Making A Foley Sample Pack: STONEWIRE
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.
