Looking for advice on how to create awesome dinosaur footstep sounds? We’ve got you covered!
In this article, we offer some tips on how to create great assets for dinosaur footsteps. We then suggest how to implement them into a design, and how it can be made easier with Krotos Weaponiser.
Alessandro Mastroianni created this high-energy dinosaur running scene to demonstrate how to create dinosaur footsteps SFX. He uses our Weaponiser plugin and some awesome sound effects libraries to bring this Jurassic Park-inspired scene to life.
Here is a breakdown of his process:
How do you design dinosaur sound effects?
Dinosaurs come in all shapes and sizes, but for the most part, they tend to be big, heavy creatures. So when designing T Rex footstep SFX and other dinosaur sounds, the audience needs to feel the force and weight behind each step the dinosaur takes. This means a lot of low-mid frequency energy to reflect the sheer size of these prehistoric creatures.
T-Rex Footstep Sound Design Tips:
Bigger Means Bassier!
Sub-bass impacts make for a great first layer. Try scaling the intensity of the bass to the size of the dinosaur with some pitch-shifting and EQ. Synthesising these sounds from pure sine waves will provide the strongest bass response, particularly around 60-100Hz and won’t clash with frequencies in your other layers.Car door slams and similar sounds are awesome low-mid layers as they provide a thumpiness in the low-mid range. Your audience will feel the bass throughout their body, whilst thumpiness sits a little higher in the mix and is more localised to your chest, creating a punchiness between 100 & 200Hz.
Make Them Crunchy!
Crunchy sounds are a fantastic addition to dinosaur footstep sound effects. Sounds such as rock sound effects and debris sound effects add to the seismic power behind these steps as your Jurassic antagonist destroys the ground beneath their feet.
Or, if your particular dinosaur happens to prefer destroying major cities, add some metal sound effects or industrial sound effects to suggest the destruction of vehicles and buildings.
Alessandro demonstrates this excellently in the video, using the Robotic Lifeforms library – what may seem like an unusual choice of source sound often sounds fantastic in context, so don’t be afraid to experiment!
This layer is the most important as it will add some fantastic texture and character, and will be the most important layer to reflect the character and location your scene.
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Easy On The Highs!
Some high-end crispiness can be the last piece of the puzzle for Dino footsteps, but be sure to not go too far! Some subtle distortion will provide better results than boosting the high frequencies too high and will retain power in the other layers
‘Big’ Often Means ‘Slow’
With bigger dinosaurs, the time between steps is much greater. Use this to your advantage and add some epic tails to each footstep. These can be made from long reverb tails and distortion, or get really unique and creative and add additional character through other sound libraries.
Now that we have assets in place, it’s time to build your T rex footsteps. Here’s the traditional method:
- source the sounds you will use for your dinosaur design.
- organise these sounds into groups for different layers for your footsteps and place each group on a separate track in your DAW.
- listen and assess. If they work, keep them, if they don’t, find another. Rinse and repeat the process until you have enough layers for your dinosaurs feet sound.
- once you have all of your layers in place, you will have the rough shape of a single footstep, meaning it is time to do it all again!
- repeat the process over and over until you have enough footsteps for your dino scene.
- move the timing of the layers around slightly on each track to create some variety.
- move and edit these layers, offset timings, make micro edits, in the end you will have a few dinosaur footsteps.
…Tedious, right? Now, here’s an easier workflow with Weaponiser:
with Weaponiser we can make worfklow improvements for all the steps above, making your dinosaur footsteps faster and more natural sounding.
- source T-Rex footstep sounds for your design, or explore the fully-fledged Weaponiser sound effects libraries for high quality assets.
- add the sounds for each group to Weaponiser’s onset, body, thump & tail sections – all on a single track
- hit the fire button, or spot to picture using MIDI. Thanks to Weaponiser’s randomisation capability, you’ll have a different footstep sound every time it is triggered.
…a massive time saver!
Adjust Timing quickly and easily!
Weaponiser lets you change the starting points of each sound in the plugin, saving time and effort when compared to doing this manually. The drunk function will even do this for you, differently each time!
Processing your sound design layers adds depth and character to your creations. Shape the sound EQ, compression, transient shaping and distortion.Each element in your dinosaur footsteps design has its own volume slider as well as an overall master, for total control of your sound design.
So if you are looking to create a powerful T-Rex Stomping sound effect or Dinosaur Footstep sounds, these tips and pointers should help you on your way to achieving something cinematic and powerful.
If you want to take advantage of Weaponiser’s time saving capabilities, take it for a 10-day free trial now!
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