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Robotic Mech Sound Design Using Reformer Pro & Weaponiser

How to Make Robot Movement Sound Effects

Ben Jacquier recently shared this video with us, where he re-designs a mech walking sound effect from Gears of War using Reformer Pro, Weaponiser and some awesome libraries from the Krotos Ultimate Bundle which contains an insane amount of Libraries for you to use in your re-designs from foley, FX, Whooshes, Mech, Explosions, Destruction and More. Let’s get into it!

Hello, my name is Ben. I’m a French music composer and sound designer and today I’m going to use Krotos plugins to do some sound re-designs for Gears of War. I use Presonus Studio One as a DAW for my work, but you an achieve the same results in your own preferred DAW. let’s get into it!

The first thing we will design is the mech walking sound effects.

Robot Walking Sound Effects with Reformer Pro

It is really time-consuming to put a footstep sound on every step that he takes manually, so I’m going to use Krotos Reformer Pro to make things much faster. I’m going to mimic his movements and steps with my mouth, and my recording will be the trigger for Reformer Pro’s sound libraries. It’s a really simple and efficient way to spot to picture and you can hear a scene begin to take shape immediately instead of using markers.

I loaded Reformer Pro into a track and explored the library. I can find awesome robotic sound effects using Reformer Pro’s search tool. I am using it the Krotos Ultimate Bundle, which comes with thousands of sounds to choose from for all kinds of purposes. I want the robot sound effects to sound it’s older and not too techy, so I have combined the Soundmorph Robotic Lifeforms libraries with Soundbits Drags and Scrapes, using the bucket drag preset to add a clunkiness to the scene, which suits my design much better.

Creating Robot Movement Sound Effects Vocally

Performing the sounds with your voice is very fun to do. Reformer Pro will be triggered by any Audio Input, whether you hitting the microphone, running a guitar through it or choosing to use a contact microphone if you don’t want to use your voice, or even using MIDI.

We’re lacking some low frequencies to make it more powerful and impactful as it is a big robot, so let’s find another library to add those in. Now, there’s a lot of information in the high frequencies that we don’t need, as our other layers are taking care of that space.

I’m not going to be too precise on this sound design as I just want you to understand how Reformer Pro works and how it can make things very fast and efficient.

From Robotic Lifeforms to Rhythm Impact Machines – the size of the Krotos libraries is just crazy. You can find pretty much anything you’re looking for. Whats amazing is that you can start with presets and then you can create with your own from them sound as well. It’s a really nice workflow.

In Part 2, Ben Builds upon this design, using weaponiser and MIDI to trigger further sounds to bring his sound design to life!

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