How to Edit Sound Effects for a Sound Effect Library
Once you have recorded a large amount of material intended to be used as sound effects, the next step in creating a sound effect library is to edit this raw audio. You will need an audio editing software that will allow you to cut, fade in/out, normalize, and eq your tracks. There are many professional digital audio workstations (DAWs) out there for purchase and also several useful freewares easily found on the internet.
The first step in editing your sounds is to import all of the various raw .wav recordings into your software. This can be done one at a time but for efficiency I usually import 40 audio tracks at once and then solo each track, in other words muting all but one tracks. Once you’ve imported all of your tracks and you are ready to edit and bounce your edits down to completed sound effects. These following tips should help ease your experience and provide the best sound effects possible.
1. The first step is to normalize each sample. This makes the audio as loud as possible by increasing the amplitude of the highest point on your recording to the highest point possible.
2. Next, cut out unwanted frequencies that degrade the quality of your sound by using eqs. For instance, an unwanted air conditioning sound may be interfering with a bird chirp. To get rid of the unwanted AC simply apply a high pass filter around 2,000 Hz which will kill the AC noise but preserve the higher frequencies of the bird chirp.
3. After cleaning and amping the audio next find a clean break with which to start each particular sound effect and make a fade out or let the natural reverb of the sound fade out by itself for 1-2 seconds.
4. Create a stereo 48k 24bit .wav file of your recording for video editing purposes. This quality of file is highly valued by individuals and libraries that license sound effects and will earn good money.
5. Make as many versions of each sound recording as possible to increase your number of products. For example, if you have a dog barking 20 times then create sound effects with one bark, three barks, six barks, 10 barks etc. switching up the combinations of barks. This could easily give you 50 or more sound effects from just that one sequence of dog barks.
6. Increase your content holdings even further by using pitch shift. For example, a person’s laugh can be pitch shifted down to create a deep giant’s laugh or pitch shifted up to create a little child’s laugh.
A little knowledge of the ins and outs of audio editing combined with the above tips will allow you to easily create professional sounding effects that can be licensed time and time again by multi-media editors and producers.
Filed under: Arts & Entertainment