Viewing entries in
Lunch & Learns

Lunch And Learn: Digital Foley Hacks For Kontakt And Other Samplers

Comment

Lunch And Learn: Digital Foley Hacks For Kontakt And Other Samplers

Digital Foley is often a straight-forward and technical element of the sound design we create for a TV show, and it can become a simple skill for an editor’s toolbox that amplifies each episode. Though footsteps are a small detail in the entirety of a sound edit, it is sometimes tedious and overwhelming to transition similar Foley edits between episodes. Listed below are a few quick alternative solutions that I use when editing Foley.

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Objective-Based Mixing

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Objective-Based Mixing

Creating an exciting sound mix for television can be a HUGE challenge. Way back in 2020, I explained the basic structure of my mixing process, but there is a lot more to mixing than just following a list of steps. I also like to consider goals or objectives I want to achieve during the process. These vary from project to project, but here are three mixing objectives I often keep in mind while I work through each mix.

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Recreating a Musical Tune as a Sound Effect

2 Comments

Lunch and Learn: Recreating a Musical Tune as a Sound Effect

On occasion, a sound editor’s musical skills are put to the test when they are asked to recreate a tune or song for a specific sound effect. For example, in the second episode of Yuki 7, the alarm clock that goes off matches the theme song of the show, which you can listen to starting at 1:11 in the video below. For sound editors with no musical training, this task can be particularly challenging. So for this blog, I’m going to teach you how to recreate a melody to use with any sound effect just by listening to it!

2 Comments

Lunch and Learn: Cedar DNS One

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Cedar DNS One

As an animation dialogue editor, I usually work with clean and high quality recording files. However, in the past two years, the pandemic changed a big amount of my work routine. The files I received are mostly recorded by voice actors themselves at home from Zoom meetings. Some files are recorded from a bad microphone position, some are recorded in a reverberant space, and some have frequency humming in the background. I spend a lot of time cleaning up the recording files as best as I can, so I’m always on the lookout for a good noise reduction plug-in. DNS One from Cedar has a good reputation from a lot of mixers and dialogue editors, so I gave it a try.

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Creature Vocals: Concept and Design

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Creature Vocals: Concept and Design

Creature vocals or monster vocals, if you will, are one of the more conceptually challenging elements to telling a story through sound. I always struggle with, “Is it real enough?” or “Is this vocal believable for this creature on screen?” Of course, that’s a matter of personal opinion and experience, but there are some approaches that make the design process of these vocals a little more palpable and easier to arrive at the “finished” product.

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Designing Cinematic Style Sound Effects with Gravity by Heavyocity

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Designing Cinematic Style Sound Effects with Gravity by Heavyocity

Today I’m going to be discussing a virtual instrument called Gravity by the folks at Heavyocity. It’s loaded into and powered by Kontakt Engine by Native Instruments. While Gravity itself doesn’t have a free version available, Kontakt is available as both a free version and full version. Gravity is an incredible, extensively customizable virtual instrument designed predominantly for use in modern scoring. It’s comprised of 4 instrumentation sections: Hits, Pads, Risers, and Stings. Each of these 4 main sections breaks down further into complex blends of the loaded-in beautiful, high quality samples within the category as well as the simplified individual samples for additional customization with the effects and other adjustable parameters.

Comment

Lunch And Learn: Space Controller

Comment

Lunch And Learn: Space Controller

Space Controller allows for a new way to pan sound sources instead of the traditional method of using knobs, joysticks, or a computer mouse. There is a separate app for mobile devices which allows the device to be used as a movement reader to pan the sounds according to the position of the device.

Comment

L&L: Collaborating With Another Editor

1 Comment

L&L: Collaborating With Another Editor

Collaborating is a big part of our industry. Even in sound editorial, where we are usually by ourselves in a room when we work, we collaborate in projects with mixers, supervisors, Foley artists, and also share editorial with other sound designers/editors.

1 Comment

L&L: A Crash Course In Toon Sound Design

3 Comments

L&L: A Crash Course In Toon Sound Design

From giant mecha robot fights, to ancient black magic or car chase sequences, the types of projects we work on as sound designers come in all different shapes and sizes. Animation particularly as a medium continues to surprise me, and you never know what to expect when you open up a new episode for the first time.

Through all of the genres, styles, and stories that we get thrown our way, one of the things I see editors consistently have a difficult time with is, you guessed it…TOON! I know that may seem surprising, and that on the surface the concept of “toon” might appear basic or juvenile. But the reality is toon is a tricky beast that can be tough to master. Whether it’s a toony series, toony sequence, or the occasional comedic accent, I want you to be ready if you ever find yourself working in the world of toon. So for this blog post, I decided to give a crash course on “The Art of Toon.”

3 Comments

Lunch and Learn: U-He Zebralette

Comment

Lunch and Learn: U-He Zebralette

I decided to give the super-awesome and totally free Zebralette Sythesizer from u-he a try. I’m not very experienced when it comes to synthesizers. I’ve had fun messing around with them on occasion, but I am far from a proficient synthesizer user, so I decided to get my feet wet and do some experimenting. I am SO glad I did.

Comment

Lunch and Learn: TDR Nova

Comment

Lunch and Learn: TDR Nova

TDR Nova is an intuitive and user friendly free plugin made by the company Tokyo Dawn Records that could be a good replacement for your stock pro tools EQ plugin! It has a lot of cool features that can help you fine tune your audio. Let's take a look at some of its features!

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Splicing Footsteps

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Splicing Footsteps

In past blog posts, we have mentioned different ways to optimize Kontakt, or other samplers, to digitally walk foley for our shows and how advantageous it has been in animation. It often involved pulling walk cycles into Pro Tools and cutting up small samples then exporting the samples and pulling them into Kontakt. This method, although convenient, is not the only way to create footstep samples. In this blog post, I will do my best to give instructions on how to create samples without having to cut up the original audio file in Pro Tools; and instead splice or split the original audio file within Kontakt then mapping it to your desired keys, keeping the source file intact! Woohoo, get excited!

Comment

Lunch and Learn: De-Bleed from Izotope RX

1 Comment

Lunch and Learn: De-Bleed from Izotope RX

This is a module from Izotope RX that I’ve used quite a bit! De-bleed works just like its name. It reduces the unwanted sound that bleeds into an open mic. In one of the shows I worked on, they recast one of the lead characters after they did the production shooting which means I needed to remove his voice underneath any other dialogue so I can replace with ADR in there. De-bleed performs a great job in this situation!

1 Comment

Lunch and Learn: Soundsnap

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Soundsnap

If you’re a sound editor, then you know how important having a good sound library is. Not only is it important to have a well rounded library but it is also necessary to continue adding to it. I’d like to introduce you to a fantastic web based sound library called Soundsnap. This website is great for editors of all experience levels and since we’re getting close to the holidays, it could be a great gift! Check it out below.

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Phasing

Comment

Lunch and Learn: Phasing

The latest gear and hottest plugins are regularly trendy topics of discussion in the sound community. But for this week’s blog post, I’m going old-school and throwing it all the way back to good ol’ PHASING! (Hold for applause)

Now, I bet you are thinking to yourself, “What is phasing exactly?” or perhaps “How does it apply in the real world?”, and most importantly “Do I even need to know this?!” Well, you’re about to find out…

Comment

Creating Spooky Vocal Sound Effects for Halloween

Comment

Creating Spooky Vocal Sound Effects for Halloween

Whether I’m working on a Halloween special or just a spooky scene, I often find myself needing to make scary vocals. There are so many ways to achieve a haunting voice, but I’m going to talk about a few tools that I like to use. To get started, you need four plugins and a vocal recording. This can be laughing, a spooky saying, or even an elongated breath.

Comment