Halo Sound Design – Behind the Sound of the Spartans

See how Krotos was used to bring the Spartans to life in the hit Paramount + series, Halo, then try it for yourself with the Krotos Sound Design Bundle.

We were very, very excited to hear that Weaponiser was at the helm of these awesome sounds, and it was a joy to hear from the Halo sound team on how they built the sound world for such an iconic franchise. You can feel every brutal footstep of the Spartan armour, and Brennan Mercer and the rest of the Halo sound team did a fantastic job on the sound production of this fantastic TV show.

Watch their process below, then see how you can achieve the same results using the Krotos Sound Design Bundle – available for download below!

Using Weaponiser for Footsteps in Halo

From Brennan Mercer:

“In order to produce the weight and kinetic energy of a Spartan, we knew we had to create a workflow that combined both Foley and sound design. Foley artist Goro Koyama recorded feet for each Spartan, focusing specifically on the surface on which they were walking. We then used an audio to MIDI plugin which allowed us to convert the Foley recordings into MIDI clips.

Those MIDI clips triggered a sampler (Weaponiser) which contained the heavy metallic sound effects of the Spartans. These were then rendered into a track in Pro Tools. So now we have a combination of the Foley surface recording and the heavy metallic sound effects”.

Simplifying the Syncing Process With Weaponiser

With Weaponiser, not only can you sync additional layers to your Foley with ease like Brennan and his team did, but did you know that your Foley recordings themselves can be added to Weaponiser directly?

This way, they are ready to be spotted to picture – no need for dragging and syncing audio files into your session, and no need for additional plugins.

Simply load your Foley footsteps into Weaponiser, and spot to your scene with MIDI clips right away, instead of dragging the audio clips in. This way, you can use a single instance of Weaponiser for footsteps, plus three extra layers of sound design, as well as Weaponiser’s synthesiser engine.

You can then shape these sounds in the box using Weaponiser’s transient shaper, compressor and EQ quickly and efficiently and alter timings within the plugin – no need to re-sync in your timeline.

Add additional textures with Reformer Pro

Brennan used Cargo Cult’s awesome Envy plugin to achieve the additional design layers of the Spartans suit, but did you know you could use Reformer Pro to achieve similar results?

Envy works by using the amplitude of one sound and mapping its shape onto another sound, and Reformer Pro does the very same.

Using the Reformer Pro analysis tool, you can load your sound designs into the software, and analyse and process them into organic, playable instruments.

Then all you need to do is control the input, and in this case, you can use the Weaponiser track from your footsteps and feed it into Reformer Pro to achieve more heavy, sci-fi elements and textures!