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[Valo]

I've been dabbling a bit with sound design and been trying to create and edit sound effects. Inspired by games such as Journey and Sword & Sworcery, I've tried emulating the sound design of those games. With no success at all.

Here's one example of the sound design of Journey and an example of what I was trying to go for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkL94nKSd2M&feature=youtu.be&t=4m46s&ab_channel=IAmSp00n

No matter what I do, I just can't seem to be able to figure out how to edit sounds in that fashion. As a composer with a band-background, I can do basic mixing and mastering for songs. Though synthetic sounds and any kind of advanced audio editing is beyond my comprehension, it seems. Of course Journey's sound design is done by incredibly talented professional(s), but it would be interesting to be able to understand the basic concept of that kind of audio editing.

If any of you have any tips that could direct me to the right direction, I'd appreciate it a lot. If you are familiar with the subject and would be interested in offering paid tutoring, you can PM me with an offer. This is something I would want to learn.

[Michael Klier]

Sound Design is a lot about experimentation and learning which steps to take to get to a specific result. If you're into books I'd recommend the "Sound Effects Bible".

As for your question regarding the Journey SFX: If you listen closely you'll hear that the sound is made up of 4 distinct parts.

• a synth pad
• chimes
• a low end drone swell
• very subtle ocean waves

The key to make these sounds blend together is heavy EQ'ing and good volume balancing between the individual parts. The low drone has probably all frequencies above ~100Hz or lower cut by a low pass filter. The chimes sound don't have any lows at all and the synth pad / ocean are more present in mid range frequencies with less lows/highs.

If you feel like sth. isn't working try some aggressive EQ'ing first. You will be surprised how different things can sound with just using an EQ .

[Valo]

I bought the book you suggested to Kindle. So far seems very useful for getting the basics covered.Thank you for recommending it.

That breakdown of different sounds used in the SFX was extremely helpful! I knew it was combined of different sounds but didn't have any idea what kind of sounds were used. Definitely wouldn't have picked up the low drone and the ocean waves by myself.

Your explanation of the frequencies makes a lot of sense. It's basically the same as mixing a normal song, but with more aggressive EQ filtering. That's very interesting.

I tried combining those  4 kinds of sounds (synth, chimes, drone & ocean) quickly with the tips you gave. Definitely got some interesting results already. Nothing worth showing for and definitely not even close to Journey-level of awesome. Still, the result were far better than what I was able to achieve before your advice.

Thank you so much!

[Michael Klier]

Thank you so much!

You're welcome !

[outspacer]

Here's an article by the sound designer from Journey that breaks down how some of the sounds were made: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/179039/the_sound_design_of_journey.php

[Valo]

Here's an article by the sound designer from Journey that breaks down how some of the sounds were made: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/179039/the_sound_design_of_journey.php

Whoa, thank you for the link! Going to read it very carefully.