A fast and powerful workflow for designing sound effects, with James David Redding III

James David Redding III is back with another great tutorial. In this video, you can see the process he used for an idling engine for both interior and exterior car shots, using Igniter Full Tank.

He then fleshes the scene out with Weaponiser for footsteps, Reformer Pro for textures, and Krotos Studio for ambience and backgrounds. Let’s get into it!

Creating day-to-day vehicle sound effects with Igniter

Although Igniter Full Tank comes with an enormous library for high-speed car chases, helicopters and other huge horsepower vehicles, it is equally as powerful when used for more common sound design tasks such as slow vehicles, idling engines and interior shots.

You can simply search the library for ‘idle’ and a bunch of these sounds will appear within Igniter’s library (and of course, you can add your own).

Experiment with shuffle depths and crossover rates to smooth things out, or layer a couple of idles together from the library, and you could essentially leave this design at this point! But let’s go a little bit further.

Cutting to and from interior/exterior scenes

We can do this easily inside of Igniter, with the EQ and a little automation. Assign automation to the low pass filter, and lower the value for the interior sections, and for the exterior sections to simulate the inside of the car.

It’s as simple as that! no need to search for car interior ambiences and try to make them match – everything you need is in Igniter for the vehicle in the scene. Now, let’s add some details with our other plugins!

Adding footsteps and textures using more Krotos plugins

Adding footstep sound effects with Weaponiser

With Weaponiser, you can add footsteps with our Ultimate Footsteps library. Spotting the scene with markers and then adding footstep sound effects to each marker is a tedious task – with this library, you can simply spot the scene once, using MIDI, and you will have perfectly synced footsteps.

Add a MIDI clip on a new instrument track, and add Weaponiser as an insert and load up our Ultimate Footsteps library, or add your own footstep sound effects by dragging and dropping them onto one of Weaponiser’s engines.

Next, open the clip and scan through the scene, frame by frame, adding a C4 MIDI note at each point where the foot hits the ground. It is this quick and easy to spot to picture using Weaponiser with instant results. Plus, if you want to change the sounds or preset, your scene is already spotted – no need to delete the sounds and do them all over!

Adding footstep Foley textures with Reformer Pro

To add some texture and layering to your scene, you can then add Reformer Pro after Weaponiser in your chain, and set it to one of our excellent Foley and surface libraries, or analyse your own sounds and use those. The Weaponiser output will trigger Reformer Pro’s input, adding textures to your footsteps.

Add ambiences with Krotos Studio Free

Finally, why not add some ambience to your scene. In our scene, we are out in a dark forest, so Krotos Studio’s forest ambience was the perfect addition to this scene. You can control how simple or complex the ambience recordings are with Krotos Studio’s Dual X-Y pads, and change these parameters as the scene unfolds for fast, effortless ambiences.

Get Reformer Pro, Weaponiser, Igniter, Dehumaniser 2  and Simple Monsters for less than $35/month with Krotos Kore

Get Access to Krotos Kore