What To Look For In a Foley Sample Pack
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:
Variety of interesting sounds (not necessarily the highest quality recordings)
Good labeling system
A balance of realistic with uncategorizable sounds
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.
