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SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW CLOSED. WE WILL BE IN TOUCH ABOUT WINNERS AS SOON AS WE HAVE SELECTED THEM.

We are happy to announce we have partnered with Rudique to host a remix competition for his new track OBSTACLES (featuring Zunesha).

It is open to all and we've put together some great prizes. 

The samples are free for the duration of the contest until November 5, 2024

This is the original track

Full Track

And these are examples of some of the samples in the pack you'll be remixing with:

VolcaFM_73_Amin_v0.wav

Cello_Amin_v10.wav

Cello_Amin_v19_98.wav

Obstacles_RUDIQUE_VolcaFM_98_Amin_v9.wav

Get the Full Sample Pack here 

.

(Samples will be delivered to you by email after you check out)

Who is this contest for?

Everyone who wishes. The remix contest for OBSTACLES is a unique opportunity for music producers and remixers to put their own spin on a track by the Berlin-based artist Rudique.

Participants will have one month to create their remix and submit it for a chance to win. 

It is completely open genre! Do what you do best in any style you like. 

Prizes

There will be three levels of prizes: Runner Up, Second Place, and First Place. 

Runner Up

-All runners up will receive an official release by Rudique.

Second Place

-Our most popular sample packs STONEWIRE and VISION MAGNET
-Our newest sample pack will drop after winners are announced and you will get a free copy.
-Official release of your track with Rudique.

First Place

-Korg Volca FM2 Hardware Synth
-Our most popular sample packs STONEWIRE and VISION MAGNET
-Our newest, unreleased sample pack
-Official release of your track with Rudique. 

And of course we will be happy to feature all the winning tracks on this website and to our email list.

Dates

Contest submissions open October 5 and close November 5, 2024 at 10PM EST.

Winners will be announced a few days later.

How to Participate

To participate in the remix contest:

STEP 1: Go HERE to download the stems for OBSTACLES 

(the samples are free for one month only)

STEP 2: Create your remix. We listen to everything and all genres are welcome.

STEP 3: Submit your remix before the deadline to be considered for the prizes.

How To Write A Winning Track

We can't make any promises that you'll be picked and at the end of the day, music is subjective. 

However, we would like to offer a few guidelines as to how you can write (in our humble opinion) a fantastic track and raise the bar of your music production in general.

Don't be lazy and Do utilize your strengths. Slapping a few stock drum loops under the contest samples and calling it a day probably won't stand out much. Lean into your strengths as a producer. The things that really make you different from others. Maybe you're a gifted instrumentalist, have a unique approach to sound design, or something else entirely. Only you know what makes you unique. 

Don't try to write to our taste. This will only dilute whatever it is you do really well. We're open minded and listen to all kinds of music.

Don't write some glitchy breakbeat thing to try to pander to our taste because the site is called Glitch Magic. Do you. 

Do write something YOU would release. And you totally could do that if you wish! We think some of the best music we hear always has an artist behind it who believes in what they're doing.

That's the energy in a track that gets us excited. Full commitment. If we can get that sense just from listening, you knocked it out of the park and at the least will be part of the discussion for who to pick as a winner.

Do spend time on the details. We will hear them. We write a lot of music and are very picky about how we mix sample packs so we'll notice the attention to detail and an overall high level of craftsmanship in a track versus something that was simply thrown together.

And going back to our last point, this is exactly how we would treat one of our own releases. 

The mix matters and your ear is the final judge, not your meters. Even if you aren't a mix or mastering engineer, do your best on this aspect. You can never be too good at mixing and it helps to differentiate your work. If this is a weak point for you, entering remix competitions with the intent to improve your audio engineering abilities is a great way to to build that skill set.

Keep in mind that a good mix is not necessarily a technically perfect one. Mixing to some arbitrary "industry standard" loudness probably hurts more than helps.

We're always surprised at how not perfect a lot of our favorite music is! Weird resonances, lopsided stereo fields, odd panning choices, "loud" mixes that always measure quieter than we think they will on the meters, etc. Whenever we analyze a track that subjectively feels really "clean" and well executed, we always find interesting quirks like this. 

Where To Enter

Send us your submission with the form here: https://glitchmagic.com/pages/remix-submissions

We will need your Name, Artist Name, Email, and a streaming link to the track. 

Rules and Guidelines

Make sure to review the rules and guidelines for the remix contest to ensure your submission is eligible for consideration:

• Only one entry per participant is allowed. 
• Remixes must be original.
• Submissions must be in the specified format and submitted before the deadline.

Good luck to everyone! We can't wait to listen to what you come up with.

And if you decide to use some of our other packs in your remix, that would of course make our day!

Before you go downloading all the free foley sound effects you can find and dropping them into your tracks, we think it will help you to learn a bit about where they come from and what they can be.

Yes, foley can be simply sound effects, but they can also be a kind of creative practice that enhances everything you make. Read on to see what we mean.

What are Field Recordings and Foley?

Field recordings and Foley sound effects are somewhat interchangeable terms in a music production context. Let's also include the term found sounds in here while we're at it.

But if you want to be more specific, they do technically mean different things. Field recordings and found sounds tend to refer to recordings of non-musical objects somewhere outside the studio that a producer then uses in a musical context. This is also related to the idea behind musique concrète.

Foley sounds have a bit a different heritage because they are named after John Foley, who was a pioneer in inventing a lot of the techniques for making movies and recording the sound effects we hear in movies that enhance the experience of a film.

In film production, a foley artist is a dedicated post-production position for someone who oversees this part of the film. However, over time this term was used more loosely to refer to any kind of sound effects and musicians started to incorporate things like the sound of footsteps or ambient recordings from a forest into their tracks.

So field recordings and foley are sort of synonyms at this point, but they do carry different shades of meaning depending on the context.

How Can Field Recordings and Foley Improve Your Music?

Now the fun stuff. How can foley sound effects help you make great tracks.

Ambient Sounds

To start, I'm sure you're familiar with producers doing things like deliberately adding vinyl crackles to a digital recording, strictly for a vibe. That kind of ambient sound evokes a particular feeling, which is largely what producing songs is all about. Expressing a feeling.

So why not use other types of ambient sounds? The inside of a busy cafe. The airport. Someone typing on a computer keyboard. A busy office. a forest. A summer rainstorm. All of these environments evoke a different feeling that can be a base to put your other track elements on top of.

Of course you can also process the hell out of them and create something totally different, but we'll get to that later in the article.

The "Bad" parts of an instrument

This is not always thought of as a foley sample. Most people would refer to samples of this kind of thing as an "extended technique" but we think it's close enough. Every instrument has certain sound you want to emphasize and other aspects of the sound players try to minimize.

A good example on a guitar or bass would be the string and fret noises. Generally players want to emphasize the resonance of the instrument and downplay the sound of their fingers scraping and sliding along the string.

But what if you tried to used this intentionally? You have an interesting percussion instrument now. It's a totally different thing.

Similarly on most woodwind instruments, the sound of the pads closing against the instrument body is normally too quiet to project in a concert hall meaningfully, but if you get a microphone very close and amplify these sounds, you basically have a quirky set of tuned drums you can compose with.

Noise

Next time you stub your toe in the middle of the night, drop a pan into the sink, or unlock a door as you go about your day to day life, try to imagine what each sound would be like in a musical context.

If you record these, trim them to the transients, and then load them into a hardware sampler or DAW you can write with them directly or experiment with layering them over traditional drums.

You can use all kinds of stuff for this project. Pieces of wood, metal, stone, plants, trees, whatever. This is exactly how we started when we recorded our foley sample pack STONEWIRE and its even reflected in the name.

Off Kilter Rhythms

One of our favorite kinds of foley sound effects are recordings of noises that have some transients in them but don't have a clear rhythm.

Many times if you take a chunk of such a recording and loop it in the DAW, it does start to have a clear rhythm. This can be exciting because a lot of the time the rhythm you get is something odd that you would never in a million years think to write and not even close to sounding quantized.

Then you can use that as a starting base and write to it. Odds are good you come up with something unique because of the source material you're starting with. Some examples of this would include things like malfunctioning machinery, jingling a set of keys, a squeaky wheel on an old suitcase, or a zillion other things. They all have an irregular, non-repeating rhythm to them that can get really interesting if you take them back in the studio and see how they work as loops.

But.

These are just a few ideas to get you started. If you only remember one thing from this article you need to remember this: virtually any sound can be used in a musical way. All sounds have a musical use. Read that again if you have to. All sounds are musical sounds. That's the world we live in with modern creative technologies. You might have to process the sound or it might work only in certain settings, but it's all musical if you want it to be.

Making Field Recordings and Foley Sound Effects

People commonly search for free foley sound effects online to download, ask very specific recording questions about free foley sound effects, and generally tend to overthink it.

Recording foley for your own use in music productions can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it. Want to build some intense 15 mic setup to perfectly capture the spatial experience of hearing something hit a baseball? Sure. Want to record the sound of the ocean with your iPhone? That works too.

There really aren't any hard rules to doing it as long as the result works for you. However, like any other recording, if you want to add noise and saturation, it's easier to add that in later from a clean recording by hand than it is to de-noise and de-saturate a recording that already has those qualities baked in.

Field Recordings and Foley Processing Ideas

In our opinion this is really where the fun starts to begin. You make a bunch of foley sound effects and field recordings, then start massaging them in the studio to see where you can take them.

We like to think of this as a kind of synthesis. Your foley sound is the "oscillator" or sound source, then you're shaping it with modifiers like filters and envelopes. Except in a modern DAW like Ableton Live, Logic Pro, FL Studio or almost any other, you have way more tools at your disposal to push the sound to radically different places.

Some techniques to get you started experimenting with synthesizing something totally different from a foley recording:

• Time Stretching

• Transposition

• Slice & Reverse

• Granular processing

• Distortion

• Compression (including sidechaining)

Time Stretching

You can of course stretch or compress the sample to create interesting aliasing but here's a way to take it a step further. Create a new audio track and set it to record the output of your foley samples where you are time stretching. Hit record and sample while you adjust the time or grain size. Instead of a static effect that never changes, you'll hear all kinds of interesting glitchy things happen as you adjust the timing.

Transposition

This one is pretty straightforward if you want it to be. You pitch the foley sound effect up or down. That works, but what if you added some automation so the pitch changes. You can even try doing this in very extreme registers like +/- 48 half steps or doing this extremely quickly (like several dozen times a second). This will make your starting sound an entirely different thing.

Slice & Reverse

Take your sample and reverse it. This might be enough to be interesting. Going a step further? Slice up the sample and only reverse time pieces of it. You can even rearrange the slices.

Granular processing

Granular processing allows you to do a lot of what has already been mentioned, but automate it. Instead of manually slicing up your sound, reversing pieces, and reassembling, granular effects can do this on the spot. And you can then modulate things like how big the slices are, how often they get reverse, how random this process is and more.

Distortion

Add harmonics and overtones to the entire sound as a whole or just certain parts of the frequency spectrum. This can often enhance the perceived strength of the other processing techniques mentioned here.

Compression (including sidechaining)

This can either be subtle to control peaks and make the foley sound more usable or they can be radical and rhythmic like a heavy sidechain effect to bring out lots of detail in the sound that might not have been obvious at first. This can be particularly exciting with sounds that are naturally really quiet. You can make a tiny scrape sound like a huge, heavy impact

This however is just the tip of the iceberg! Don't feel limited to just these techniques.

They can be stacked and repeated too, which moderns DAWs make especially easy. Instead of running your sound through 1 compressor to control the peaks, try running it through a pack of 20 compressors to see what happens!

Summary

Don't just go looking for whatever free foley sound effects to download and drop into your tracks as is without putting your own spin on them.

These kinds of sounds can be a huge source of creative inspiration if you can think of them as being more of a creative practice instead of just sound effects you choose to add after the fact.

And yes we know that recording your own foley sound effects can be a lot of tedious work but that is why we've created sample packs like STONEWIRE that give you both the raw foley sounds as well as the Ableton Live session with all of our sound design chains so you can not only make the sounds you own, but also learn by example. We use all of the processing techniques mentioned here and much more!

Frequently Asked Questions

What are foley sounds?

The short answer is the they are are movie sound effects named after John Foley who invented a lot of the methods used to make and record them. In modern times, the definition of foley sounds has broadened to also include field recordings and found sounds that are used for strictly creative sound design purposes in music production.

What is the principal difference between traditional sound effects and foley sounds?

In modern film making environments, a traditional sound effect usually refers to an stock sound found in a sound effects library. A foley sound implies that there is a foley artist involved who is recording customized sounds for a specific production that can't be reused by other filmmakers.

In a music production context, the two terms are more or less used interchangeably. Many producers will call any recorded sound effect a foley sound, regardless of where it was sourced from.

How to make foley sounds?

You can make foley sounds simply by find a prop or object with an interesting sonic character, setting up mics and recording it. This can be as simple or as complex as you decide to make it. From the perspective of music productions, sometimes the pristine and perfect recorded sound effects are actually less interesting than the iPhone recording full of saturation, dirt, and crunch.

How do foley artists make sounds?

You can make your own free foley sound effects at home like a foley artist. You simply setup mics and record whatever it is you want, be it wood, stone, metal or something else. The main difference is a professional recording foley sound effects for a film would normally have a monitor up with the film playing, and record in sync with the picture as closely as possible.

For the sake of making foley sounds for music production, the monitor isn't necessary and the process of recording a foley sound effect isn't much different than recording any other traditional instruments.

How to make foley sounds at home?

Do you have a home? And sounds? Something to record those sounds with? Then you can make foley sound effects at home! It's really that simple. Making foley sounds for a film that needs to be synced to picture is more technically demanding, but if you're interested in recording foley sounds for music productions, there is no reason you can't just grab a piece of rope, wood, or metal and start experimenting with you phone recorder app.

Just make sound and record it, then take your sounds back to the studio and see if you can use them creatively.

If you are interested in making foley sample packs of your own or just want to know about all the effort we put into our first foley sample pack, STONEWIRE, we're going to walk you through the original idea, how it got a bit out of hand, and some of the solutions we came up with to deal with it.

We figure this might help someone interested in getting started with this kind of thing or it will just be cool to read about and document.

So let's take it back to the origins of STONEWIRE.

But First, Where Foley Gets It's Name From

We've written about the differences between foley, found sounds, and field recordings several times now but lets clarify once more for the new people.

Foley sounds are traditionally the sound effects recorded on set or in post production to accompany a feature film production. They are named after a guy who went by the name of Jack Foley. He was a pioneer who invented a lot of the modern techniques contemporary foley artists use to recreate the sounds you "see" on the screen when watching a movie.

Over time, the term foley started to become less specific to movie sound effects and picked up a more broad, loose definition of any kind of recorded sound effect, included those used in a music production environment.

The Original Idea

With the definitions out of the way, lets get back to STONEWIRE.

It started out as a complete impulse decision. We had gotten a field recorder as a giftand were itching to use it, so we decided to pack some batteries and go to Home Depot to play around and sample the sound of sinks or something.

It's basically a giant warehouse of free foley sound effects. We thought it would be easy to sample some everyday sounds, throw the recordings into some sound editing software, enhance audio quality a bit, chop that up into individual sounds, then we would have a collection of foley sounds ready to go.

It wasn't that simple at all, but we'll get to that part in a second.

So anyway we packed up and headed over to the store.

Recording Foley Sounds In Noisy Places

The actual recording went fairly smooth. We couldn't do certain things like recording breaking glass or any kind of destructive sounds (maybe for volume 2?!) but anything involving tapping or manipulating merchandise was easy enough.

The main challenge was dealing with the ambient sounds that you would expect to be in a big box store. There were people talking, footstep sounds, doors closing and opening, various kinds of machines running, the sounds of the checkout kiosks, forklifts, and the everyday sounds of a busy store.

The solution that worked the best was simply to find a quiet place whenever possible and keep the mics close to the source.

For shorter sound effects, we were able to cut off the ambient background noises with editing, but for longer sounds we had to work to minimize background noise as much as possible.

While denoising with spectral tools like the RX suite after the fact is an option, sometimes this degrades audio quality too much. It is also extremely time consuming and as you'll see, this wasn't super practical given the amount of samples to go through.

What Kinds of Foley Sounds Made It Into The STONEWIRE Sample Pack

The sounds that made it into STONEWIRE were particularly lots of smaller objects. We labeled them in some fun ways that hopefully inspire people, but the actual sound sources were things like boxes of fasteners or parts, various cans and containers of chemicals, chains, locks, resonant objects like air compressor tanks and other appliances.

When Things Got Completely Out Of Control

We recorded too much material. There was probably 60-90 minutes of audio on the field recorder memory stick.

We used some software to help automate some of the sample chopping as well as manually cut out the sounds we loved and definitely wanted to use.

But.

There were a ridiculous amount of sounds to go through. Over 8,000 individual sounds. This is not super practical for a sample pack and many of the sound effects were redundant which would defeat the purpose of the sample pack.

Having a few variations of sounds is helpful for things like multisampling, but having 300 clips of the same slightly different sound is not as useful as having a bunch of different things that would be more inspiring.

Sorting Foley Sound Effects With Code

Thankfully there are ways to automate certain tasks. We used a Python library called Librosa that is specifically designed for music and audio analysis.

We used a few simple techniques to sort and organize the sounds into folders to break this job down into something more manageable.

One example was we sorted all the sounds by RMS and peak level with the idea being that the sounds with a more robust level are probably instances where the field recorder was closer to the source and therefore had a higher chance of a better signal to background noise ratio.

This was generally true and helped sift out the throwaway sounds. That said, for fun we tried taking some very short, very quiet sounds and normalizing them just to see what we got and in a bunch of cases there were some cool things hiding in there that made it into the sample pack.

How You Can Make Foley Sound Effects

That is a great question that we decided to ask ourselves and there's no reason why you can't just go do the same thing we did. It was a lot of time and work, but entirely doable for a motivated person.

We would recommend that you try to record more frequently and in smaller chunks to avoid the tasks of having to write a bunch of scripts to sort through a mountain of samples.

Also by breaking up the task of recording your foley effects in to batches, you'll learn a bit more with each iteration of recording, importing, editing, sorting, then repeating.

Beyond that, the sky is basically the limit and we feel making your own foley sounds is a great way of expressing your artistic voice. No two people choose the same sounds, record in the same way or do their post production the same .

Summary

Creating STONEWIRE really pushed us in a few ways once we go down to the real work of taking a bunch of impulsively made field recordings and creating a full blown sample pack out of the sounds.

Going to the recording location and playing around with ideas for sound effects is a lot of fun and probably not far off from what Jack Foley did when he was inventing the profession of a foley artist.

However, the sheer volume of how many sounds we had to sort, clean up, and categorize really pushed us because we had to learn some new technical skills to really do this part properly.

We hope you decide to take the plunge and explore your own foley sounds and of course check out our STONEWIRE pack as a working example of what is possible.

Intro: The Problem

There are a lot of producers out there and between free sample packs, free drum samples, free drum kits, percussion loops, and free samples in general which are usually royalty free, there is no shortage of material to work with or people to make music.

This is not a bad thing. Having a huge, global community of people making music in every genre imaginable is awesome. It's never been a better time to learn from other people.

But this has also served to create a new challenge: standing out.

Saturation and obscurity

Even once your tracks and songs are mixed, mastered, and released, its hard to stand out from the pack. Music marketing tactics are very much their own world and beyond the scope of this article, but we want to take a step back and consider what you can do in your production to be different from everyone else out there making music.

Yes, there's plenty of generic pop music that does well because of the marketing, but if that's what you're interested in you're reading the wrong website.

We're much more interested in how to make the drums on your project really different and intriguing, which will only make getting out there to the right people more straightforward.

Common Drum Production Problems

Drum programming is a very discussed topic in all of electronic music with techniques, equipment, and specific patterns varying depending on the genres you work in. But we hear some common problems in lots of different genres that can be distracting even if you're doing everything else right.

Definitely try experiments, layer sounds, see if you can get weird unconventional patterns to work, but you don't want to miss the mark because of a common and easily solved problem.

Here are some of the big ones we recommend you check for as you work. Keep them in mind as you product, but

Why Your Drum Machine Sounds Wimpy

Ever wonder why simple loops from vintage drum machines sound amazing on your favorite records, but when you program them or drag in loops from a sample pack they just don't feel as dynamic and exciting?

You put on a Kanye West album (Yeezus is a good example) and the drum machine loops all sound HUGE. Yours do not.

Why?

They're almost certainly using some processing you are not. Compression or transient shapers can sometimes be part of the signal chain, but the big one is saturation or distortion effects that add overtones. This can be as simple as a guitar fuzz, or very complex multiband distortion. Also, certain analog or analog modeled compressors like the LA2A or 1176 or SSL G Comp add subtle overtones even when not compressing the signal, so the are acting like saturators to juice up the sound in a subtle way.

Lots of people use plugins like iZotope's Trash or Fab Filter Saturn which not only let you do multiband saturation, but also mix the dry and wet signals. Sometimes a little bit of heavy saturation mixed with the clean signal works better than the plugin set to 100% with less processing.

Many of the best free drum kits (like our DUST DMG pack of course) have a little of this baked into the sounds so they hit hard right out of the box.

Overcooked or Harsh High End

In our magically glitchy opinion, a lot of modern music has high end problems. This includes big commercial Top 40 releases, free drum kits, drum samples, and stock drum loops.

There are a lot of reasons why this happens but what we hear most are producers getting too enthusiastic with the high end boost, not using de-essers properly, or just trying to cram too many high end heavy elements into a mix then "fix" it with processing like multiband compression.

Pick your reference tracks carefully

Just because a track has a billion streams doesn't mean it makes a good reference. It means the market accepts it. But if you think its overcooked or too harsh, have the courage to pick references you believe in. Maybe the market deserves better and you're the person to make it.

Roll off high end

In a digital environment, it's really easy for high end to build up because everything is additive. Don't be afraid to use low pass filters and high shelves to be very exact about what you want to occupy the high end. In our experience, you really can only have 3, maybe 4 elements up there. And they can't be stepping on each other.

For example in a drum collection, you might decide your hi hats and snare have the high end bite to them, and everything else gets rolled off to make room for them.

De-Essing Correctly

Letting high end accumulate then trying to de-ess the entire mixbus later is heavy handed and just doesn't feel good a lot of the time. Usually most compression effects (which is what a de-esser is) works better in thin layers. Think of it like coats of paint. You should really do this kind of processing on the track level to the elements that need it so the elements that don't can breathe.

On your drums samples and drum loops, the thing you will most likely need to look at are cymbals. Your drums collection may not need it and this may be done for you already. If your drum library does not have drum loops that are cymbal heavy, you may just skip this. You may also consider only de-essing only cymbal one shots, not the whole drum bus.

Out Of Tune Drums

This is a simple one. Not all drum elements are pitched like certain snares and cymbal or hat sounds.

However 808s and kicks usually do need to be tuned. We're not going to always tell you to tune them to the root key of the song. That's boring.

Plenty of hip hop in particular has the "wrong" bass notes in the drum loops and it feels awesome. The point is you want to have some intent behind what you're doing. Don't just throw a sound in and leave it on whatever pitch it is. Figure out where it hits a nerve and feels good.

No Groove, No Drum Fills, Stock Percussion Loops

This issue is basically a lack of customization and effort. It's fine to throw some placeholder loops in a track sometimes, but you should experiment with how you do drum loops to find some things that are unique to your voice.

Don't just program everything exactly on the grid. At very fast tempos, the groove will generally tend to get straighter, but this isn't set in stone. Try using swung rhythms or patterns that don't line up with the measures. A simple example is use a 3/4 loop in 4/4 time so it only lands on a downbeat every 3 complete measures.

Don't just use stock loops that everyone else has. Cut them up or program fills with one shots. Even if its challenging at first, this will push you to develop your vocabulary.

The Building Blocks of a Unique Drum Library

For music producers, the sounds you use are a huge part of your style of music. With bad ones, nothing feels right and with good sounds it can feel like you can do anything.

So how do you build a great library of unique drums sounds?

The first thing we recommend is setup a space for them. Get a hard drive just for your samples and sample packs, keep it as organized as you can, and build it up over time. You want to make it easy to find sounds you love in a moment so having a curated hard drive is a great place to start.

So, where do you get sounds?

Sample Marketplaces

You can of course use large collections of drum samples from sites like Splice or Landr, but these are huge marketplaces with millions of producers looking for sounds there. We will use these to fill in gaps or in a pinch, but its important not to become too reliant on these places because you're using sounds that everybody else has.

Indie Sample Companies

This is the category we fall in and there are many others. These sample pack companies can range from a single producer who does everything or a team of 40 producers cranking out thousands of sounds everyday.

With our obvious bias aside, we like to source sounds from these companies when we produce because less people are going to have the sounds. It's more exclusive. Some companies even go as far as limiting the download of certain sample collections to a certain number of customers to keep the sounds rare.

Homemade Sounds

Every producer should try their hand at making some of their own sounds, even if they are simple foley samples from stuff on your desk or in the kitchen.

Try making your own sample pack. Try making some tracks using 100% of your own percussion loops, serum presets, one shots, drum loops, everything. Refuse to use any external drum library or instrument samples. Play every part by hand. Learn to synthesize every sounds on the 808 drum machine from scratch. If its an option, you can also try inviting a drummer in to come record custom drum loops.

This isn't mandatory for every track you make, but it will really push your production skills to new places and give you some unique assets that nobody else has, which will help you to develop a unique voice.

If you do a lot of this sort of thing, it works better. After a while you accumulate a private sample library.

Techniques for Crafting Unique Drums

Once you have a few sources of percussion loops and a sample pack or three in your collection, you need to start bringing it all together.

Transcribe Drum Patterns

Load up you favorite drum loops into an audio track. Then, you're going to transcribe, note for note, that pattern as closely as you can. Try to catch every snare hit, every kick drum note, every ghost note. If you do this a lot, you'll learn tons about what makes a good drum pattern.

But for the full version of this activity, you're going to mute the original pattern and try to get it to feel good using only one shot samples from your drum library. This teaches you a lot about what works and what doesn't and where you can substitute things with your own ideas.

The Foley Loop

We're big fans of using foley samples for the texture they add as well as how easy it is to break into new territories with foley loops. Here is how to do it:

Take a foley sample with some kind of irregular non-repeating rhythm. Doesn't matter what it is so much as what it could be. Could be something like wind chimes, a loose wheel on a grocery cart, a jingling set of keys, or a toolbox falling down a flight of stairs.

Then you're going to cut out a slice of that recording and quantize it to a tempo. Stretch and warp it until you can get it to loop smoothly. The first couple times you try this, it might suck. Let it be bad. The point of this method is its a little unpredictable. You'll probably make a bunch of junk, but it's worth the effort for the moments when you strike gold.

Layer From Different Sources

We like to layer sounds that have vastly different origins. For example, you might combine vocals with a synthesized drum machine loop with a few foley samples over the top to add texture to the very precise, digital sound of a synthesized loop. Then you can sidechain that to analog noise to add texture and motion.

Or try inverting that. Use a foley loop as your base, program drum machine one shots over the top of it, then mix in a squashed, heavily filtered breakbeat for texture.

Pros and Cons of Free Drum Samples

There are tons of free sample packs out there, as well as public domain sources of sounds that are free to use. These a great asset to tap into.

But.

Everyone else is also using them, so it can be easy for artists to lean on cliche sounds that everyone and their uncle uses in their productions.

If you go this route be prepared to spend a lot of time processing sounds and re-imagining them into something completely different. This is not a bad thing and will make you a better producer, the only catch is it is a big investment of time and involves trial and error which may not always be practical.

They're there so you should use them, but know what you're getting into ahead of time.

Technology and Tools for Unique Drum Production

There is some helpful gear to have for making unique drum sounds.

1. You need something to record with. Pretty much everybody has a phone, so you should start there. You can upgrade the mic, or get field recorders and standalone mics later if you don't already have them.

2. The stock plugins of your DAW are extremely capable. Learn every trick and technique you can find to maximize what they can do for you.

3. Weird, misused, and less common plugins. Certain 3rd party plugin companies make very sophisticated tools (Zynaptiq comes to mind here) but there are many other ones. Don't be afraid to use tools you have the "wrong" way for synthesis. A good example is take denoising and other corrective tools and use very extreme settings to create aliasing and other artifacts, then mix this back into your drum sounds or render them out separately. These plugins tend to kick out interesting, novel sounds, because not as many people think to do this.

4. Odd physical objects. Some people even build "sound boxes". Basically a wooden box used as a resonator (like an acoustic guitar) that they attach things to and excite in various ways. You can record these and process them to make sounds that will leave a lot of people scratching this heads as to how you did it.

Conclusion

To wrap it up, we're big believers that experimentation and out of the box processes are the key to doing drum production that stands out from the pack.

You want to avoid the big mistakes and use proven enhancement techniques like saturation, distortion, careful tuning, tasteful compression and de-essing with unorthodox sample processing.

Ideally, you're going to build a very extensive personal drum library. This is the ultimate collection of samples from the styles you work in. Sample packs from companies you like (hopefully we're in that club 🤞) are absolutely part of that, but you want to be intentional about where you source things and consider things like whether or not they are royalty free.

By utilizing a mix of technology and experimenting with unconventional methods like foley loops and physical sound creation in ways you develop yourself, producers can develop a distinctive sound that sets their music apart in a saturated market.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a collection of drums called?

A collection of drum sounds used for music production is usually called a sample pack, a drum library, a drum loops bundle, or a synonym of one of these terms. They all basically mean the same thing. It's a bunch of files that you can load into your DAW, hardware sequencer, or sampler to make drum beats or drum loops with.

Are old drum sets worth anything?

Sometimes old vintage drums or cymbals can be very valuable and have a high resale value. But you need to know what you're looking at and be aware that the vast majority are worth very little. Just because something is "vintage" doesn't automatically mean it's a collector's item.

However, for making a sample pack or recording percussion loops, old drums can be very valuable in a different way. If they sound unique or you have a unique idea for how to use them, you can potentially make tracks with those sounds that help build your reputation as a musician.

What is the best drum sample library?

There's no single "best" drum sample library. An big room EDM sample pack is going to be pretty hard to use if you're interested in making old school hip hop or 90's drum and bass. The core sounds are just very different and if you're trying to re-create a specific style, you'll need to use sounds that are common in the genre.

But we're all for trying to invent your own thing by using uncommon sounds. Just don't expect to find everything you need all bundled up in one place with a bow on it. You'll need to collect sounds from a few different places and put them together yourself.

Where can I download drum samples for free?

Most sample pack companies offer free drum sample packs, including us.

What is the best free drum kit?

Even among paid sample packs, there's not a single perfect drum kit. A lot of what makes a sample pack good is what you're using it for. An amazing lo fi hip hop pack you got for free during a promotion might be pretty useless if you want to produce hard techno bangers.

Instead of searching for the best free kit (which doesn't exist) get a hard drive and make that your sample library. As you collect or make more and more samples for your library, start to organize it in a way that makes sense to you and allows you to quickly find what you need. A lot of people do this by genre.

What is the best website for drum samples?

Ours? Duh. Kidding, but not actually. We make things we would want to use in our own music. Plenty of other websites crank out as many samples as possible every day, so the best site would depend on what you need. If you want a huge marketplace, there are several of these run by corporations. If you want something smaller and more curated, look at smaller companies like us or even individual producers selling packs independently.

Is it illegal to sample drum breaks?

Yes, it is illegal to sample copyrighted material without permission. A lot of people do it anyway. A lot of great music has. been made with illegal samples. We're not going to tell you what to do, but its important you understand what you're getting into. The main risks with this are your music might get taken down from streaming platforms & music stores at any time, demonetized on platforms like YouTube, or hold back bigger career moves. For example, maybe a sync agent wants to use your tracks in a movie or TV show. Uncleared samples could kill that opportunity. This is why we sell royalty free sample packs. You buy the sounds once and then you're free to do what you please with them, as long as you aren't reselling them or giving away copies for free. We think this is more in line with how the artistic process actually works.

What is a ghost note in drums?

Ghost notes are quiet, less prominent notes in a beat that add feel and fill in the empty spaces. For example, you might have a drum pattern that hits on beats 2 and 4, but lots of quiet 16th notes between those at 1/3 of the volume or even less. You might not notice them immediately, but if you took them away it would be very obvious.

Do you want to create organic drums and samples when you write percussion parts, but can't figure out how other producers get this sound in their tracks? Today we're going to be exploring how you can achieve this using foley samples including our own foley sample pack, STONEWIRE.

Lets jump in!

What Exactly Are Organic Sounds In Music Production?

Generally speaking, organic textures and organic sounds refer to musical elements that were sourced from acoustic, natural sources as opposed to synthesized or electronic sources.

This can be anything from the sound of someone's fingernails scraping a guitar string to the sound of the wind moving through the trees to a full choir singing.

You'd be hard pressed to get the same answer from different producers, but many of them will specifically say that organic sounds allude to nature somehow. So, things like the sound of a rainstorm, the rhythms of the ocean waves crashing against the shore, or the ambient sounds of the rainforest.

What Organic Sounds Add To Music

Many electronic sound sources have a very precise, exact nature to them. Naturally sourced sounds tend to have lots of little imperfections, slight amounts of moving changes, resonances, bits of ambience that come and go, as well as lots of other small details that add a lot of interest.

You can emulate this to a degree with electronic instruments, but sometimes this is more more work because you need to tell the machine to make every little detail. An actual organic sound has all that detail already built into the sound without the producer needing to add anything.

Where To Find a Collection of Recorded Organic Sounds

There a lot & lots of collections of sounds for download if you look around but we're of course going to at least request you check out our foley pack STONEWIRE.

It is a library of sounds which is loaded full of one shots and percussion loops that are both processed and unprocessed. You get a large folder full of the raw foley sounds that include metal, wood, noisy, ambiences, tones, scrapes, crunches, shakers, and more all recorded entirely from real life sources. None of the raw sounds are synthesized and none of them around available anywhere else.

The more interesting part is we took these organic sounds and made drum beats and percussion loops with them. We applied very heavy levels of processing to the organic foley samples to make kicks, snares, textures, melodies, and basslines in a few different tempos.

How We Made Drum Beats From Organic Foley Samples

The way we were able to make a lot of electronic sounds from these organic textures in STONEWIRE was by applying lots of heavy effects processing to the starting samples.

Even though there are layers and layers of heavy effects on every sound, we're basically treating the starting sound like you would an oscillator on a synth and transforming it. If you go into the Ableton Live 11 set that comes with the pack, you can even see the complete effects chains we used to make every sound.

If you go through these effects chains step by step, you can start to see not only how to replicate this process yourself with your own sounds, but also hear the relationship between the starting product and end result. The cool part is even with extremely heavy processing the final samples retain some of the "organicness" of the starting samples.

Summary

Human being tend to connect with the natural and constant variations that are found in acoustically sourced sounds because that is what the ear is used to detecting. Electronic and other synthesized sounds can stick out to use in a bad because because they tend to be much more exact, precise, and unchanging than anything found in nature.

Although we can fake a lot of the subtle modulations present in a truly organic sound, this is a lot of work because a synthesizer or computer needs explicit instructions for every single thing that needs to happen. While this can be a fun challenge, sometimes for the sake of efficiency and maintaining inspiration in a music production environment, it's just simpler, easier, and more intuitive to source sounds directly from their natural source.

Our collection STONEWIRE is a foley sample pack that offers a diverse range of real-life recorded sounds. There are lots of variations on metallic, wooden, noise, ambient, and percussive sounds that are ready to use as is in a music track.

STONEWIRE also is a working example of how organic textures and percussion can be transformed into extremely electronic sounding musical elements, while maintaining the organic quality that makes them compelling in the first place.

By applying extensive effects processing, organic foley samples are creatively morphed into drums, melodies, and basslines, showcasing how these natural sounds can be foundational in their raw form and also serve as sources for innovative, processed audio in music production.

We hope that you check them out and consider picking up the pack!

If you plan on purchasing or making your own foley sounds or a foley sample pack for music production purposes, this article is here to give you some ideas for the kinds of sounds you should consider.

Some of these ideas are things you can create almost anywhere, but a few of them require some planning, preparation, and setup.

However we think that they're all musically interesting. You'll be able to use them as featured sound effects in a track, as well as subtle ambient sounds that just sit in the background and add a vibe to your music.

That said, let's jump into the actual sounds you need to be making.

Tonal (Pitched) Sound Effects

Technically, many mallet instruments like Marimba, Xylophone, or even a Gyil (which we made into an Ableton Sampler instrument and currently available to download) are all pitched wood sound effects arranged in chromatic or pentatonic scales to make them more convenient to play.

But there are plenty more wooden objects you can sample and pitch up or down with software. If you listen carefully, even items like a drum stick or serving spoon have a subtle pitch to them.

If you carefully notch out the overtones with an equalizer, you can exaggerate the tonal characteristics of these objects to make instrument-like sound effects that don't exist in real life.

You might need a couple of instances of the equalizer to get enough of a difference between the tonal component of the sounds and the surface noise, but there's nothing stopping you from doing this. There are no rules!

Transient Noises

Basically anything can be made into a percussion instrument, as long as it isn't super reverberant or sustained.

Plenty of music in the experimental/IDM/glitch family uses very short, chopped sounds to program as percussion. This can be as simple as literal blips of noise. Straight white noise with an envelope of varying length actually makes a decent hi hat sound.

So there is no reason you can't make field recordings of lots of different types of wood, chop that up, and sequence it.

Some ideas for getting a variety of sounds out of the wooden objects you have around you:

• use different kinds of wood

• use different size objects from a large desk to a small toy

• "activate" it with different things. Your hands, a drum stick, a closed fist, and open palm, slide things across the surface, strike it, there is an infinite number of possibilities.

• Place your microphones in different places. On or off axis, over or under the sound source, or even experiment with multiple microphones. You could for example put microphones both very close to capture the direct sound effects as well as very far to incorporate some ambient room sound.

Creaks

This is another type of wood sound effect that everyone will know and comes up in foley sound effects libraries a lot.

Basically two dry pieces of wood rubbing together to create the distinct squeaking sound we all know. Your best bet to record these is probably to record it from the source. Old doors, floorboard, furniture, that kind of thing.

From a music production standpoint you can of course sequence the sound as is which will make it more easy to identify. Maybe.

Tracks like "Alberto Balsalm" by Aphex Twin come to mind which contains a sample that most people think is the squeak of a chair sliding across the floor. According to Richard D. James it was sampled by "opening a lid on an ammunition box with a wireless microphone inside".

But RDJ is also one of the greatest trolls to ever do it so who knows if that's actually true or not.

We would also suggest that you try to make your samples also sound completely alien too. Throw it through a 10 second reverb, resample that, then chop it up with a granular plugin.

Because this type of sound is fundamentally kind of vague (as Richard so masterfully shows us in both his music and interviews) leaning into this quality is interesting musically and could lead you to fruitful places.

Wood Surface Noise

Surface noise for us is simply the sound of one surface moving across another. This can be as simple as sliding your hand over a wooden railing for instant presto free wood sound effects.

But you can certainly go past this by engaging wooden surfaces with any number of other objects that might resonate themselves. An example of this would be sliding a glass or ceramic mug across a wooden desk surface. You have a could options to sample something like this for musical purposes.

You could place mics on the desk, glass, under the desk in the glass, or both. Every little bit of roughness that the glass hits on the surface will excite it a bit too. You can decide later how much of that resonance you want to incorporate into your sound design.

Breaking, Cutting, and Cracking Wood Sound Effects

This is the more fun stuff to make! It's messy! And loud! What's not to love there?

If you're cutting wood with power tools or even things like hand saws, you're going to catch mostly the noise of the tools which is not without its uses. But things like the sound of a piece of wood slowly cracking can make for a very helpful layer when making risers or other transition sound effects.

It's entirely possible to make transition sounds completely with synthesizers or software tools, but since computers are involved, sometimes there is a lot of preciseness to the sound that just feels cold and stuff. Layering a sound like wood cracking can really change that because there is so much change and motion built into the sound as it is without you needing to do anything to it.

And of course you take these kinds of samples and affect them with digital effects if you're looking for something more otherwordly sounding that isn't as obviously a sample you made in the garage.

Fire and Burning Wood Sound Effects

The sound of wood burning makes for excellent ambience. It has something about it that approaches the same sonic territory as vinyl crackle from a record that also feels very warm and cozy.

You can also experience with individual pieces of wood burning as opposed to a large fireplace which will have more of a roaring quality to it.

If you want to really get adventurous, some people are bold enough to explore sampling techniques that are actually destructive to their gear.

Whenever you're working with fire sounds, you have to deal with the issue of getting mics close enough to catch the sound you want without melting those mics. However there are some crazy folks out there who will do things like throwing a cheap contact mic into a fire and recording the sound of it slowly dying.

If you do this, we're not responsible for what comes of it. Only for the bold who are willing to do it entirely at your own risk!

On the flip side, we met a guy on the subway once who used to freeze contact mics inside ice and record the melting sounds, but that's a story for another day.

Wrapping Up

You can do a lot with something as simple as sticking to only wood sound effects. Sometimes this limitation actually inspires a lot more creativity than if you gave yourself free reign to do anything.

This was certainly our experience making our STONEWIRE foley sample pack which of course includes plenty of wood sound effects. Unfortunately we had to deal with the limitation of not being able to destroy thing in the store, but maybe that's good territory to explore for the next volume.

The STONEWIRE foley sample pack specifically uses many metallic sounds because they're one of the most flexible kinds of sounds in music production. They can be used in many different contexts and run the full spectrum form trashy and noisy to beautiful and pure.

Today we're going to talk about how they're organized in STONEWIRE and some ideas for using metallic sounds in your productions.

What Makes Metallic Sounds Useful In Music Production

Metallic sounds are useful in music production because they are very flexible depending on how they are engaged and the type of sound being used.

Consider how metallic sounds can be very harsh and downright creepy. Think horror movie sound effects like a bowed waterphone. They can also generate large amounts of more pleasing white noise like frequencies like a good crash cymbal. And they can of course generate very beautiful and pure, sine wave like tones that have a melodic character to them. Think of how clear the pitch of a tuning fork is!

And if they are EQed properly they can cut right to the front of a mix on their own as well as when you layer them on top of other elements.

The Primary Metallic Sound Folders in STONEWIRE

In our foley sample pack, STONEWIRE, there are several kinds of metallic sounds for you to experiment with that were made from objects you would find in a well stocked hardware store.

Metals

The obvious place to start here would be the metals folder.

There are both long and short variations here that tend to be on the noiser and less tonal side of the frequency spectrum. These types of sound are very helpful for making or juicing up percussion sounds that you need to really propel a track along.

The closest traditional instrument would the hihat on a drumset.

Screws and Nails

Screws and nails are obviously made out of metal and the sounds here include a lot of shaker-like sounds that are basically shaking a box of fasteners.

There are also sounds in here that a technically big bolts, but there are interesting because they do have a more tonal pitch center to them while being very bright. So by pitching them in a sampler you can make very cutting melodic sounds with these.

Tones

There are of course other obviously metallic sounds in the pack like various chains, locks opening and closing, small machine running, but in the tones folder there are more pure pitched sounds made from things like paint cans, air compressor tanks of varying sizes, as well as pieces of metal railing.

Metallic Sounds That Are Usable In Different Genres

STONEWIRE is not the kind of pack you would use in specific genre of music. We didn't want to make metallic sounds for Drum and Bass or Lo Fi nail sounds or something. We wanted sounds with all kinds of texture in them because in combination with other quality samples they're going to be useful in all kinds of music that require interesting textures.

Objects That Sound Metallic & Harsh vs Resonant

We touched on this earlier that there are a variety of metallic sounds in the various folders of STONEWIRE but the most important thing in getting started quickly with them would be to grab a few different kinds of these metallic sounds when you sit down to work.

Open up your DAW or sampler and drag in a few of each class of sound and see what you can make. This is exactly how we made the bonus loops that come with the downloadable Ableton Live set with all of our sound design chains.

Choose a few harsh sounds which might be good for making percussion loops but also bring in some more resonant sounds that you can pitch down to make things like kicks with or play on your sampler to make melodies.

Thinking In Terms of Frequency: Where does a sound sit?

One of the keys to working with metallic sounds and anything other type to be honest are always being aware of what frequency range a sound is working in. The following sections are going to get into some more technical ideas for you to experiment with.

If you don't already have a good internal sense of where a sound sits on the frequency spectrum or where you think it should, we find that it's helpful to pull up your DAWs analyzer plugin and over time this will improve your sound design.

It will train you to start paying attention to what parts of a track have space to put a sound so you'll be reaching for the right sounds that work more immediately rather than having to try a bunch of things manually to guess and test what might work.

The Simple vs Complex Sound Continuum

We tend to think of all sounds as sitting on a spectrum with simple sounds on one side and super complex ones on the other. So on one end you have basic sine waves with no harmonics and on the other, crazy sounds that swirl and chance and have a zillion effects doing things to make all that happen.

This framework can be a real lifesaver when you're trying to find the right sound.

It is exactly what it sounds like. You simply ask yourself, "am I looking for a simple sound here or a complicated one?"

How do you know which to reach for? The correct answer is often the opposite of what is already going on in the track.

In other words, if you have a very busy track with 50 elements and tons of modulation making everything swirl around the stereo field but it still feels like it needs something, adding another complicated sound with lots of motion and change is probably not what it needs.

There's a good shot you need something basic and easy to understand to help the listener feel more anchored and pull things together.

The opposite is also true. If your track is kind of basic and feels like nothing interesting is happening, then that's probably the time to break out all the really intense sound design to add some interest to what is happening.

Crafting Metallic Sounds: Techniques and Approaches

Combining Different Frequencies

If you listen to the STONEWIRE loops and explore the Ableton set where we did all of our sound design you might notice how we deliberately chose to balance out the frequency spectrum.

There are always some low sounds to anchor things, some higher sounds to add polish and sizzle, some relatively static sounds that don't change very much as well as more complex sounds that change a lot with very long effects chains. We're often using a few layers of LFOs as well to create certain modulation effects.

Don't be afraid to do things like trigger and LFO with another LFO that is modulated by an envelope. You can achieve some very interesting effects this way!

Tips for Incorporating Metallic Sounds in Your Music

Exploring unconventional metallic sounds can give your music an exciting edge. Take our sounds and use them as is if you want, that's what they are designed for. But don't forget to carve out some time to do some experimentation independently to see what you can come up with.

Sometimes the best results are basically just happy accidents! We had a lot of these when making STONEWIRE, especially when using granular effects which tend to be particularly interesting when working with metallic sounds.

Balancing Metallic Elements with Other Sounds

This maybe goes without saying, but contrasting all the metallic sounds with something else in addition will only make your music more interesting. Try incorporating synthesized sources, actual instruments, or foley samples made with other materials like wood or plastic.

Summary

Recorded metallic sounds are a powerful element to have in your sample library collection because they can be some of the most flexible sounds. They can do everything from eerie, horror movie like ambiance to pure and lush melodic tones or a combination of the two.

Our pack STONEWIRE includes a lot of raw foley samples that are designed to be flexible and we additionally include processed loops and one shots so you can see what's possible with them. If you use Ableton Live, you can ever download and look inside the session where we did our sound design to see exactly how we processed the foley sounds.

When it comes to improving your sound selection, a basic mental framework like categorizing your sounds and track somewhere on a continuum from simple to complex can go a long way in helping you pick the right sounds right away when you're producing.

Frequently Asked Questions About Metallic Sounds

What is a metallic sound?

A metallic sound can be make in several ways like activating an object by striking it or making it gradually build up resonance, like if you were to bow it with a violin bow.

What is a metallic voice?

A metallic vocal quality is typically characterized as having a sharp, bright tone that often results from an increase in the fundamental frequency. Untrained singers or the layman may mistakenly describe this as a nasal voice due to the rise in pitch.

How Can I Synthesize Metallic Sounds Instead of Recording Them?

Some of what gives metallic sounds their bright, distinct quality is non-integer harmonics, usually higher up in the frequency spectrum. FM synthesis or physical modeling techniques that utilize feedback loop algorithms tend to be very good at approximating the high harmonics that you hear when activating an actual piece of metal.

(When we first released STONEWIRE a few people even asked if we used FM to make the sounds, but we did not. It's all recorded foley samples of actual objects)

How can I create a metallic sound in my music?

As we mentioned you can incorporate metallic sounds by using foley recordings like STONEWIRE , synthesize metallic sounds using something like FM synthesis or physical modeling. And of course you can combine these techniques! You could loud one of the metallic sounds from STONEWIRE into Ableton Sampler, then modulate it with FM (this is a stock feature) to make an actual metallic sound have even more harmonics and it will have even more bite and brightness!

If you've never experimented with using mechanical sound effects, foley samples of machines, or tried to manipulate these kinds of field recordings for musical purposes, you might be surprised at where it takes you creatively.

You will train your ears to listen for interesting qualities in sounds that you might have missed before, learn a lot about recording that will carry over into how you record traditional instruments, and work your creative muscles by being forced to think outside the box with what a sound could be and not what it is.

Let's jump in the specifics of how to get started working with mechanical sound!

Finding good mechanical sound effects

Mechanical sounds can be very helpful in sound design because they tend to loop well, have a complexity to them, and certain machines being fairly noisy are good candidates for manipulation with different filtering techniques.

Things like clicks, pops, rattles, and whirring sounds are pretty common in a good sfx library. One quality you should look for that isn't talked about as much is sounds that let you create unusual sonic perspective. You can take something that sounds absolutely huge in real life and make it sound pretty small as a sound effect.

Similarly, you can sometimes take a sound from small, relatively quiet machines like tiny servo motors, then record and process them in a way that makes them sound absolutely gigantic by placing recording mics very close, using EQ boosts in the bass and low mids, and lots of compression later.

The key is to mostly be on the lookout for interesting textures and always be thinking about what a sound can be not necessarily what it is right now.

How To Properly Record Machinery Sounds

We wouldn't obsess too much over the perfect set of mics or the perfect room. When recording machines you usually don't have a ton of options to treat the room, you're often recording in the environment where the machines are used.

Good mics like a flat set of Earthworks are a good choice, but sometimes mics that color the sound can be interesting too. When recording machine textures for sound design and sound effects, we're a lot more concerned about things being interesting instead of technically perfect.

Sometimes the wonky screwed up recording is WAY more interesting than the perfectly EQed, pristine version.

You can do tons with a simple and cheap field recorder or even just using your phone's recording app.

Mic Positioning: Close Mics vs Room Mics

Sometimes putting a mic really far away from the machine source is good because you're capturing both the machine sound as a whole as well as the resonance and ambient sound of the room. There is certainly a place for this.

However, particularly with larger devices, it can be exciting to try placing mics very close and move them around to different parts of the machine. Depending on the microphone position, you can often find significantly different sounds on different parts of the machine. They're exactly like musical instruments in this way.

You can also experiment with multiple mics in different places. If you're going to do this, it's helpful to have a recording device that can invert phase for situations where you have mics on opposite sides of the device.

Eliminating Room Sound Completely

As we mentioned, there is certainly a place for recording machine sounds that are distant and incorporating room ambience.

But what about completely ditching room ambience to see what that gets you? This will take things to a completely different place. One way to achieve this after the fact with software is to use de-reverb plugins like those offered by iZotope's Ozone Suite. This will introduce aliasing when applied heavily.

But remember these kind of recordings for music production and sound design are a lot more concerned with interesting sounds and not perfect sounds. Maybe the aliasing sounds cool! If it does, why not use it? There's no reason or rule not to.

Another technique is to eliminate the room sound at the time of recording. In addition to using very close mic placement, you can go even further by using contact mics and placing them on different parts of the machines you are recording. This will yield basically no room sound and can sometimes pick up sounds on the machine you didn't even realize were there.

If you want to try the contact mic method, try recording the internal sounds of the computer you already use. Between the fans, keyboard, and various electric signals rattling around inside it, there's a whole world of unusual sounds inside your computer that you can record...back into your computer for further processing.

Multi-Microphone Setups

The ideal setup if you can manage it and don't want to comprise is to use all the techniques mentioned with a multitrack recorder.

If you want to maximize the number of sound effects you can make from one session with a machine, you could place ambient mics at a distance in 2-3 places. Over the device as a stereo pair and a 3rd mic as far away as the room will allow is plenty.

Then, you can place movable close mics near interesting parts of the machine as well as take a contact mic and move that around various places on the machine to see what kinds of less obvious mechanical sound effects you can capture.

Creating Unique Sound Effects From Your Machine Recordings

Now that you have a concept of how to approach making recordings of machine sounds, the next goal should be to use them to create extraordinary sound effects.

Start by experimenting with pitch alteration or changing time rate. One cool detail of using mics with a very high frequency response over 20kHz is you can take recorded sounds way way above what humans can hear and pitch them down into a range we can hear. There's a lot of interesting stuff up there you might not have realized you recorded!

You can also of course filter, modulate, distort or apply granular effects to you sounds to transform them into something completely different, then just write music with whatever comes out of that process. This is exactly what we did with our foley sample pack, STONEWIRE.

Research and Explore DIY Devices

Another approach to take when trying to create intriguing sounds from machine recordings is to try your hand at building odd machines explicitly for the purpose of recording unique sounds.

A common version of this amongst composers is to attach resonant objects to a metal or wood box of some kind then find interesting ways of activating parts of the "machine". Everything from plucking it to striking, bowing, or breaking it are up for grabs! There really are no rules as long as what you're hearing is compelling to your artistic sensibilities.

Layering Sounds and Transforming Them With Signal Processing

Most people tend to think of audio effects as a refinement or modification of what is already happening.

But what if you thought of your effects as a kind of synthesizer instead? The starting recording is effectively the "oscillator" section and the effects you add after it transform the sound into it's final result.

Even with the very basic types of effects like changing their pitch, stretching time, filtering, distortion and modulation effects you can radically reshape a sound into something completely different. With most modern DAWs it is also very easy to layer multiple effects chains and trigger then like you would a traditional synthesizer so the possibilities here are endless.

You can experiment with layering sounds in difference frequency ranges or by different levels of activity and rhythm.

What To Know About Capturing Various Machinery Sizes

The size of the machine you plan to record can have an influence on what equipment you use.

Smaller devices have the challenge of it sometimes being difficult to fit microphones in the places you'd like. Very large machines sometimes are hard to capture in their totality if you're dealing with something the size of a bus or boat motor.

For smaller devices, capturing all their detail and nuance is best achieved with contact mics and small maneuverable mics that are physically smaller. We like Earthworks mics a lot for this purpose because they're small and very neutral sounding mics.

Working with larger devices might simply require more cables that you'd normally have on hand. Beyond that it may be valuable to have mics with a few different polar patterns and roll offs. Larger machines can produce huge amounts of low end sometimes, so having the option to switch to an Omni polar pattern to reduce proximity effects or engage a bass roll off switch can be helpful if excess bass frequencies are messing up an otherwise interesting recording.

Should You Use Downloadable Mechanical Sound Collections?

There are tons of these and you can even include a decent chunk of our foley sample pack STONEWIRE in this category.

If you find a collection of sound effects that you like and it's royalty free, we don't see a reason not to use it most of the time. The only thing that would make us think twice is if it was not royalty fre.

One thing to consider with free collections of mechanical sound effects is that lots of other people are likely to have them too, so you should have a plan for making these sounds your own with how you process them. You don't want to use unprocessed source material that's exactly the same as what others are using with no variations.

Summary

Capturing, processing and looping mechanical sound effects offer a lot of possibilities for creating your own sound effects and doing very musical sound design.

Getting the perfect recording if mechanical sound effects is a lot less important than capturing interesting sounds. This is why with even a phone or cheap field recorder, you can get achieve surprisingly good results. Interesting beats perfect every time.

That said, if you can make recordings at a high technical level, you should try to do that. Use different microphones, experiment with different placements and keep an open mind. Sometimes really strange mic placement will yield amazing results.

Then like we did with the STONEWIRE foley sample pack, you can use modern plugins and processing to transform these recordings into a unique collection of sounds.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes mechanical sound effects important in sound design?

Sometimes the best sound design ideas can come from unlikely sources, for example by taking a traditionally unmusical sound and finding a way to make it work in a musical setting. Mechanical sounds in particular can be used as percussive one shot samples, loops or even melodic elements. They will have a different texture and character than a traditional instrument, so they can be a good way to come up with new ideas.

How does the placement of the microphone affect the sound recording of machinery?

Microphone placement in any setting makes a huge difference whether you're recording a typewriter or a robot or a guitar. All the same principles of audio recording apply. If you move your mics further away, the sound will tend to get darker and capture more room ambience. Positioning mics closer or using contact mics will capture more detail and high end. In some cases you can also experiment with the proximity effects of cardioid microphones which will enhance the bass frequencies.

What are the benefits of using multiple microphones in recording machinery sounds?

Multitracking machines and industrial sounds is a great option if your recording setup can support it because it gives you the most flexibility to manipulate sounds once you are back in the studio. You can use the mics in isolation, you have alternative options if there was any issues with any of the individual mics, and you have the option of more sophisticated mixing techniques like automating the levels of your various mics to achieve interesting spatial effects.

Today we're going to be talking about where to source percussion samples, percussion loops, and what to look for in percussion sample packs in general.

So much of being a capable producer is starting with the right raw ingredients. But there is also the added challenge of doing this without stirring up legal headaches or software problems that might limit how you distribute your music or monetize it.

We will be looking at common sources of samples for both professional and hobby producers and digging in to how to make the most of them, as well as when it makes sense to use each source.

Where do professional producers get their percussion samples?

This is a big question and if you ask 10 producers, you'll get 10 different answers.

Depending on the genre of music you work on and the circle of music producers you're interested in, some people are very open about their sources and others are very secretive.

There are basically 4 categories of sources we can think of where a producer might get their percussion samples:

1. Records

2. Internet Media, like YouTube videos or popular podcasts

3. Percussion sample packs for sample sites like us or our competitors

4. Musicians or DIY sources

We're going to examine each of these in more detail and we'd advise that you explore all of them. They all have pros and cons. Both from a musical perspective, a legal perspective, and a workflow perspective.

So let's jump in and see what each of these sources have to offer.

Digging for Gold: Percussion Samples from Vinyl Records

Digging for percussion samples in vinyl is a true art. Documentaries have been made about how various producers approach this, especially in hip hop and related genres. Going to the record store to dig is practically like going to church for a lot producers.

If you have an open mind, you can get every kind of sound you would ever need from just a record store if you have the patience to look and listen to many different kinds of recordings.

You'll find drums, cymbals, bells, congas, bongos, one shots, loops, textures, and many other instruments all at the record store.

When you hear something you think you can use, you need to dub the sounds from vinyl into your sampler or DAW where you can work on it.

The one drawback to sampling from vinyl: you might attract lawyers & repel money

These sounds are not royalty free!

If you do something like sample the surface noise of the record you're in the clear, but as soon as you start lifting drum breaks or synths or any of the copyrighted material, you invite legal scrutiny.

Some people don't care and just figure it out later. That works, but it can be expensive. Danny Brown did this on Atrocity Exhibition and later said in interviews he was in debt after the record came out because it cost him $70,000 to clear all the samples on the album.

I'm a small producer, it doesn't matter who I sample

For a smaller music producer, odds are pretty low that someone spends the money to sue you if there's no money to take. But it can still ruin your fun if the music gets taken down from streaming platforms.

A bigger concern for a smaller artist would be that you lose out on opportunities. A label might not want to deal with releasing an albums full of uncleared samples and it will make the music much harder to pitch for sync licensing, which can be a significant source of income.

Many producers make their first real money from sync well before they have a fanbase or reputation, so you don't want to wall yourself out of this in the beginning.

Creative Sampling from Non-Musical Internet Sources

Another approach that's become popular in recent years is to sample more unconventional sources that are not music. Things like podcasts, popular YouTube or TikTok videos, or sound effects like iPhone notifications.

These can but fun and more culturally relevant if you're trying to reference a viral trend that a lot of people are going to be familiar with. These also have a very difference sonic character because you are dealing with digital sources of audio, not analog sounds like you would get from vinyl or tape.

However, you're still dealing with potential copyright issues since you're still borrowing from sources that are not your intellectual property.

A key difference is if you are sampling from a YouTube creator, it may be easier to get in touch with the rights holder and get explicit permission to use the sample as well as negotiate a price if they want to be paid for the use.

Navigating Sample Pack Companies

This is where we work to help you. Sample pack companies ideally make the process of sourcing great sounds without a legal headache simple and easy.

These are some of the principles we try to incorporate in our packs like STONEWIRE, VISION MAGNET, GRITMATTER and the others. However, even if you decide to use a product from one of the many other sample pack companies out there, we think these are factors you should keep in mind.

Insist On Good Sounds

This should go without saying, but you should curate your sample library like your record collection.

Insist on quality sounds you can use in many ways. Samples should sound good and be well organized. If you find free sample packs that sound good to you, use them.

But don't fill your hard drive with mediocre sounds because they're free. A lot of people just hoard free stuff then can't figure out why they're having trouble finishing tracks.

A well recorded, versatile collection of sounds you can use over and over again is worth paying a few bucks for.

Think about cost per use, not cost.

The more you use a sample pack, the more the "cost per use" will decline. Say you buy a few percussion sample packs. One cost you $30 and you used it 2 times. Your cost per use is $15 ($30/2 uses).

But say one of your other percussion sample packs was $40 and more usable. So you end up making 60 beats with it that year. The cost per use of that pack is $0.67 ($40/60 uses).

The sample pack with the higher upfront cost is actually cheaper in the long run if you use it more often. So you should always consider how much you'll be using a collection of sounds as well as your immediate needs.

Look For Royalty Free Sample Packs Only

We think the royalty free model is the cleanest way to do it for everybody involved.

You pay for a sample pack, download it, then you're good to go. If we want to make more money we need to find more customers and make more sounds for you to use.

What To Watch Out For In Sample Packs

Hidden Royalty Splits

Not every company or producer who releases a sample pack does it in a royalty free way. Always read the terms of use. For example, many sample packs will actually require that you split royalties with its creator if you release anything made with the pack.

Don't assume anything, always read the fine print!

In our opinion, this undermines the whole point of a sample pack by creating another administrative headache to deal with, which frankly music already has too much of.

Stolen Sounds

There are plenty of subreddits and sample pack sites that either sell or give away pirated sounds that once again defeat the purpose of a good sample pack.

You want a collection of usable sounds that you can use without having to worry about, like you would an instrument.

Overused Sounds

Sounds that are widely available for free, made from stock synth presets, or ship with major DAWs tend to become very overused.

Even if you love the stock Apple loops that ship with Logic Pro for example, you have to remember that literally every other user of that software will have those loops so they're going to pop up in all kinds of other contexts. And this will include other types of media you probably don't want to be associated with outside of music. We're not going to name names, but use your imagination.

Rolling Your Own Samples: The DIY Way

Lots of producers get their samples the way we do at Glitch Magic. They make them! Either by recording things like foley sounds and manipulating them in the studio to fit their music or by collaborating with musicians they like.

This is something everybody should at least be a little involved in because it will help you to find your own voice. Think of it as curating a private sample library. Yes, use plugins you like and sample packs that inspire you, but you should also be using some sounds that nobody else on Earth has except for you.

Getting Started Making Your Own Samples

If you've never done this before, you can start by making a little bit of everything. Even if your first batch of homebrew samples isn't super usable, you will learn a lot about what goes into good samples and it will elevate your production.

Set a goal to make 30-50 one shots. Find some objects around the house you can turn into percussion samples. Make some "drums" out of thuds and taps against ordinary objects. Jingle your house keys to make some off kilter rhythms to sample.

Take all of those sounds and try to make some interesting loops or even full tracks with them.

Even if it takes you a few tries to really nail your own percussion samples, there is no way this doesn't improve your skills as a music producer if you've never done this before.

Something nobody talks about is this is also a great way to network with other producers. 50 sounds is not a huge collection of sounds so it might be tough to sell as a product, but if you meet a producer you want to work with this kind of thing makes a nice olive branch to hold out as a show of willingness to collaborate.

Percussion Samples Demystified (We Hope!)

Hopefully you have a better idea of where each of these samples will fit into your workflow as a producer in a way that helps elevate what you do.

And of course since we offer royalty free sample packs that we built for our own production needs, we hope you check them out. We offer percussion sample packs, foley sounds, synth loops and samples, as well as some other toys that we hope inspire you!

Since there is usually some confusion about what exactly foley is, where is comes from, and what samples to look for or make for music production, we wanted to talk about it!

More importantly, what goes into a great collection or library of foley sounds.

In a music production sense, the short answer here is a solid foley sample pack is going to be fairly big, well organized, have a variety of identifiable and out there sounds, and most importantly interesting sounds.

But this is sometimes confused with foley sound effects for films and visual media, so lets explore why that is and how foley can enhance what you do in the studio.

What Are Foley Sounds & Where Did The Name Come From?

Since this is a topic with a lot of jargon around it that confuses people, we should get some definitions out of the way so you do not get confused when we talk about foley sounds in a music production context.

This is opposed to foley sounds in a film context which is really where it comes from.

Who and what is a Foley artist?

The term "Foley" originates from a guy named Jack Foley who invented a lot of the techniques a modern filmmaker uses to add sound effects to a movie. He would record sounds to picture using various props to enhance the film experience in post production.

What do foley artists create exactly? Most people would call what they do sound effects. Everything from the egg crackle of the Velociraptor hatching in Jurassic Park to the Luke Skywalker's footsteps and light sabre in Star Wars.

Foley In Film production Vs. Music Production

Now that you understand why foley is called foley, what about music?

Over time, recorded sound effects used in film started to become synonymous with recordings made from different types of objects or environments in general.

Sometimes foley sounds in music are referred to as a found sound or field recording. Basically anything counts, whether its the hum of a tube television, a crumpled ice cream cone, cars driving, or the sound of footsteps.

Unlike in a film where foley artists recreate sounds that match what they see on screen and often record with the film running and perform the sound to picture, in a strictly musical context, artists may or may not be recording in a studio.

In many cases its productive to get out of the studio, do your recordings and then explore those sounds in the context of the studio.

Why use foley sound effects?

You may be here wondering what all the hype around foley sounds is at all. Why would you want to use everyday sounds or something like breaking glass in your music?

We can think of a bunch of good reasons and this is why we went as far as making a fairly extensive foley sample pack ourselves.

Its cool.

A lot of music is about playing with expectations and referencing other things with sounds. So folding in recognizable sound effects can be a creatively exciting thing to do.

You can mix individual sounds with foley sounds in a variety of ways.

This can mean using foley as it's own musical element as a replacement for a traditional percussion sound, or layering it on top. For example, adding the crackle of footsteps on leaves or crinkling paper on top of a snare can add a bite and texture you may not be able to achieve any other way.

Ambient sounds.

Instead of using vinyl crackle or other commonly used noises for ambience, you can experiment with more unorthodox sources.

Synthesis.

Sometimes taking a foley sound and completely mangling it with effects or granular synthesis can be really, really interesting. Because you're starting with an odd, quirky sound source, this can sometimes lead to results that you'd never synthesize with a more traditional FM or subtractive synthesis method.

Foley Sample Packs

Since you now know that foley sounds are used in both music and film in different ways, it makes sense that you're also going to find foley sample packs that cater to both types of scenario.

From here on, we will be focused on foley sounds in a strictly musical context, but by its nature it will overlap into some of the film stuff.

That's not important. What matters most is what makes a collection of these sounds good whether its a freebie product, a paid download, or something you're building yourself for your own personal use.

Foley Recording vs. Regular recording

Usually when recording for film foley sound effects or recording traditional instruments, you're trying to capture sound that is realistic, high quality and low noise.

The modern listener expects a relatively high auditory experience.

However, when you're creating foley recordings, the standard of what is good audio quality can be different.

Sometimes high fidelity is good, but in our opinion it is much more important that it's an interesting sound because you're not creating a final product. You're creating an input that is probably going to be manipulated quite a bit in sound editing software.

So the important point here is a solid foley sample pack is going to have a reasonable amount of processing to get the sounds ready for you to use, but you don't want things to be overcooked.

For our STONEWIRE pack, we decided to do both! You get both the minimally processed sounds as well as plenty of loops and one shots with heavy processing and you can decide what you need as you work.

How to create Foley sounds

Often foley sounds are simply sounds captured as they are in their environment. This can be a great place to start from.

Alternatively, you make build dedicated noisemakers in a foley studio and record sounds that don't really exist in other places. We recommend having a mix of both on your sample drive because you never know where the next track idea might come from.

If you're determined to make these sounds yourself, the best place to start is with a field recorder or even you phone. Just start making sound with things in your environment, take the recordings back into the studio and see if you you can make something happen with them.

What are the different types of foley effects?

The real answer here is there is a infinite amount of foley sounds.

But for the sake of organizing your hard drive and being able to get to what you need when you need it, we find you really need some kind of labeling or tagging system.

Labeling might not be the most exciting topic, but its really important for having a usable library.

If everything is buried in an unorganized way, this really pulls back the momentum in the studio when you have an idea but need to flip into being the company IT guy to find the sound you're looking for.

Good Labeling

For STONEWIRE, we needed a system that would be compatible with everybody's computers so we chose to organize everything into folders with 18 categories.

Some of them are descriptive of the sound like "tone" "bump" "crunch" and others are are descriptive of the thing we made it with, usually the material. For example there are folders for wood, ceramic, locks, surface sounds, and metallic sounds.

Making The Best Foley Sound Library We Could

To wrap this up whether you decide to check out our pack STONEWIRE, try someone else's or take a crack at building your own the biggest qualities we look for in a solid foley sample pack are:

1. Variety of interesting sounds (not necessarily the highest quality recordings)

2. Good labeling system

3. A balance of realistic with uncategorizable sounds

4. Decent size. Having a lot of options to choose from can be helpful when you're looking for just the right sound or need a couple variations of the same thing for multisampling.

STONEWIRE

Of course we hope you check out our sample pack STONEWIRE!

We did everything we could to make it everything we would want in a pack.

It is a foley sample pack consisting of over 1,500+ individual sounds recorded inside a large American home improvement retail store and carefully sculpted in our studio. It also includes processed and unprocessed one-shots and loops with our sound design.

If you use Ableton Live 11.3 or higher, we even include the session we did all of our sound design in so you can see exactly how we approach doing sound design with foley in a hands on way. Everything is done using stock Ableton 11 Suite Effects and Max for Live patches so you can simply toggle on or off each step in the effects chain to see how things work.

Do you keep hearing about foley sounds and and wonder what all the hype is? Or maybe you've seen them used in music production but are confused...is this a film technique or a music technique?

The truth is it is both and in this article we're going to demystify both as well as get into some things you can do today to start using recorded foley sounds in your music.

It will elevate your productions and help you stand out with a unique voice, so lets get into it!

What Are Foley Sounds In Music Production?

The term foley comes from the film industry. A foley artist is generally the person who records sound effects that enhance the film's experience, named after Jack Foley who invented a lot of the techniques.

Door creaks, the snap of a match lighting, footsteps, a big impact, the click of a lock, or the zing of someone sliding down a rope are all examples from movies where sound effects really enhance what you're seeing on the screen.

However, in music, foley tends to overlap with what some people refer to a field recordings or found sounds.

This basically means sounds of not traditionally musical things you record outside the studio in the world somewhere. The clink of a coffee cup, the ambient noise of an airport, the sounds of a contact mic pressed to your computers fan motor—really whatever you want.

Why Would You Use Foley In your Productions?

Now that you know what foley is in a music context, why would you want to use this?

Simple. These kinds of samples add a certain texture and vibe to a track that can be really really tough to re-create with traditional music instruments.

Many sounds that are "bad" by standard definitions can be really interesting musically in the context of other things. A bright, clean sound appears more pure if you put it next to something covered in dirt.

You could for example, use a foley sample of actual dirt. How would you synthesize that? Sounds like a pain in the ass. It's easier to just go outside where dirt is abundant and bring a microphone along.

This kind of sound effect can be deeply personal because no two people are going to approach it the same way. This is a great quality to fold into your work that makes it more you.

How To Record Foley Sound Effects

Need Free Foley Sound Effects? Making Them Might Not Be As Hard As You Think!

Can you use a beautiful high end tube microphone to capture your foley sounds in pristine, perfect form? Yes of course you can.

Can you instead use your dying iPhone that now has a very unique polar pattern due to it accumulating 6 years of pocket lint over the internal microphone? Also yes. Sometimes to greater levels of success.

The second option might actually be cooler because its more quirky and hard to reproduce. If you can make it work, it will help make your sounds more unique to you and your music. And don't forget that you can do a lot with modern software to remove noise and shape the tone of the sound.

Think Like A Foley Sounds Effects Artist

If you lookup video of how a film foley artist works, it's remarkably low-tech a lot of the time.

Need to sound like a bird flying away? Get some feathers. A gate opening? Get some other rusty metal that squeaks.

Where it gets more interesting is when foley artists need to create sounds for things that don't or can't exist in real life. They have to imagine what something would sound like if it did.

This video of the sounds used in the movie Dune are good examples of how this is put together, sometimes using or building odd objects to make sounds people don't typically hear in real life.

This help to create a unique sound world in the film to make fictional things feel believable and authentic.

Using Cinematic Foley Techniques in Music

You can use this same techniques in a musical context to build your own sound world. Some more cliché examples are things like sirens, various weapon sounds and "romantic" sounds.

We would encourage you to think outside the box here, even deliberately do the opposite of what is common in different genres of music.

Here is how to get started making foley sounds for your next project using only a phone:

1. Make a list of the common percussion sounds that are used in most genres of music. Kicks, snares, hi hats, pitched drum sounds are a good start.

2. Start experimenting with sounds around you that loosely sound similar. A low bump against an object for example can be used as a kick or short, higher sounds might work well as the basis for a hi hat or snare.

3. Record a few different variations of each sound, download your recorded sounds into your DAW and start sequencing them like you would with any other sound from a sample pack. See how they feel with more traditional instruments or as a layer.

   

If this first attempt isn't successful, don't be discouraged!

The act of putting this stuff together will teach you a lot and if you keep repeating this over time, you'll improve with every iteration.

Don't get it twisted, this is actually somewhat challenging work but its also a skill you're developing so it's supposed to be a challenge. Anything worth doing isn't going to be too easy.

The fun part of doing the work is by developing your own process for creating foley sound effects, this will help make your productions more individual.

No two people do this the same.

Over time you'll accumulate a collection of sound effects that are only yours. And you never know, sometimes a sound from a few years ago you didn't know what to do with will suddenly become useful as your skills grow.

Common Foley Sound Effect

Here are some more ideas for foley effects that you can try to incorporate in your next song:

Foley Textures - Beyond Vinyl Crackles

Its a cliché in many genres to incorporate ambient sound effects like vinyl crackles, nature sound effects, or crowd noises, but the musical principle behind it is not!

Using some sustained sound with an element of randomness has a lot of possibilities and can help avoid moments in a track where you want to avoid a complete silence but not fill things in too much.

Some ideas to get you started are:

• Machines or small toys

• Sounds that are very loud in real life, mixed very quietly. Like a jet taking off, a major city block during the day, the brakes of a train screeching.

• very quiet sounds, amplified and compressed to be much louder than they normally are. Even something as simple as running your fingers along a surface can be musically interesting in the right context.

Wood, Footsteps, and more

Sounds that are clear in origin like ceramics, metallic, wooden, or someone doing something as simple as walking on an interesting surface like gravel or leaves can be compelling and add a distinct feeling to a track.

Odd Rhythms

Sometimes you can find interesting rhythms by looping a foley sample that on its own doesn't appear to have a beat to it, but it reveals itself when repeated.

Jingling keys or stirring a cup of coffee are both examples that often will work well. One production trick is to start with a looped sounds like this and program more traditional percussion around it to come up with rhythms that you normally would not think to write.

Pitched Sounds

As you go about your life, have your ears open to objects that have a clear, singable pitch to them.

Those tend to make great objects to sample because you can repitch them and write melodies or chords with them. Some people will even build fully playable Kontakt Instruments with things like this.

Free Foley Sound Effects vs. Paid Options

While this article has some ideas to get you started with foley sounds and making them yourself for free, we aren't going to dress this up—it's a ton of work.

Especially if you plan on making a large library like we have. Our foley sample pack STONEWIRE was recorded entirely inside a hardware store with a field recorder, which resulted in over 8,000+ raw sounds that we had to sift through, process, pick favorites, and organize.

Whether you decide to use our STONEWIRE sample pack or another company's collection of foley sounds, it is also sometimes useful to have examples of how to do things. This is why we decided to also include processed loops and the full Ableton Live 11 session so you can see exactly how we did the sound design.

If you open the session in Ableton you can literally just mute the effects until you get back to the original starting sound and study how we arrived at the final result.

Get Started With Foley Sound Effects Today

Hopefully you found this helpful and are inspired to start working with foley sound effects by making them yourself or using ours.

We use foley sounds to synthesize interesting new sounds every day, so its a very fruitful skill to add to your music production skill set. The possibilities with it are truly endless.