Some things never stop being funny, no matter how much time has passed. This is also true for sound effects. Some classic sound effects and jokes we use have been around for more than half a century! Kate gave an excellent run down of animation sound's origin in her THE HISTORY OF ANIMATION SOUND post, and many sounds devised by Carl Stalling, Treg Brown and Jimmy MacDonald(and the derivatives of their sounds) are still being used by sound editors today! This week, I asked a few of our editors to tell me about their favorite cartoon sound effects.
Last week we introduced the first of our fantastic new interns: Ian Howard. This week we check in with the other: Ruben Infante. Ruben attended Full Sail University, and recently worked as a Lead Stage Manager for NASA. We're thrilled to have him with us, and excited to hear about his unique perspective on sound and learning.
Here at Boom Box Post, we take pride in educating our interns and preparing them for the world of audio post-production. We are lucky to have a plethora of excellent candidates each and every time we interview. This week marks the beginning of a brand new class of interns: Ian Howard and Ruben Infante. In today's post I chatted with Ian about his background, expectations and desires for his internship education.
In this month's interview post we chat with Mak Kellerman, one of our talented sound effects editors here at Boom Box Post. Mak has worked with Boom Box Post on Future-Worm, Pickle and Peanut, Penn-Zero: Part Time Hero and many other exciting animated shows. Mak is expert at creating interesting sci-fi builds and today he was working on creating the sound of an evil haunted portal!
For this month's interview post I sat down with Brad Meyer, a sound effects editor here at Boom Box Post. Brad spends a lot of his time designing exciting, signature sound effects for his shows, especially vehicle sound effects, using both custom recordings and sound library material. Brad sat down with me to talk about his process for creating the signature sound effects for a demonic race car that is possessed by monsters.
Here at Boom Box Post we do a lot of wild sound effects recording. In the last year we’ve recorded props as varied as children’s ball pits, seed pods from trees, laser swords, metal impacts, metal screeches with dry ice, christmas lights, human and non-human screams, zombie moans, body drags, two different Ford Mustangs and of course: farts. We’ve used a wide variety of different equipment to accomplish these recording goals. For our most recent vehicle recording(blog post coming soon) we rented a few additional microphones and took advantage of the new gear to set up a brief microphone shootout. The microphones we compared were the Sennheiser MKH 8050, a compact super-cardiod condenser, the Sennheiser MKH 8060, a short shotgun based on the same capsule as the 8050 and the Neumann KMR 82i, a highly directional short shotgun. All three are popular choices for sound effects and film production recording. We wanted to test the timbre and character of each microphone as well as how they interacted with the acoustics in our edit bays. To test the mics we recorded a variety of sample material similar to the type of recordings we make.
Here at Boom Box Post we have an exciting internship program that runs throughout the year. During the program each of our 2 interns will shadow editors, record foley props and participate in a series of lessons encompassing the different sound services Boom Box provides. This includes dialogue editing, sound effects editing, mixing and more. For more information on our internship program click here. We collect applications year round and would love to hear from you!
Our newest class of interns began about a month ago and have done a great job learning about sound editing and recording as well as showing their passion for sound. We hope you enjoy this brief look into our program and our stellar interns: Liz Roman and Amanda Niles.
Today's blog post is a spotlight on audio tools. I'm using the word "tool" in a broad sense, to mean anything used in conjunction with a set of skills to accomplish work or goals. I've asked several Boom Box Post editors to tell me about their favorite tools used when working with audio. This could be a plug-in, a collection of sound effects, a microphone or even a technique they have learned or developed.
One of the pillars of our creative learning environment here at Boom Box Post is our internship program. During the program our interns shadow editors, record foley props and participate in a series of lessons encompassing the different sound services Boom Box provides, such as dialogue editing, sound effects editing and mixing. For more information on our internship program click here. We collect applications year round and would love to hear from you.
As our current class of interns nears the end of their time here at Boom Box, we wanted to showcase their unique personalities and backgrounds. We hope you enjoy this brief look into our program and our fantastic interns: Madeline Kushner and James Singleton.
The shocking conclusion of our 2 part vocal sound design challenge is here! In Part 1 we asked several BBP editors to perform a non-english vocalization, and tell us about the imagined creature that created it. For this post, we asked a few other BBP editors to process, twist and have fun with one of the clips in order to enhance the original vision. Not surprisingly, they favored the clips with a lot of low-end information, and especially enjoyed pitch-related processing. Check out the before and afters, plus each editors methods below!
This month we're kicking off a two part Boom Box collaborative blog post challenge! I've tasked our editors with creating a unique non-human/non-english voice from their own mouth that is evocative and has potential for sound design. Next month I will assign each editor someone else's voice, which they will twist and tweak to help achieve the original intent, using whatever tools they choose.
To kick off a new class of interns (and score some cool new sound elements for our library), I asked Boom Box Post intern James Singleton to create a selection of lightsaber/laser sword sound effects. The original Star Wars trilogy is chalk full of classic sound effects that continue to inspire our field today, and recreating old favorites is a great way to flex sound design muscles and explore unconventional techniques. I requested James work primarily from recordings and sounds created specifically for this project, and take inspiration from Ben Burtt's original methods. To wrap up the project I asked him to tell me a little about his process for creating the final sound effects.
To celebrate Halloween in gruesome style we came up with a unique challenge for our editors: Death by Sound Effect! To kick off the creativity, we asked the team to come up with bone-chilling, funny bone-tickling and gut-wrenching ways to die, and threw all of their ideas into a hat. Each participating editor was randomly assigned a form of savage expiration, and encouraged to be creative in their approach to a sound effect representative of that event.
This month's collaborative post dives into the everyday lives of the talented editors here at Boom Box Post. For this challenge I asked the editors to open their ears and listen to the sounds they take for granted everyday, and attempt to capture a unique window into their lives with sound. I sent each editor home with a small handheld recorder(unless they had their own) and encouraged them to capture a fresh take on a sound they hear in their daily lives. The results were exciting and surprising, let's take a listen!
For this month's collaborative post, I really wanted to challenge the team. I was inspired by the cooking show Chopped, wherein participants compete to create the best dish for a panel of judges, but are hindered by "mystery ingredients" that you would not normally want to cook with, like gummy worms or instant mashed-potatoes.
For this edition of Mystery Sound, I asked the team to create a magic spell sound effect. The catch is they had to incorporate this recording of a California Sea Lion in a prominent way, and explain how they did it!
This week we challenged the team to create Sonic Branding Stings. These short clips are designed to create a fun and interesting sonic brand to help identify and showcase the company.
When it comes to vocal processing either for music or post production, engineers and producers have always needed an accessible way of augmenting their vocal tracks. iZotope’s VocalSynth ($199) is the new plugin that combines all the classic vocal sounds of the 80s and 90s. Whether you are trying to have your vocalist sound like Daft Punk, Michael Jackson, Imogen Heap, or T-Pain, or if you want to sound like an alien robot from Planet X, now you can. VocalSynth gives you the tools to do just that.
This week I challenged the team to create their own audio "Rube Goldberg" machines. If you aren't familiar with the concept, a Rube Goldberg machine is
"...a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered to perform a simple task in a complicated fashion, generally including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American Cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg"
Thanks Wikipedia! In addition to imagining and executing their sequence of events with sound, I also asked that everyone give me a visual representation to include in this post. Granted, we are all audio people for a reason. That said, I'm really impressed with all the work here BOTH audio and visual. I hope you enjoy these fantastic Boom Box Post Rube Goldberg machines!
I've been a fan of Native Instruments plugins for years. For sound design and music, I find their software hard to beat. In particular, I was a huge fan of KORE, their "sound machine" that had the a very useful FX processing mode, allowing the user to run any source sound through it's many amazing effects chains. Some of these chains, sold in bundles of 'effects packs' were extremely powerful and very intricately constructed. Many posts on my old Sounds Like Jeff blog refer to my use of KORE for original sound design. So naturally I was bummed when NI discontinued the product, I suspect to make way for MASCHINE, it's flagship product for the future.
Have you ever attempted to record a prop, only to find that a small tweak creates an entirely different sound than you were going for? Sure a creaky door sounds like a creaky door, but what else can it sound like? How about hearing something while out and about that triggers your creativity? With the right tweaks, that bird would be a super cool laser blast!
As sound professionals, our ears are always open. Creatively, these discoveries can be the most exhilarating part of the job. I challenged the team here at Boom Box Post to come up with some of their favorite 'smoke and mirror' sound design moments; creating sounds from unexpected sources.
![Death by [Sound Effect]: A Halloween Sound Design Challenge](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54813413e4b0034aade3a0bc/1477583620478-NXJOE06KIWZN6610ZHBX/skulls-623532.jpg)
