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How To Design: Recreating The Slo-Mo Stinger

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How To Design: Recreating The Slo-Mo Stinger

I was recently cutting sound effects on a scene for my apprenticeship project that included a slo-mo sequence. During the spotting session, my supervisor was discussing proven ways to get in and out of slo-mo sequences with different stingers and sub dives as the bread and butter. He referenced this specific sound effect to me and I thought it would be a fun idea to try my hand at recreating it.

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New Year, New Ways: Trick Tips to Start Your 2025

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New Year, New Ways: Trick Tips to Start Your 2025

2025 is officially here! One of my New Year’s resolutions is to make a conscious effort to improve my speed and efficiency in my sound work. It’s easy to get stuck in your old ways, especially if you’ve been working with Pro Tools for quite a while. Since there are a million ways to achieve the same result, what better time than now to start exploring other techniques and form new habits in your workflow?

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Recreate any space with Impulse Responses!

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Recreate any space with Impulse Responses!

As sound professionals, we always have our ears open for interesting sounds. This isn’t limited to just sound effects I can record but also interesting ways sound can interact with the spaces we inhabit. Over the years, if I find myself in an especially interesting space, I’ve made a point of recording myself clapping once, so that I can later farm that sound as an Impulse Response, recreating the space. This practice carries the same nostalgic feelings as my field recordings, but expands the idea to my mixing. I can put any Impulse Response (the clap) through a reverb plugin that will, like magic, recreate that space. You too can be out there capturing wild and interesting spaces for your work!

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Music Mixing Basics for TV & Film: Songs

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Music Mixing Basics for TV & Film: Songs

As a mixer of a lot of Disney content, I have years of experience mixing musical numbers (or songs, as we call them). As someone who came into post-production sound mixing from a classical music and music engineering and mixing background, this is one of my favorite parts of the job. It brings me so much joy to have the privilege to integrate amazing Broadway-style musical numbers and carefully crafted pop songs of all genres into the stories that kids consume. A great song can be a wonderful extension of the story–not just adding a little pizzazz, but bringing the entire story to new depths. 

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Music Mixing Basics For TV & Film: Score Mixing

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Music Mixing Basics For TV & Film: Score Mixing

As a re-recording mixer, it’s our job to create the final sound balance for a film or TV project. Here at Boom Box Post, we edit and prep both the dialogue and sound effects. The score however comes directly from the composers. The music has been both organized and mixed but it’s now our job to fit it in to the rest of the soundtrack. That’s where this post comes in. For this Music Mixing Basics posts, I’ll be covering the steps we take to work the score into the final mix.

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Lunch and Learn: Organic Robot Creature Vocal and Movement Design

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Lunch and Learn: Organic Robot Creature Vocal and Movement Design

Creature vocal sound design and creature movement sound design is an essential part of creating believable and immersive worlds in film, television, and video games. It involves creating unique vocalizations for fictional creatures, ranging from terrifying beasts to friendly aliens, as well as translating where this creature comes from, what type of body it has and its size. 

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Creating The Sound of a Futuristic Spacecraft Engine

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Creating The Sound of a Futuristic Spacecraft Engine

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.

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Recreating Classic Cartoon Sound Effects

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Recreating Classic Cartoon Sound Effects

I am currently knee-deep into recording an extremely comprehensive auxiliary percussion library for Boomboxlibrary.com. The idea is to produce pristine recordings which we (and other sound editors) can use as source material for new creative sound design.

As the recordings pile up (and I procrastinate having to edit them all) I have been playing around with some of them, just to see if my hunch was correct; that these would help me create great cartoon sound effects that are high quality and new but harken back to the classic Hanna Barbera sounds we all know so well.

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Lunch and Learn: Using a sampler to create moving steadies

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Lunch and Learn: Using a sampler to create moving steadies

Often times, we’re faced with the task of designing sounds that track the movements of certain on screen visuals. These sounds need to be continuous, reactive, and dynamically pitched; imagine a car weaving in and out of traffic. It accelerates, then gradually slows down, eventually swerving out of the way of an oncoming semi-truck. Maybe you have a character wielding a magical sword; swinging it through the air at varying speeds and veracity while emitting a sparkly blue glow. These types of scenarios  need a convincing sound that coincides with the every movement of the character or prop.

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A Beginner's Guide to Starting Your Sound Effects Library

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A Beginner's Guide to Starting Your Sound Effects Library

Whether you are a newly graduated student or you are a long time picture editor looking to delve more into sound, jumping into the freelance world can be intimidating. You might have some money saved up and are wondering where to allocate it to best help you freelance career. After securing a decent computer and a Pro Tools subscription it can be easy to fall into the mindset that you need the newest shiniest plugin or the fanciest piece of hardware. While plugins and gear are nice to have and can indeed help you, finding quality sound effect libraries to add to your personal sound collection is perhaps a more worthwhile endeavor.

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Lunch and Learn: Increasing Productivity with Zapier

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Lunch and Learn: Increasing Productivity with Zapier

As a total productivity nerd, I’ve tried many different applications to speed up my workflow and day-to-day task management, both at work and at home. I use a mix of Todoist, Spark (email), Google Calendar, and Slack. After constantly jumping back and forth between all of these applications, I decided to look into a way to make them work together more efficiently. After researching different websites, I decided to try out Zapier, an app automation and integration tool. 

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The Essentials of Designing a Pirate Ship

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The Essentials of Designing a Pirate Ship

In many of our shows, we often get the exciting opportunity to work on a pirate adventure! I wanted to outline some of the things that are crucial to building a pirate ship that sounds fun, authentic, and thrilling! The kind of ship you are designing may vary, but this is a good guide to give you a place to start. You can always tailor it to whatever special needs your project calls for.

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Lunch and Learn:  Advanced Pro Tools Shortcuts, Tips, and Tricks

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Lunch and Learn: Advanced Pro Tools Shortcuts, Tips, and Tricks

Everyone knows that the key to becoming a quicker editor is learning and utilizing keyboard shortcuts, but Pro Tools is such a powerful piece of software that even the most seasoned editors or mixers might not know all the keyboard shortcuts that can help speed up their workflow. Hopefully after reading this blog. post you can walk away with at least one Pro Tools tip or trick you didn’t know before.

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Lunch and Learn: The Basics of Weaponiser

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Lunch and Learn: The Basics of Weaponiser

Weaponiser, a plugin from Krotos, was created to assist in the building of gunshot effects, but with a better understanding of how to use it, Weaponiser can be beneficial to all kinds of builds from customizing a one time effect to providing slight alterations to repeated sound events. Using Weaponiser you can even quickly build a multi character Foley Libraries!

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Toon Sound Effects For Conveying Emotion: Part 2

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Toon Sound Effects For Conveying Emotion: Part 2

Recently we published a blog that listed classic toon sound effects and the emotion they convey to the audience. Our hope was that it would be a helpful tool for anyone stuck in the editorial process. This is part 2! Continue reading to find out how our editors approach the following emotions with classic toon sound effects: Scared, Disgust, Love, and Bored.

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