Gun Sound Design Tutorial With Aftertouch Audio

Gunshot Sound FX are fun to create, and can be made very simple with the Krotos workflow.

Aftertouch Audio’s Tyler Gillis demonstrates how you can use Weaponiser to quickly and efficiently create powerful gunfire sound effects.

Tyler uses these sounds with Soundminer, then drops the files into Weaponiser, pre-sliced, organised and ready to go.

He then takes advantage of  Weaponisers effects and synth engines to design and mix a FAL assault rifle from start to finish, all within 10 minutes!

Watch the video below & start your stopwatch…

Hi everyone. My name is Tyler, and this is Aftertouch Audio. Today we’re going to be going ahead and taking a look at how to create very quick weapon sounds using Weaponiser. And guess what? I only have ten minutes.

All of the sounds that I’m using in this video here are actually from my own collection that I have available on aftertouchaudio.com. So if you’d like to go ahead and have any of these weapons sounds for yourself, just go ahead and check out my website, at aftertouchaudio.com. Let me just quickly break down what I have going on here. I have an instance of Weaponiser opened up and if you close out of this you’ll see that I have it split off into four different tracks which is the mech, the shot, the LFE and the tail. On each of these tracks I’ve loaded up a plugin with Pro Q three which is just doing nothing, and a plugin called K Clip which is also doing nothing.

Under my master channel, I also have two plugins and that is Gulfoss Live. And then I have also ISL 2, and this is basically my true peak limiter and have it set to -2.9. So other than that it’s a very clean slate. I am working with absolutely no samples here. So we will just go ahead and very quickly design as fast as we can a gun sound that we can pass for realistic and again, a ten-minute timer. So let’s start now.

Okay, so to start off, I have the FAL loaded up and the FAL is what I’m going to be actually redesigning here. So let’s go ahead and start with the mech layer. So I’m going to go ahead and use our mech microphone mixes and Sound Miner has got this really cool feature here where, if you can see in here I have all these regions selected. So you can adjust how much you select via these sliders, and then once you’re happy with your selection, you can then take this little knob here and drag it over and into your session, and then it will actually cut each sample out for you.

It’s really nice. Now it doesn’t get it perfect which is why you have to go ahead and adjust a few things. So let’s go zoom right in. And what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to go ahead and have the start point of them all start at around the same time. And to do that I’m actually going to take the body layer here and I’m going to take the body and just have it start right there, right where the transient is.

So that way I can kind of see if anything’s out of sync. So let’s go to the next one and you can see that that one’s way off. There will be one in here that’s extremely off, but we’ll see.

Okay, so now that we got all the mech lined up, let’s move on to the shot. So the shot layer, we’re going to do the exact same thing. Because the settings are dialled out and looking for transients, we can just drag this in. And now we’re going to do the exact same thing. But what I’m going to do is I’ll actually mute the onset layer so I can just see the shot in this little window here and then I can do the exact same thing.

I can just zoom right in and we can go ahead and make our distinction on how this is going to go.

Okay, so now that we got all that done, let’s move on to the tail and we’ll quickly go through that. Let’s grab the tail design and we will drag a tail in.

Okay, so we got to get pretty good sound going so far. And guess what? It was only six minutes going. So let’s go ahead and start to use some of the inbuilt plugins here. What I normally do is on the output, I load in a limiter and I will load in a limiter on the Mech and I will throw in a Saturation plug-in.

Now in order for me to actually mute these because I have been individual outputs, I have to go ahead and just solo out the Mech and I will go ahead and turn this here to be always on top so I don’t have to keep reloading this.

Okay, now that we have this always on top, I can now just hear the Mech. So let’s boost up some drive, and make it a little more aggressive. That works for me. Let’s go into the body layer and we’re going to do something quite similar. So let us solo out the body and we’re going to throw in a limiter on that, and we’ll throw in a Saturation plugin on here.

So let’s go ahead and boost this up.

Okay, so now we’ve got the body. Now let’s talk about the thump. Now I can load in an LFE sample, or you can go ahead and actually create one using the synth engine down here. And I think I’m just going to go ahead and create one. But the cool part about this year is that I actually again, solo out the shot layer.

So just solo the shot. You can now just see the shot and I want an LFE that kind of resembles the shot. So let’s go ahead and turn this on. So let’s go ahead and have the duration be something much shorter and  We’ll take the amplitude down.

Let’s go ahead and have it do something like this. What does it sound like? Let’s just hear that.

I should also go ahead and solo the LP so I can hear it.

Okay, that works for me. Let’s turn down the gain a bit. Cool. So we got the mech and we got the shot. And now let’s work on the tail.

For the tail, I personally like more tail in my guns. I don’t necessarily like it to be as natural. I like a bigger tail. So let’s go ahead and throw on a limiter on the tail and we’ll throw some saturation on it as well. Really get that tail singing.

Not that much. Bring it down a bit. But let’s go ahead and bring the tail up. Cool. Okay, so now let’s go ahead and focus on the timing of the gun.

So we’re going to have the onset be at the very start. Then we’re going to get the tail out of there and the thump out of there. So let’s go ahead and focus on the body. The body can happen just after the mech itself right there. Thump layer can happen right there.

And then the tail layer can happen just a little bit after that.

Very nice sounding! So I want a little less thump so let’s bring the thump down a bit. Cool. Now it’s time to dial in the burst mode.

So when you’re doing rapid fire in Weaponizer, you have a couple of options. And the options would be you have to fire rate it over here and you have the burst mode here. And then you have this little I. If you have the I engaged, it will play the same sample repeated. So doesn’t sound very good.

You loaded in five samples. Let’s utilize those. So let’s go ahead and change that there from an eye to cycle round robin. And now you get a lot more realistic because you’re actually rotating the samples that you’re hearing rather than just hearing the exact same one over and over and over again. So let’s bring up the fire rate.

But what we can actually do is because we have burst shots in here, let’s hear what it sounds like.

Okay, that sounds really good. Now let’s add, a little bit more variation to this. So we’re going to go to the onset and we’re going to adjust the volume. And you can do that via the actual level slider, but you can also adjust how it plays back within a range. So if I go ahead and just grab on this little knob, I can actually extend the range to play it from anywhere between here and here.

So I’ll add a little bit of level variation to the Mech so it’s not as present. And I will do the exact same thing with the shot. That way it’s not as present. I’ll bring it down to the smidge. That way it plays within this range.

The thump will do the same thing, except it’ll just go from there and down the tail. I’m going to do something a little bit different with I’m going to change it from knob to envelope. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to have it fade out in a particular way and I’m going to have it fade out something like this. That way it’s not as in your face. Okay, so we have that.

We have that. And then I can also adjust the speed. I don’t like to do that with the mech as much, but I can do that with a shot. Just a little bit, just a tad.

Okay, that sounds really good. For 45 seconds left. What we can then do is come in here and I can take some low end out of the mech, and I Record Arm.

And then for the shot, take some low end out of this. And then the tail, we can also do the exact same thing.

Cool. That cleans up the low-end a bunch. And then for the Mac, I just want a little bit more high-end.

My sample rate changed halfway through the session, so let’s just quickly fix that by going into my project, set up and changing it from 192 to 96 again. Okay, let’s have a quick look at what we ended up creating.

I think that sounds pretty good for about ten minutes of work. Keep in mind, I just barely scratched the surface as to what you can do with Weaponiser. You do have access to four banks per actual group. So you can have up to 20 samples in your mech layer, you can have up to 20 samples in your body layer, 20 samples in your LFE layer, and 20 samples in your tail layer. You can get absolutely crazy with what you can do here.

The real-time effects are good. I just use saturation and limiter. But they do have access to things like EQ, compressors, ring modulation, flangers, transient shapers, and noise gates. Each one of the banks also comes with its own synth layer and all that jazz. Anyways, I hope you guys did enjoy that video.

If you did, consider leaving a like and subscribe and also join our discord. We have a bunch of people over there, and we talk sound design all day. So anyways, enjoy. Check out Weaponiser. Thank you, Krotos team for making them and go make some noise!

Try this Gunshot Sound Effect Workflow for Yourself!

Soundminer is a great tool for sound design and when used creatively with Weaponiser, your speed and workflow will increase dramatically.

Whooshes, impacts and countless other sound effects can be made with speed, quality and precision.

About Aftertouch Audio

Tyler Gillis is a Sound Designer, Field Recordist & YouTube Content Creator working in audio post-production. Tyler has created some of the most informative and exciting videos for sound design on his YouTube channel, so make sure you check it out!

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