WRITTEN BY JEFF SHIFFMAN
CO-OWNER OF BOOM BOX POST
I recently watched Guardians of the Galaxy with my kids and I was struck by the fantastic spaceship sound design. Really interesting choices were made and everything seemed to have heft and weight.
Entirely unrelated… I’ve had it on my list to test out some software synths that I had purchased a while back. My week was light so I fired up The Riser by AIR. One of the presets had a really interesting oscillating sound and the functionality of The Riser made it easy for me to play around with pitch and speed. I found myself creating crazy spaceship engine sounds (very likely influenced by having just watched the movie) and thought, “this would be a great blog post!'‘
Creating futuristic anything is fun, but where to start? Here was my process for creating a full compliment of entirely original (and useful!) futuristic spacecraft engine sounds.
Step 1 - A germ of an idea
You need an anchor for your inspiration. In my case, it was this synth, The Riser. But any synth will do. Or even a funky source recording you can manipulate with pitch/time correction or software plugin processing. The goal is to find your spark and run with it. Here’s the steady I created in The Riser that started this journey.
My settings in The Riser for the futuristic spacecraft synth steady
Step 2 - Layering to create personality
It’s at this point that I wanted to start layering sounds to build some additional character. I found the jet engine steady of a Boeing 737 that worked well. It has a great tonality so pitch manipulation really shines through. Next I added a pitched down fire steady that gave the engine some great flame/combustion texture. Now three layers deep, I was very close; but it still needed something. As I searched for a layer to give the engine some heft, I came across some insanely cool dinosaur vocals. These had both a low frequency heft as well as some interesting texture. NOW I had my sound.
All four layers of the futuristic spacecraft engine steady
Step 3 - Hashing it out
One great sound is a good start. But as I said in my post The Basics of Vehicle Sound Design, The best thing you can do for yourself is to find and collect sounds before cutting a single region. If you find a great single sound and dive in, you may spend hours trying to make it work with other sounds. This is your chance to make a whole collection of sounds; much more useful for the working sound editor.
For starters, an easy way to get variations is to play around with pitch manipulation. Here at Boom Box Post, we like Soundshifter by Waves since it’s reasonably priced, simple to use and produces great results. Since we have our layers in place, we can apply the same modulation across all files to get a unified final sound. Here’s an example of some in-flight engine variations to illustrate the point, but the sky is the limit as to how many versions (acceleration, deceleration, etc) you want to create for your library.
Next up, I wanted to create some fly bys. For this functionality I like Doppler by Waves. I’m able to manipulate a lot of factors with the plugin to produce a handful of great variations. I made sure to process both the original synth steady and the jet engine at the same time to ensure they matched. I then layered in some of the fire steady, some fire whooshes, and even some more crazy dinosaur vocals to give the fly bys a lot of character.
Fly by designs in layers
As I was messing with Doppler, I pushed some of the settings to the extreme and got some wild, super-fast variations. I liked these as a whole different category which I am calling maneuvers. I pictured these sounds as being useful for U-turns, or blasting to hyperdrive. It just goes to show you, the sound design process is one of discovery. Never be so hyper focused as to ignore these happy accidents when they occur.
For the last bit of design, I wanted to create both launch and landing sequences that were a bit more unique than the flying variations I had created with pitch manipulation so I went back to The Riser. I was able to mess around with countless factors using the modulators, giving these iterations a lot of personality.
The Riser settings for the futuristic spacecraft launch, playing with pitch ramping among other factors
I also took the opportunity to layer in some explosions, air chuffs, fire bursts, and yes, even some more dinosaur vocals. Generally these are elements I would leave separate in my session to allow for freedom to match picture in the sound edit, but I’ve rendered it all together so you can hear the final results.
Launch sequence
Landing sequence
Sound design is a process of discovery. I hope this inspires you to take on a sound design challenge of your own. Start with an idea and run with it!