This year I really wanted to achieve a goal of releasing a sound library. I’ve released a few in the past (personal and through Broken Robot). But with my focus primarily on work these past few years, it had been a while since I went through this process and I wanted to use it as a good output for some new creative ideas.
My good friend Daniel at Subsocial Studios, reached out and asked if I wanted to collaborate with him on a sound library. So this ended up working out perfectly for us to do something together, and to try put out something new.
Short version, that library came out a few weeks ago, if you’re interested you can check out more info at the link below.
Sound Library Link
Slightly longer version - we tried to come up with a few ideas for this and ultimately settled on the concept of “movement”. It was general and vague enough to give us lots of opportunities to play with, and our goals was to basically try and capture as much movement as possible in the source sounds and see where that led us.
We opted to record in the loading bay of our old recording studio as it gave us the most flexibility for moving things around and making noise without the risk of damaging other equipment.
Our microphone list was:
Sennheiser 8060
Sennheiser 8040 (Pair)
Neumann U87
LOM Usi Pro (Pair)
We kept the Sennheiser’s pretty close as they were going to give us a more focused sound naturally and reduce some room sound. So we decided to lean into the opposite with the 87 and Usi Pros. We did the get Usi’s a bit closer later on for some more ultra-sonic content, but for the most part we just wanted to know if a lot of these sounds would give us a different character in processing later if we used distant mics.
Our source was basically any physical props we could get and wouldn’t feel bad damaging a bit, this is not a complete list but gives an idea of what we captured.
Drum Skins/Rims
Old Drum Cymbals
Projector Screens
Lots of Fabric/Clothing
Wooden Carts/Sticks
Metal Pipes/Rods
Plastic Sheets
For performance we just tried to get as much natural movement out of the source that we could, and also a lot of unorthodox things that I probably wouldn’t normally do. For example, holding a sheet of plastic on a broken tuba horn next to a spinning dolly wheel. Now we know what that sounds like, and it has an oddly “electrical” quality to it.
The intention was never to use this source as raw material though. When it came to processing, my goal was to either embellish/enhance whatever movement was naturally in the recorded sound. For example, if it was cloth flapping, can we make that feel more dramatic and support it with a tremolo that’s derived from the movement of the source? If it’s a pass-by, what does slowing it down, or speeding it up do to the sense of motion?
So that’s how you end up with sounds that start like spinning cymbal below.
The intention was not to lean into anything too sci-fi but obviously certain modern processing does lean in that direction. So I decided not to fight it when things went that way.
Ultimately I know this was aiming for Daniel's main user base which is primarily music creators. So I wanted to include a number of sounds which were very distinctly kicks, snares, cymbals. Those are super easy to make by just speeding things up, and layering to get the right transients you want.
After that, I just tried to include as many different whooshes, impacts, risers and other sounds I figured any sound person would want up their sleeve.
For the super nerdy, all the sounds in the library were made over a 2-3 day period. I tried to do a fresh start a few times and not just work in the same session to see if I could uncover something new.
At first I was going very handcrafted and clinical, but I wasn’t generating content I liked, and not at a pace that would get us anywhere. So I opted for a lot of samplers, including the Noise voice within Serum which is always fun to put sounds in, and makes it really easy to spit out a bunch of source with the envelope you need.
S-Layer and Polyplex both have their charms. So once I generated a lot of content, I’d mix and match with throwing different combinations of source and early design material in those and just see what came out.
I’m a really big fan of doing pitch moves within S-Layer for different riser/downer sounds - careful here as it can get really sci-fi really fast.
At this point, I could easily spit out lots of content really quickly, and it made it much easier to curate sounds from here
Beyond this, there was more Tonsturm Traveller and Whoosh when I needed to impart more movement into some static sounds we captured, or just on design source that I had generated from other sounds.
Kilohearts PhasePlant was also another source engine that appeared a lot, their granualar voice was fantastic for retriggering a lot of variations and giving an additional sense of movement.
Ultimately the name of the game here was continue processing and rinsing sounds through this whole chain a few times, until they were in a place that I thought they were interesting, fun, and could be helpful in some context.
I didn’t try make them all take up the whole frequency space, and opted to keep some a bit dark, and other’s a bit brighter/brittle, in hopes that they’ll do their job better in combination with other sounds. But there’s a lot that can be used just drag and drop in certain context.
In the end, I ended up delivering about 143 unique raw sounds (most of these are nice and long with 10-20 variations per sound/action), and then about 183 designed sounds.
To showcase these, it’s just easy to cut them into different musical rhythms. It makes it hard to steal and it’s just a fun way to then throw these sounds into a completely new context and see how they fare.
You can check out some of those examples here: Library Demo
At this point Daniel then took all the sounds, then creates Ableton Live instruments. I think this is such a fantastic way to experiment and play with the sounds, I honestly don’t know why more manufacturers don’t do this.
It’s great when you buy new sounds and get to dig through them, but often that’s a task in itself and unless I have an application for those sounds right away. A lot of great material might pass my by until I hopefully stumble upon it when searching via metadata.
So creating an instrument that some folks will play and make use of right away, or that others can just experiment with to get a sense of the sounds they now have access to, I think it’s a really natural and fun way to understand what a new set of sounds could be used for the in the future.
If you made it this far, you’re a wonderful nerd of a human and I hope you found something interesting. Definitely go check out the sounds and if you haven’t had enough of me rambling. We made a little video to go along with this where we talked about some more of this stuff further, and you can take a look at the link below.
Thanks!