next »

[Impossible]

I've always had some serious trouble making decent sound effects for games. There is no shortage of indie games with good arcadey sound effects so I'm wondering what tools people are using and if there are any hints you could give me. 

I've tried making sound effects myself, either through code or through tools (like audacity) but I've consistently come up short trying to make something decent.

[DrDerekDoctors]

Personally I tend to, uh "borrow" some sounds I got off the 'net and then mess with them extensively in another package I, um "found". Sometimes I'll synth them from scratch and then mess with them as well. Other times I record my own foley on a little sound recorder and work from there.

Obviously this is because I'm making freeware stuff, though, and that first option is not a solution which'll work for shareware.

[portabello]

You should give PD a try: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Data

It is very good at making all manner of sounds.  It has a bit of a learning curve, but it is capable of doing pretty much anything.

Some sound effect tutorials for pd can be found at http://obiwannabe.co.uk/tutorials/html/tutorials_main.html

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

There are freeware sound effects, I use those. Make sure they explicitly say 'free for commercial use' or 'public domain' though. And even then you have to be careful because a lot of "free sound effect" sites allow random people to upload anything. http://flashkit.com has a lot of good free ones though.

[PoV]

You could always make jingles.  I.e. very short arrangements in a music app.  Fast 2-3 note blips or short sequences.  As a starting point, notes from a major chord sound positive, minor chord sound negative, or adjacent sound very bad.  Using whatever instruments you have available to you (chip tune sounds, orchestration, etc), and any suitable filters (reverb to make it more epic, but don't abuse it).

[FARTRON]

I read an interview with Trent Reznor discussing his sound effects for Quake.  He said he'd had no experience with effects, and called a sound engineer friend of his in a panic, and asked "how the hell do I make the sound of an axe splitting a skull?" and his friend suggested drop some cabbage on the ground.

The lesson, I guess, is to just record anything and everything.  Let your imagination run with it, and try rooms with different acoustics.  Something in the bathroom with the water running will sound very different from something in your bedroom.

[Madgarden]

I use SimSynth and Analog Box 2, both free, for synthing most of my sound effects.

Also, I like to sample from old chop sockey movies.

[portabello]

I just remembered a small little app called stoper:  http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/stomper/index2.html
Its quite easy and can make some pretty cool sounds.  Its also really fun to use.*

I use SimSynth and Analog Box 2, both free, for synthing most of my sound effects.

Wow, I forgot how much fun simsynth is!  Thank you for making my day!

*well, maybe not if you don't got a boner for digital synthesis like I gots   english!!!

[Impossible]

Thanks for the hints.  I'd heard of SimSynth but haven't used it in a very long time.  Analog Box is a lot of fun to play with, although I'm not sure how useful it will be. Unfortunately I had trouble getting stomper to install in Vista . It looks pretty nice.

[Bezzy]

I read an interview with Trent Reznor discussing his sound effects for Quake.  He said he'd had no experience with effects, and called a sound engineer friend of his in a panic, and asked "how the hell do I make the sound of an axe splitting a skull?" and his friend suggested drop some cabbage on the ground.

The lesson, I guess, is to just record anything and everything.  Let your imagination run with it, and try rooms with different acoustics.  Something in the bathroom with the water running will sound very different from something in your bedroom.

Yeah, supposedly, punching a cauliflower with a punching glove is meant for a good "ptcchhhhh!" punching sound.

Or was it filling a wollen sock with porridge (can't remember if it's dry or wet porridge) and hitting it against a brick wall.

I'm not kidding. These foley guys are nutters! But it seems to work!

[Jimbob]

I remember reading the diary of a game for Alien Breed 2 and them talking about manipulating cat noises for alien sounds. I did a similar thing with cow noises to make ork noises for my game, and it came out quite amusingly

[PoV]

I've been too busy to bring it up, but this might make a fun set of challenges.  Sound effect making.  Given a situation, you make something, and talk about how and/or why you did it.

Should be quick too.  Minutes instead of hours, unlike the music challenges.

[FARTRON]

A foley based adventures in TIG!  Also, nice link there bez.

[DrDerekDoctors]

I've been too busy to bring it up, but this might make a fun set of challenges.  Sound effect making.  Given a situation, you make something, and talk about how and/or why you did it.

Should be quick too.  Minutes instead of hours, unlike the music challenges.

Would it be wholly synthed or could it be processed foley you've recorded yerself? Kinda' sounds like a fun idea.

[PoV]

That's exactly the point.  You take whatever approach you want.  Synthesis, Mic+FX, beat slicing, jingles, whatever or however you can imagine how to come up with a suitable noise. 

[PoV]

See this thread if you want to play.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=268.0

I know I used to miss topics that were promoted to announcements.

[Bad Sector]

I made this tool two years ago. It is a very simple frequency modulator using two envelopes (frequency and volume) and a base waveform (sine, square, etc) with a few tweaking options (screenshot).

The installer installs the program, the source code (in Lazarus/FreePascal) and a C library that loads .ssfx files (which are a few bytes) and produces a pure waveform, ready to be sent to your audio card. Everything licensed under BSD.

Nothing fancy, but does the trick for simple audio effects. Mix it with some oldschool bleepy tune and you're set.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I've been playing around with SimSynth, it's really fun. I'm not sure if it can make everything you might need in a game (such as water effects and so on) but it can do quite a lot.