How to Record Sound Effects for a Sound Effect Library
In order to record sound effects for a personal or professional sound effect library one first needs a quality recorder. Personally I’ve tried all sorts of pricey gear and microphones throughout my sonic adventures only to discover that a solid $150 to $400 handheld digital recorder no larger than an old-school cassette tape box suffices to create sounds good enough for placement in any Film, TV, and media project. In addition, these units run on battery power and the recorded files can be dragged onto your desktop via USB.
You must make sure that any recorder you purchase records up to at least a 48k sample rate .wav file because audio for video is prepared as 48k. Any 44.1k samples you have would work fine on a CD but for DVD usage they will have to be up-converted to 48k which can result in “aliases,” sort of sonic ghosts that compromise the quality of your recording. Also, 48k sound effects command a higher price on downloadable sites because their sound quality is simply better due to more samples per second of audio.
Two basic categories of sound effects to be recorded are “ambiences” and “hits.” Hits are single audio events like a burp, splash, or car horn. Ambiences are longer recordings generally between 30 seconds and 10 minutes that contain background sounds such as those found on city streets, in a hotel lobby, or a doctor’s office.
Both categories are necessary in order to create a good sound effect library. You merely have to go to location such as a train station and hit record in order to get ambience recordings and thus they are the easiest to obtain. More planning and scheming, however, is required for hits because you need to gather the objects and perform the actions to be recorded (called foley) or you need to wait outside police stations, for example, for that perfect siren sound.
The basics of recording a sound effect is literally as simple as hitting the record button. However, there are several tips to keep in mind in order to get the best recordings possible.
2. Record all of your sounds as “hot” as you can, meaning as loud as possible without overloading the microphone. You need to pull back from your source if you notice a red LED light on your recorder which signals that your incoming signal is too hot. Capturing the strongest signal without distorting is the goal.
2. Very loud sounds such as explosions or loud cheering requires that you purchase a 10dB pad which will allow you to record high volumes. This sort of pad lowers strong signals by 10dB and can be bought on the web for $20.
3. Try to keep background noises at a minimum but don’t be too obsessive over a “pure” recording because these background sounds can often afford surprising results such as an unexpected car honk, bird call or human noise. Remember that much of the background noise can be filtered out when editing your recordings and will slow yourself down being overly strict about the “perfect” recording environment.
4. Keep your microphone out of the wind while recording by standing strategically behind wall, trees, or parked cars because wind hitting the head of the microphone will compromise your recordings. Through the editing process and by cutting lower frequencies you can often minimize wind noise but for the most part wind will render your recordings useless.
5. Music from live performances and loudspeakers must remain out of your recordings. If you accidentally include such music in the background of your ambiences it will make your recordings useless. Selling and using sound effects with such music is a violation of copyright law since that music itself is copyrighted.
These tips are simple and meant to point an aspiring sound effect artist in the right direction toward the creation of a sound effect library for use or for sale online. Future articles will discuss the process of editing, categorizing, and marketing these raw recordings.
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