Sound advice.

[deanl]

Hey there.

Does anyone here know anything about sound and sound recording. I'm guessing a few people here record their own music or have at least played around with audio applications in the past.

I was wondering if anyone has any advice on treating sounds to make them sound more... "real". For example... If I take a music or dialog track that has been recorded in a studio. Is there a way to make that sample sound like it's being played from a radio in a room?

I realise I could just burn the sounds to cd and actualy record the sound live from a cd player in the room. But I was just wondering if there is any way this can be done in post.


Also, does anyone have any tips for beefing up sounds. Makin them sound the very best they can.

This weekend I plan to redub a ten minute short film from scratch. All I'm armed with is a handfull of stock sound effects, a microphone and a copy of soundfroge. Any advice would be great.

Cheers guys.

Despin out.

[Kev Owens]

I used 'Cool Edit' for that radio effect- much better to do that in post otherwise you limit yourself.

It also allows you to 'cut out' unwanted noise with a variety of filters and a manual sound wave analyser that you can manipulate.

All depends on the quality of the original sound recordings though.

[sn-films]

Originally posted by Despin180:
... does anyone have any tips for beefing up sounds. Makin them sound the very best they can.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Try adding one or two track compressor filters to the audio clip. Start with some of the presets until you get a feel for what the filter does. Basically, the compressor will "squash" things down once they cross a certain dB threshold. This sounds like a bad thing, but its really not (assuming you have a clean source). What you want to do is use the compressor to average out the extreme points on the waveform, leaving you with a fuller, more uniform sound. After that, you can start tweaking EQ, etc. I usually boost the lo's and hi's and drop the mids slightly, but that's just a matter of personal preference.

By the way, try Sound Forge's Resonance filter for the "radio in the room" sound. You will want to dampen the low-end frequencies slightly to make it sound crispier (higher frequency noises carry better than lows). You can also add a shade of distortion for the cheap speaker effect if desired.

Sound Forge kicks ass. Have fun.