Using Foley Sounds Creatively In Music Production
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.
