals & Gongs, Magic Chimes, Hand Drums, and Auxiliary Percussion. All libraries contain high-quality recordings of professionally played percussion instruments. Various sticks and mallets were employed at numerous tempos and volumes.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Auxiliary Percussion SFX Library!
The Auxiliary Percussion SFX Library is the latest member of our Percussion Collection and contains a wide variety of professional percussion sound effect recordings. Instruments include a bamboo horn, various tambourines, cabasa, castanets, claves, cowbell, various maracas and shakers, flexatone, toy glockenspiel, guiro, harmonica, kalimba, triangle, rainstick, sleigh bells, spoons, train whistle, and wood blocks. Each instrument is played at numerous tempos and employing various techniques.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Hand Drums SFX Library!
The Hand Drums SFX Library is the latest member of our Percussion Collection and contains a wide variety of professional percussion sound effect recordings. Instruments include the den den, djembe, doumbek, frame drum, and udu drum played at numerous tempos and employing various techniques.
For this library, all drums were played by our co-owner and classically trained orchestral percussionist, Jeff Shiffman, to achieve an incredibly high standard of quality.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Cymbals & Gongs SFX Library!
The Cymbals & Gongs SFX Library is the latest member of our Percussion Collection and contains a wide variety of professional cymbal and gong sound effect recordings. Instruments include China, crash, ride, splash, and toy cymbals and large and small gongs played with various sticks and mallets at numerous tempos and volumes.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library from the Robotic Creations Collection: Vocalizations! You can now also purchase this new library by itself or bundled with Futuristic Weapons and Heads Up Display in the Robotic Creations Collection Bundle.
This library features the high-tech sci-fi vocalizations of each distinctive robot from our Robotic Creations Collection. You’ll find coughing, cheering, crying, efforts, growling, groaning, breathing, humming, impacts, screaming, singing, sneezing, snoring, and more.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: Foley Essentials!
The Foley Essentials SFX Library contains footstep, scuff, and drag sound effect recordings on a variety of surfaces. Surfaces include dirt, creaky floorboards, brick, leaves, grass, gravel, mud, sand, snow, water puddles, and wood. Each surface was walked with several shoe options including leather dress shoes, high heels, and sneakers.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: Women and Men! You can now also purchase this new library by itself or bundled with Babies & Kids as the Human Vocalizations Bundle!
The Women & Men SFX Library contains a variety of custom-recorded adult female and male vocalizations.
As many of you know, in 2017, we branched out from our post-production sound business, Boom Box Post, to start Boom Box Library. BBL (as we call it around here) is a sound effect library company which allows us to share our sound design work with other professionals, and also contribute to the creativity of our community members with custom-recorded libraries that we feel fill a void in basic materials. In short, our award-winning sound designers are creating sound libraries that we ourselves want to use.
For many of you who freelance or have unpredictable schedules, adding library creation to your business ventures could be just the thing you need. But, while recording or designing the sounds may be totally in your wheelhouse, there are a lot of other things that go into being able to sell your libraries. And that’s the end goal, right?
The Futuristic Weapons sound effects library features a wide-sweeping collection of high-tech sci-fi weapon sound effects. Each weapon sound effect has been sound designed from the ground up to match the life, characteristics, and personality of one of our five Robotic Creations robots. Because the robot personalities range from Mimo, the friendly robot buddy, to Firewall, the gigantic mech suit, the range in weapons is extreme. You’ll find sounds like a zip line, boomerang, water gun, laser blaster, futuristic gatling gun, mayhem blasts, and everything in between.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: Shopping Carts!
The Shopping Carts SFX Library contains a wide variety of professional shopping cart sound effect recordings including rolls, crashes, drops, stutters, basket seat movements, skids, shakes, and more.
Recently we published a blog that listed classic toon sound effects and the emotion they convey to the audience. Our hope was that it would be a helpful tool for anyone stuck in the editorial process. This is part 2! Continue reading to find out how our editors approach the following emotions with classic toon sound effects: Scared, Disgust, Love, and Bored.
Over at our other company, Boom Box Library, we recently released “Magic Chimes,” a library of mark tree and bell tree recordings for sound design and music applications. The library has been a big success thus far, clearly filling a need in the sound library community. Creating it from scratch was very fun, so I thought it would be interesting to share the process with you.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Magic Chimes SFX Library!
The Magic Chimes SFX Library contains a wide variety of professional mark tree (the professional name for wind chimes) and bell tree sound effect recordings. These include glissandos, scales, single notes, steadies, shaking, and more.
One of our most popular blog series is Glossary of Sound Effects, of which we have done 3 parts. On the original post, we get a ton of questions asking what keywords should be used when trying to find very specific sounds. I decided to relay a few of these questions to our editorial team. I’m very curious what buzzwords they will recommend.
