Friday, June 27, 2008

Tips on Editing Sound Effects for a Sound Effect Library

By SFXsource

Once you have recorded a large amount of material intended to be used as sound effects, the next step in creating a sound effect library is to edit this raw audio. You will need an audio editing software that will allow you to cut, fade in/out, normalize, and eq your tracks. There are many professional digital audio workstations (DAWs) out there for purchase and also several useful freewares easily found on the internet.

First import all of your raw .wav recordings into the software of your choice. Try to import 40 or so for efficiency, though you may attack one at a time, and solo each track for editing which mutes all tracks except the one with which you are working. Now you are ready to edit your sounds and then bounce them into completed sound effects. The following points will assist the quality and efficiency of your work.

1. Use normalization on each recorded sample first. Normalization increases the amplitude of each .wav file, in other works amps the volume as loud as can be.

2. Next, cut out unwanted frequencies that degrade the quality of your sound by using eqs. For instance, an unwanted air conditioning sound may be interfering with a bird chirp. To get rid of the unwanted AC simply apply a high pass filter around 2,000 Hz which will kill the AC noise but preserve the higher frequencies of the bird chirp.

3. After cleaning and amping the audio next find a clean break with which to start each particular sound effect and make a fade out or let the natural reverb of the sound fade out by itself for 1-2 seconds.

5. Mix down a 48k 24bit stereo .wav file to be used for video productions. Such 48k 24bit stereo files earn the most money as they are valued by video editors and producers for their higher quality.

5. By creating multiple versions of each recording you will increase the number of your products and thus the value of your library. For example, if you have a sequence of 20 firework explosions, create sound effects for one explosion, two explosions, five explosions etc while cutting and switching the order of explosions each time. Using this method, you can readily get 50 or more products from this one recording of fireworks.

6. Use pitch shift and other effects to create new versions of each sound to increase your number of products. For example, a burp sound effect could be pitch shifted down to create a monster burp sound and pitch shifted up to create a more childlike sounding burp.

With a little knowledge of audio editing, simply follow the above advice to transform your audio samples into professional quality sound effects for licensing in media productions.

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