Useful Types of Wood Sounds For Music Production
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:
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use different kinds of wood
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use different size objects from a large desk to a small toy
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"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.
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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.
