Haunted Light 2014-02-27 Recording monster sounds

This week I have been working in the next step from have done the sound manager to actually record the sound. I have been using the site freesound.org to get royalty free music and sounds to mix them into something new. But the most work hours has been put down into finding sounds in real life that could work in the game. The Monster’s sounds are pretty easy to find because they are made by my voice, which later on gets re-pitched and reversed if necessary.

The tools I am using to record my voice and objects are my G35 headset’s microphone and the audio software Audacity.

For example I start by recording my voice doing a monster growl. You can hear the example here:

https://soundcloud.com/simon-johansson-6/blog-unpitched

As you can hear it is not very scary, but the important thing is trying to sound just as you want it because many things can later on be altered in Audacity to get the correct sound.

When I am re-pitching the audio I usually set the pitch to negative 41 (-41) because it lowers the pitch a lot without making the sound too unclear.

And the audio can be found here:

https://soundcloud.com/simon-johansson-6/blog-pitched

As you can hear it makes a lot of difference just by altering the pitch, I tried to reverse the sound as well but it did not meet the expectations so I chose to not reverse the sound clip. The reason for it not to work reversed is that I used my breath a bit too much so in reverse mode it will give a wooshing sound. That sound could of course be filtered and removed but for just an example file it is a bit too much work.

Now recording sounds are always fun but at the same time it is extremely frustrating to not get the desired sound. I have been working for about 10 hours with the wall monster’s sound and I just cannot seem to get a fitting sound. I have tried a screaming sound, a hoarse sound, a moaning sound. The closest I’ve gotten is the moaning sound but I still want to add a sound effect for the tongue. I have bought meat that I’ve slapped against the microphone, tried to fry meat to get the correct sound. I am looking for a meaty whip sound. I may have to get find a stock sound for it because my microphone is too weak to record the sound. I’ll have to dig a bit deeper to find the right sound.