The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
Viewing entries tagged
recording
As sound editors, we’re always looking for opportunities to fortify our sound effects library. A great sound editor can deliver excellent editorial with even the most limited toolbox. However, for a team that works on demanding series of varying styles with quick turnarounds—getting bogged down by a weak library isn’t an option.
For aspiring editors and audio students, I always come across one tip in—to start building up a personal SFX library. So I complied a list of 10 spring inspired sounds, that if you have access to, you should go out and record this refreshing time of year!
Whether you’re a seasoned field recordist or just getting your feet wet, you probably know by now it’s not the cheapest hobby. It’s a niche market that requires very specialized equipment and accessories, so it’s no surprise these companies charge an arm and a leg for their products. In my experience, when it comes to the most important pieces in your kit, IE recorder/mixers, microphones, etc, investing in the best gear your budget allows usually pays dividends in the long run. But with accessories like a synthetic fur windcover, I’m curious to see if we really need to spend $100+ to achieve satisfactory recordings. To me, it’s more important to get out in the field and start recording rather than waiting to afford the perfect setup. So with that being said, let’s try making a DIY windcover!
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 recently found ourselves working on a Roller Derby themed episode for one of our shows. As you can imagine, this episode called for an abundance of roller skating sounds to cover a wide variety of performances. With the guidance of Re-recording mixer Jacob Cook, Tess and Tim took it upon themselves to plan and execute a recording session to help build up our library and turnover some much needed roller skating sounds for the episode.
As sound professionals, we always have our ears open for interesting sounds. This isn’t limited to just sound effects I can record but also interesting ways sound can interact with the spaces we inhabit. Over the years, if I find myself in an especially interesting space, I’ve made a point of recording myself clapping once, so that I can later farm that sound as an Impulse Response, recreating the space. This practice carries the same nostalgic feelings as my field recordings, but expands the idea to my mixing. I can put any Impulse Response (the clap) through a reverb plugin that will, like magic, recreate that space. You too can be out there capturing wild and interesting spaces for your work!
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.
As a studio that works in a lot of children’s animation, we are always on the lookout for a good substitute for breaking glass. Recently, our supervising sound editor, Tess, took it upon herself to create our own library featuring the breakage of terracotta pots.
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!
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.
On past projects I have received critiques that my wood creaks for various items (doors, wooden chairs, footsteps, etc) sounded pretty weak and ill-fitting for the scene. The sound libraries I had access to at the time really didn’t offer many quality options, so I decided to do some research on how I could capture better creak sounds. I stumbled upon a couple videos online of Foley artists using what is called a creak box. This Foley instrument allows the user to more precisely create and perform creaking sounds quite easily. Below I’ll be going over how I put together a couple different creak boxes of my own and what I learned in the process.
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?
