Monday, 9 June 2014

Researching sound elements

As another task for my media course. I had to research how different sound elements are made, what equipment they require, what techniques etc.

Task 2: Sound elements

 

 

Sound effects


Sound effects can be made in a few ways.

They can be recorded using a voice recorder and a contact microphone when recording most sound effects.  Also after recording basic sound affects they can be improved with audio editing software to make them sound better if needed. However, a contact microphone is one of the ways to produce sound effects.

However, in some cases sound effects can b made using stereo  microphones.

 

Post Production


Also after recording the sound effects, using appropriate microphones, you can export them from your recorder onto your computer, and put some additional effects on the recordings using audio editing software like audacity or Soundforge to make them sound more high quality and for the sound effects to sound professional for the final product.

Some of the effects that can be applied can be Equalisation, gate, normalisation etc.

 

Atmospheric Sounds:


Atmospheric sounds are used to give a listener a realistic impression of where a story is set.

There are a few ways to record atmospheric sound effects.

You can use stereo microphones to record them. In order to insure high quality of the recordings, you can either buy a high quality microphone, or after recording sound effects put them through post production procedures.

You can also use external recorders. Like the Zoom H1 recorder which has stereo microphones. This device also allows you to record in multiple audio formats if you wish to use this option.

 

Post Production:


After the recordings are saved, they can be put through post production procedures to insure that they are the right quality towards the final product. The same audio software mentioned above can be used to modify atmospheric sound effects. Atmospheric sound effects require more advanced and detailed editing in order to insure the high quality of the audio file. So extreme attention to details is needed when using equalisation and normalisation + resampling if required.

 

Music:


Music production is an area that uses most various types of production equipment. To record a music product, either a theme tune, film music or a song, there’s many software and devices that you can use to record a music product.

 

Software


For producing the instrumental track, you can use Garageband, this only one of many music production programmes which allows you to produce music on Apple devices. Another software well known for music production is Logic.

These types of software allow you to compute your own music with a wide range of instruments available, with more kits you can buy and download. You can then also mix down your final product into a song adding effects to the different stems of the track. You can use the same software to record vocals if needed.

 

Music Production Equipment


However, with software also comes equipment, and there’s a wide range of music production equipment available to you. Middy controllers are very popular in this industry. Allowing you to compose music using a controller that is basically a musical keyboard. The controllers vary in the amount of keys and options available, however, they do because of that of course vary in price. These controllers also allow you to add effects into the stems of the track instead of using the computer keyboard. The controllers allow you to add the effects with more precision with the various controls.

 

Dialog:


Recording dialog can be used in many different media productions. Voiceovers for jingles, vocals for a track, commentary on something and much, much more.

 

 

 

 

Recording Equipment


When recording dialog there are a few things to consider regarding recording equipment. Depending to what type of dialog you are recording, you will have to pick the correct microphone. For recording interviews, you will need a by-directional microphones which will record the front and the back of the microphone. For Voiceovers you will need an Omni-directional microphone, which records only the front of the microphone, this will then be recording only your voice.

 

Post Production


Then of course comes the post production for Voiceovers. At this stage you can do the necessary corrections like cutting out silences, sometimes if needed cut out some spoken parts, putting music and jingles when appropriate and then normalising the Voiceover recording if required. All this is done using audio editing software like Audacity Soundforge or Wavepad.

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