How to Design Whoosh Sound Effects

How to Create Whoosh Sound Effects?

A guide to one of the most essential assets in sound design.

Whooshes are everywhere in sound design. Transitions; object throws, vehicle pass-bys, fight scenes, movement – If you have motion in your scene then you are going to need a whoosh to add power and drama. so how exactly do you make a whoosh?

We’ve got a scene to to show you a variety of ways for designing your perfect whooshes using Weaponiser to have total control over repetition, variation, layering and movement.

This clip requires different whoosh sound effects as there are plenty of changes and movement, featuring a person throwing an orange back and forth for an commercial project. To make it sound organic and save time, we perform to the scene using Weaponiser.

The first sound effect we worked on was the sounds for the orange landing in the person’s hand. One of the most important benefits to Weaponiser is loading your own recordings and samples into it, so here we’ve simply recorded a quick take of an orange, that could be dropped straight into Weaponiser. This sample is now ready to be played. Simple!

This workflow lets you perform variation in speed and size, not to mention creating different landing sounds to make the design sound natural and organic.

All that was left was a nice thump layer to add weight and body and a bit of tweaking to let the sounds gel the clip together.

hot tip: weight is a vital part of a convincing whoosh sound design. Be sure to scale your sound layers to the size and weight of what you are designing to – bigger means lower and slower, and vice versa.

Weaponiser comes with 574 whoosh sound assets, where we found a perfect fit for our flying orange. These can be loaded into the project with some randomisation, as well as speed and level variation, ready to be performed with the MIDI keyboard.

Our full clip now sounds fully dynamic, varied, and realistic, and we did it all in no time!

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