The official how-to Sound Effects thread

Ben Burtt goes into quite a bit of detail on the "A New Hope" DVD commentary about many of the sources for sound effects, including the lightsaber.

There's also a site somewhere that talks about the original saber sound effects. I'll dig around in my favorites and see if I can find it.

 

"Ben Burtt goes into quite a bit of detail on the "A New Hope" DVD commentary about many of the sources for sound effects, including the lightsaber."

yeah, he tells that story of his about the mic cord buzz and the projector hum.

"There's also a site somewhere that talks about the original saber sound effects. I'll dig around in my favorites and see if I can find it."

this one?

http://www.filmsound.org/starwars/


well, i finally figured out how to get the sounds from kotor.

 

In unrelated news, once I rubbed a stick against polystyrene foam (I think it was that) and if I started fast and ended slow, it made a lightsaber-ish noise.

 

I'm trying to duplicate the vocal distortion effects found during the Death Star battle ("We're passing through the magnetic field, hold tight! Switch your deflectors on, double front!"), which I've also heard in places like THX-1138 as well as over a marine radio in the reality series Deadliest Catch.

No, this is not the generic "telephone voice" filter; as I said, it does have a real-life origin and it is most definitely a distortion.

Any hints on how to approximate this with a program like Goldwave, or at least what the name of this phenomenon is so that I might better search for it?

 

Just killing your low-and-high end and throwing on a slight vanilla distortion filter should do it.

 

The "untuned radio" preset on Goldwave's Mechanize effect is almost what I'm looking for, by point of reference.

Okay, after a bit of work (more fine tuning to come) I've gotten a decent approximation. First do a highpass (I used default), then applying the "through the skull" flanger preset and the "untuned radio" mechanize preset, taken down to 100-200Hz. Throw in a little of the Doppler effect and it doesn't sound half bad.

 

what happened to the sound bunker?

 

It's still around - but now and then you have to try a few times to get it to work.

 

I'm so proud of myself, I combined about 5 effects to make the sound of a really fat guy stomping his feet on the ground and making an earthquake. Hooah!

 

it was relocated to http://dreamland-digital.com/soundbunker.html, right? all that page gives me is "forbidden"

 

You are correct - but it's been spitting errors lately so you have to try multiple times before it'll work sometimes.

 

ssomeone should really start that thing from scratch. even once you get it to work, the zips are filled with screwed-up files.

 

i was bored, so i went through my copy of jedi outcast and swapped a bunch of sounds around for better ones

stormtroopers now let out a long drawn out wilhelm when they fall off of something.