In this Awesome Video, David Dumais Creates a Sci-Fi Gun Sound Effect all Within Weaponiser!
Watch and learn as David Dumais imports his own sounds and builds out a gun sound effect from the ground up from a clean start. Through this video you’ll be able to learn about how Weaponiser works, and see how it will fit into you own projects. The resulting sci-fi gun sound effect that David creates with Weaponiser is completely unique.
All that remains to be said is a huge thank you to David Dumais for taking the time to create this video. Go check out his YouTube channel for more awesome content.
Enjoy!
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Hi, everyone. David here from daviddumaisaudio.com. And in this video, I’ll be creating a sci fi gun sound effect all within Weaponiser by Krotos Audio. Now, if you don’t know what Weaponiser is, it’s actually Krotos Audio software, a plug in that they created, especially designed for creating any kind of gun sound effect. It’s really good for that.
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But what I’m going to use it for in this video is actually using my own recorded materials, import my own layers, and create a gun Sci-Fi sound effect from that. So if you want to see that in action, stick around. Because I actually haven’t even created it yet. I don’t even know what it’s going to look like or sound like or what I’m going to create yet. We’re going to just jump in.
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And hopefully my goal with this video is that you can not only see and learn from my process, but also hopefully learn a bit more about Weaponiser and how it works. And if you don’t already own it, maybe if it could be a good product for you. All right. If you’re new here, like I said before, my name is David. I like to create sound effects.
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And if you also like to create sound effects, then I have a free little gift for you. It’s my five layering techniques for creating better sound effects. It’s a little PDF I put together five different layering techniques that you can use to create better sound effects. If you want to grab that, it will be free.
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Links will be in the description below. All right, so that’s it for now. Let’s just jump into the video and let’s get started. All right. So like I said, we’re going to be using Weaponiser.
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So here I have it open inside of Reaper, and we’ll do all of our design in here. So maybe I can make it. I can’t make it bigger. But there you go. Okay.
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So I’m not going to go into details about how it works and everything in here. Hopefully you’ll get to learn a bit more about how it works and what everything does just for me using it and creating this gun sound patch. So why don’t we start from the beginning here? So I’m just going to go into here. I’m going to go to the factory preset, and I’m going to go to a clean start.
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So it kind of erases and gets rid of all the samples and everything that’s loaded in here. And what I’m thinking of is having some sort of like mechanical sounds to start with just right at the transient right at the top of the gun. So I’m going to look through some files here and start importing some sounds in here. All right. So I’ve imported some sounds in here.
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And why don’t we go one by one and just see what we can create with this?
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All right. So I’ve tweaked these up a little bit. So instead of doing like a power up, which is what the onset usually is. It’s just kind of some sort of power up. I’m going to use it as my mechanical layer.
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So this is what I have right now. It’s kind of plasticy. That’s okay. I can work with that. Maybe I can add some metal later.
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And I’m just going to add a bit of transient shape here just to increase the attack a little bit.
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And there you go. So I’m going to leave this layer here for now and move on to probably the body layer. This is where the core of the sound is going to be. So I’m going to see if I can find some sounds I’ve already created and see if I can import something in here.
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All right. So I’ve imported a few sounds here. Most of these are kind of short, except for this third one here. This is going to be like my laser layer. So we’ll see how that fits in.
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But let’s start with the first one here.
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So what I like to do inside of Weaponiser here is you can actually for the speed, you can go to envelope, and then here, you can manipulate the pitch envelope, which is cool, because then you can get some different sounds out of your samples.
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So I have to do something like this usually, or maybe I’ll do that with our mechanical stuff. So what you can also do here is if I increase the scale just so I can see a bit closer, I can offset the body layers from the mechanical layers. Let me do that here. I don’t want too much.
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Yeah. I don’t like this kind of plasticy sound here. Is it this one might be this one here. This one.
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I’ll start with that. Okay, let’s move on to this next body layer here, which is this.
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So if I go closer, I can see this one’s not starting right. I’ll put that there. What about this one? This one same thing. So I’m going to put this so there’s no, like, delay, which right now you’re hearing a delay, which doesn’t sound very good.
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And you’re also hearing a delay because this one is slowly ramping up. So you’re hearing this one, and then this one after once it’s here. So maybe I’ll do it a little bit less. Not as weird.
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So that sounds kind of cool. Okay, let’s move on. I’m probably going to come back to this, but it’s okay for now. So this one’s good. Let’s hear this one.
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Let’s hear in contact with the other.
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So right now, what I’m going to do is I just want to slowly, like, remove layers and see what’s working, what’s not working, what’s too thick and see what I can do to make it better.
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So right now, this layer here is really kind of masking this one. So I’m going to see if I can maybe change it up somehow to make it different. Maybe it could just be volume.
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And if I remove it. So it’s a pretty important layer at the moment, but maybe I can replace it with something else. So I kind of like it right now. I might come back to this and actually replace it. So let’s move on to our thump layer.
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So this is usually, like the thing that punches you in the chest. So usually I like to put something like a kick sample in here or something like really bassy that just punches you in the chest, maybe even a snare sample or something like that. So I’m going to look through some of my files. I know I have some kicks in my samples that I created myself. So I’ll probably import some of these in here.
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All right. So I’ve imported three different layers here, and these all have different variations. By the way. I could import them all into one bank here and then have them cycle through that one bank, but I don’t really want that. Right now I’m just trying to find sound that kind of work together.
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And then from there, if I wanted to add variation, I could. But right now it’s just a matter of I really want to figure out what works well together. So I’m going to start with this one here and see what I can do. So first thing, make sure it starts right at the beginning there, and let’s just hear it. So it’s quite tonal might work.
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Might not. We’ll see. Let’s try it in context.
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This one’s a bit bassier. So I usually like to put some sort of transient shape around here because I really want this to punch through.
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And I also usually like to put on a synth here. This just adds base. So right now the frequency is pretty low. Let’s put it up a little bit. If I solo this, like, you might need some nice speakers or studio monitors to hear this because it’s going to be in the base frequency.
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And I usually like to put the duration down because I really just want this to be at the beginning like that.
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Perfect. So let’s hear this in context.
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Let’s hear this. So this one here is way too long. So I’m going to take that off. Let’s hear these two together.
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And I think this one appears high pitched in total. So I might pitch this one down. Let’s hear that.
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So it doesn’t work as well. So what I can do now is what I showed before is I like to go inside the envelope here and let’s see if I can change this. So not only does it change the pitch, but I can also change how long it will last.
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So this is it from this to very different, right?
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Pretty good, actually. Let’s hear it all together now.
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Pretty good. So I’m going to keep this one muted here, and I’ll play everything together.
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So it sounds a lot better, a lot punchier. But right now I hear one layer that’s sticking out too much, something that’s high end. I think it’s this one right here.
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There we go. So that sounds pretty good to me. So now what I’m going to do is actually just come back here to the onset my mechanical layers, and I’m going to see if I can add some metallic elements to this. So it sounds a bit more like a gun rather than just some sort of laser shooting out or something. All right, so I found this layer here.
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Let’s have a listen to this one. This one’s kind of cool.
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It’s still kind of the Sci-Fi metallic layer. So let’s put that in context here of everything else.
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So it sounds cool, but right now it’s masking like the main laser shot. So what I’m going to do is I can just have this come in really low and actually just come in at the end after the laser has done playing. So let’s hear if this actually works.
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So that’s better to my ears.
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So before we had this layer muted. So what I think I’m going to do is I’m going to clear this one here, and I’m going to see if I can find another kind of metallic mechanical sound in here. All right. So I’m going to see if I can have some hinge. Sounds like blending in here and makes sense.
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It kind of works.
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I’m going to make this part. This is okay with that. I’m going to make this lower, though, like this.
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So if I put it all together. So this is the sound. And I wonder if I could probably even bring it down even more. Now, if you wanted to, you could test this out with a rate of fire here.
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So I still find that hinge sound a little bit too much here.
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There you go. Okay, let’s keep going here. Let’s work on this layer again.
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So for this one, I like to have a bit more saturation. I want even more kick into it. Yes. Let’s add some saturation. I think the one thing that Weaponiser can’t do and I might be wrong about this.
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Maybe somebody correct me in the comments, but I don’t think you can do like side chaining on here. Maybe you can. Maybe you can do side chaining for the compressor. No, I don’t think you can. And so it’d be really nice to have, like, for example, the kick here.
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I really want that to kick right at the beginning and then have the other samples come in. But I can’t do that because I can’t do any kind of side chaining in here. So I might be wrong. But as far as I know, I don’t think you can do side chaining and be so useful for creating weapons sounds in here. Because right now what happens is that everything just gets muddled up, especially right at the transient and then you have no control over the transient.
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You just get all the mud right at the beginning because that’s where all the samples are playing. But it’d be so much more easy. So much easier to control the transients if you were able to do side chaining within here. But unfortunately you can’t. So anyways work with what we have here.
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So I’m going to do some saturation. Here we go. So for this.
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So if I turn this off and probably do a little bit of cut stay better. So it’s here in context.
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Take it off.
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It’s not really doing the auto gain unfortunately. So let’s bring this down a little.
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So that’s okay if I turn this off.
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So right now I think we can make this even more punchy and impactful if we could change the tail of the sound because right now there’s something that’s just lasting too long. It’s probably like this one here.
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So what I’m trying to do is clean up this thump here because you don’t really want it to have any kind of tail to the sound because I’m just going to mask the rest and this is really just to hit you in the chest. So you don’t really want anything beyond this transient.
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Saturation is off. Let’s put the saturation back on here.
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So I’m just trying to see if I can add a bit more body to this.
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There you go.
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Alright. On the master. Maybe I’ll add some slight compression here.
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So this just helps to bring out the transient a bit. What I try to do here is for the attack. Usually the transient lives between zero and 30 milliseconds. That’s why I’m doing like .3 at the attack. So it doesn’t touch the transient and then I’m doing kind of a slow release on the gun just so that the compression comes back with the tail of the gun.
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So what this is doing to my ears anyways I think it’s helping to separate the transient from the tail of the gun a little bit better and maybe I could do like really hard.
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So this is just helping to glue the sound a little bit better to glue all the layers a little bit better so that they all have the kind of same movement of volume over time with this compressor on.
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So I’m not overly liking. I think it’s this down here.
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It’s kind of cool but it kind of gets annoying.
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Alright. So that’s pretty good to my ears. I think maybe I would play around a little bit with like some flanger or something. Let’s try it a bit too much.
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So this helps to sell the sci fi a little bit better with this flanger here.
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I don’t want too high on the mix.
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There you go. So this is a decent sound for just throwing in some samples in here and seeing what I can create.
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What I could also do and what I’ve also done before is you can also export this sound that I just created and then once I have it exported I can put it on a new track here and then add a reverb to it so that it’s like in a space and then import that reverbed sample back into here as the tail. So then you have the shot and then you have the reverb portion of it and then you can kind of play around with that and then compress it together, glue it together and then you can have this shot that’s in a room where it feels like it’s in a space so that can work pretty well. I’m not going to do it right now but that works. All right. So I think that’s it for this gunshot.
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I think I’m going to leave that here.
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I could probably just still tweak it a little bit. This little sound at the end here is kind of annoying but I’d have to play with this a little bit or maybe even switch it up for this. I’m going to leave it at for now. Maybe I’ll save it and that should be good. All right.
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So that is it. I hope you guys found that useful and valuable in just seeing kind of the process and hopefully learning a bit more about Weaponiser and just watching me design some gun sound in there. Yeah. So let me know what you guys think. If you guys have any questions or comments please leave them down in the comments below.
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I always do my best to read them, read everything and answer them and if you guys want to see more sci fi gun sound design I actually did a whole video about how I created a gun sound effect all within Phaseplant by Kilohearts so I’ll put a link in the cards for that. If you want to check that out and just a reminder to grab that free PDF on the five little techniques for creating sound effects and I think that’s it for now. Thanks so much for watching. I’ll see you in the next video. Bye.
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