sonofableep

once upon a time, perusing my sound effects libraries went something like this: search for the sound i needed via some crude FileMaker Pro thing, pull the physical audio CD off a shelf, stick it in my CD-ROM drive, spin it up and RECORD IT INTO MY AUDIO EDITOR.  record.  the audio.  in realtime.  granted, this was 1995 and it was also the first year of my doing things like “perusing sound effects libraries”, but still.  kee-ripes.

eventually i wisened up and ripped all the SFX CDs to my hard drive (boy did i ever think i was clever) and suddenly had all those sound effects right there at my finger tips.  needless to say, that sped things up a bit.  that also afforded me the option of doing clever things with file renaming, so i could use Windows search capabilities to find files my own way.

also i found myself doing a lot of database prep work, using Audition batch processes to strip out the silences between cues, hi-pass stuff @ 15 Hz, even do a little compression & limiting across the board.  so while i was using a combination of FileMaker Pro & Windows to navigate the sound libraries, i was simply using the Audition “file open” dialog to, yes, audition them.  with auto-play enabled in the dialog, i’d click around all the files until i heard what i wanted.  i got to know the first few seconds of every file very, very well.  :)  and thanks to the prep work, a file that originally might’ve been 20 seconds long with five explosions at different volumes all seperated by a few seconds of silence became a 10 second file with all the explosions kinda sorta “mastered”.  BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM went the auto-play.  that was me perusing my libraries in the early 2000′s.

now of course software like Soundminer and (my fave) Basehead combine uber-thooper-dooper database search & retrieval and keyword management (buh-bye FileMaker Pro) with on-the-spot auditioning (buh-bye “file open” dialog) in one sexy package.  type in “horse fart” and get hundreds of…hm?  what?  oh, just the one?  okay, “horse fart” gives us just one hit – a real gem, mind you.  but type in “metal rattle” and get hundreds or even thousands of hits, depending on how many libraries you’ve got lying about.  you can listen through them all as fast as you can arrow up & down, or jump into each file a bit, and even pitch it up & down to see what the effects of transposition would be.  then you just drag whatever selections tickle your fancy right into your waiting audio software.  lovely.

every time i do this it puts a smile on my face.  because i’m old enough to remember how much time and effort used to be involved every time you thought to yourself, “you know what this SFX session needs?  a little bit of metal rattle, about two seconds worth, right here on track 2…”  i bet that used to take me about 15 minutes.  now i can do it in about 15 seconds.  freeing up lots of time to pen this dreck and refresh facebook.

and thar she blows…our favorite SFX DB search return: “horse fart.wav”