In this posting I will talk about the basic tools and techniques for sound design. First of all what is sound design?

Sound design is manipulating recorded audio or creating audio elements. For example I used to do large amount of sound design when doing work on a Television show named Xena The Warrior Princess. On this TV Show the director requested us to have a sound each time a Greek God appeared out of thin air, those appearances were always involved visual effects for example lightning, sparks, light flashes and so forth, I had to come up with sounds that will fit what you see . I started with putting elements of what you see, for example sparks and lightning , but then comes the tricky part,the things that don't make sound , like light flashes ,smoke and so forth, for that you have 2 options. Use an all-natural sound ( recording ) or use a synthesized sound. Synthesizer sounds almost never work , they're simply not rich enough, since synthesizer sounds normally made from simple waveform for example sinus and square as opposed to an organic audio recording that is Far more complex and more natural for us.

Then what should we use for a flash of light ?, it's usually trial and error. I will start looking into swishes or whooshes those are recording of fast-moving things like sticks, cars, airplanes, trains etc. then I might look for explosions, fire, screams, animal voices and so forth. The difficulty with real recordings is that they generally sounds like what they're, well, here comes the manipulation part ( that is the fun part ). First tool and it's not actually manipulation but it's very important part of sound designing it's called layering, which means playing two or more sounds at the same time. layering itself can get you quite far when it comes to hiding the original sound, for instance, sometimes when you mix car driving by with jets flying by and you also add fire and explosion it does not sound like a car anymore but a totally unrecognizable sounds. When I am sound designing I rarely not layering elements. Other tools which I use are. Pitch shifting, reverse, reverb, filtering and Already made sound design elements library.

1. Pitch Shift : Probably the most useful sound design tool . Pitch shifting can help a lot with making recognizable sounds less recognizable. It can in addition make a lot of small sounds sounding far larger. I recorded my son one day screaming, after pitch shifting it it sounded like a huge monster. There is a limit to how much it is possible to pitch shifting before you start hearing some side effects, so you need to be careful. Also it helps significantly if you record the sound in high sample rate, 96khz and 192khz ( if you have the equipment to do it ). One more secret is that it is best to pitch down in little amounts, for instance if you need a pitch something 2 octaves down you much better pitch shift 8 times 3 semitones as opposed to one time 24 steps all at one time. Another good use for pitch shifting is when you need the sound to be longer or shorter.

2. Reversing : Very useful tool when sound designing, extremely useful to create a surreal sound design. When you reverse you do not reduce the quality of the sound but you make it much less recognizable and weird.

3. Reverb : Great tool for making sound biggerthan life, and change the ambient of the place the sound was recorded. for instance, once I recorded water drips in a very small studio, put reverb on it's sounded like drips of water in a enormous cave.

4. Filters : Low cut low pass as well as bandpass are good devices to isolate a part of the recorded sound. For example if you need a rumble for earthquake you can record city traffic run it through a low pass filter and you get good earthquake rumble ( obviously you can add some things to make it better like avalanche and distant explosions to make it more engaging ). I usually use high pass and low pass filtering only on some of the elements and not to aggressively. Overdoing it can cause the result to sound unnatural as well as unpleasant.

5. Already made library of sound design elements: If you have to do lot of sound design and you don't have unlimited time you better have a great pre-made sound design elements library, when you use a good sound design elements library it is possible to do sound design that can take all day in 2 minutes.

There are other tools ( plugins ) which involve more sophisticated sound processing but if you look under the hood they almost always do the same stuff which can be Pitch shifting, reverse, reverb, filters, modulation as well as delays. The good thing about some of those plugins are that they're making a lot of tasks for you, like slicing and dicing the sound to thousands of pieces applying effects to each piece dynamically pitch shifting etc, when you try to do that yourself it will take you tremendous amount of time. The trade-off is usually that you may have a lot less control of what the end result might be, sometimes they are great but sometimes they are a waste of time. I personally go to those tools perhaps 20% of the time, Usually for sci-fi projects and less for organic real world projects.

One thing I should say about sound design is that it takes time to get to great a result, you simply have to work hard and be patient till your design sounds beautiful.