• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Podcast Show Notes
• Events

The Sampler

May 11, 2005 4:18 PM

Online SFX: The Biggest Keeps Getting Bigger

Last time, we profiled the BBC's impressive and wide-ranging SFX collection and mentioned that one of the places online where those sounds could be auditioned and purchased was sound-effects-library.com. Well, scouring the website got me curious about that outfit, so I dialed the company's London headquarters and talked to managing director Lloyd Billing to find out more.

"Actually, the company is much more than just the online sound effects, though that's certainly a big part of it," Billing says. "We're owned by a company called The Tape Gallery, which specializes in soundtracks for TV, cinema, and radio commercials. We have a large audio post-production facility in Soho [London] with five studios." The facility's post spaces offer a plethora of state-of-the-art gear, including mixing desks such as the AMS Neve Logic 2; the Soundtracs DS3 and SSL Omnimix models; hard disk recording systems like the Audiofile, Synclavier, and NED PostPro; and a wide selection of top outboard gear.

"We went digital back in 1987," Billing continues, "and we started building our own digital library then, originally recording into Synclavier, which of course was one of the first digital workstations around. It was a very high-quality machine, particularly for its time. Over the years we built up quite a large library of our own, and we started distributing music and effects on Laserdisc. We started off with one library—the Tape Gallery Library, with 5,000 sounds, and after a while other libraries began to approach us and ask if they could join us. We now publish nearly 80 libraries, ranging from one- or two-CD sets to huge libraries like SoundStorm, which has 40,000 to 50,000 sounds, and the BBC collection."

Another one of sound-effects-library.com's most popular offerings is Cinesound, which contains SFX from several decades of British filmmaking and documentary productions. "That library represents a merger of the huge collections of three major British film studios—Pinewood, Shepperton, and Elstree [EMI]," Billing says. "It's got all the classic early James Bond films—Dr. No, Goldfinger, etc.—and also things like Zulu, Platoon, and much more. Generally speaking, most our customers want effects that are digital all the way through so they want more modern sounds, but we do get requests for Victorian street atmospheres or various other things that are hard to come by these days. Try finding a Zulu war chant today."

Sound-effects-library.com doesn't only deal with large collections, of course. One of the company's most recent additions is a small collection called The Three Annas, which is by a singer who has single-, double- and triple-tracked herself singing operatic cues for use on commercial spots or whatever. Then there's new music by a Spanish composer named Juan Sanchez, who's fairly well-known in the techno/ambient community. Other specialized collections include one by the versatile British voiceover specialist Enn Reitel; GDO, which consists entirely of soccer sounds, fan chants, and songs; John Woods' library of auto and racetrack sounds; and dozens of others, large and small.

"The greatest thing we offer is to be able to find the best effects out of an enormous selection of libraries; you can cherry pick," Billing says. "So if you want a special 'thunderclap' for horror, you can listen to several without having to resort to that famous old BBC classic, which has sort of lived its days. You type in "thunderclap" and the BBC [library] will come up with a selection of newer ones, or you can find one in another library. There's so much there [on the site]; you can probably find anything you want there."

Billing also notes that the company's expanding roster production music libraries are also becoming more popular with each passing season. "There are about 20 libraries there now and its growing. In this business, the more content you have the more reliable you are and the more people come to search your site. So we're expecting great things in that area, too."

For more info, go to sound-effects-library.com.

---

Music Grows in the Production Garden

The San Antonio, Texas-based library company Production Garden Music got its start nearly two decades ago when a radio production and management veteran named Mel Taylor came along. "[I] looked at what was around and decided there was a need for a quality, affordable production music library," Taylor says. "In those days there weren't as many [libraries] as there are today, and a lot of what was out there was in this sort of dull 'canned music' style. So we came out with The Production Garden, which was a small package of six discs, and we had a very good response to that. Then we kept adding volumes and grew from there.

"Obviously the industry has matured a lot since then and offers more serious music, much of it centered around the sorts of music that you'd hear in films and in mainstream media," Taylor continues. "The quality and diversity has improved tremendously, and there are more outlets that need music than ever before. People are using so many forms of media now—there are more broadcast and cable channels, more radio stations; more of everything. People are using music on the Web, of course, and even the world of corporate video production has changed dramatically: It used to just be bigger corporations that would [make films and videos], but now that putting together a non-linear digital editing studio is a fraction of the cost a decade ago, more and more smaller companies are plugging in some kind of audio/video department, and we're tapping into those places and into private video producers."

From the outset, Taylor says, Production Garden Music set its sights not just on regional work, but national accounts. "We started out using the old-fashioned direct-mail method and targeted radio stations," he notes. "But it's grown a lot from there, and today we have some distribution overseas, too: Just the other day we sold a production track to an advertising agency in Singapore for use in a McDonald's commercial over there. Certainly the Web has brought us customers, too."

Though the company has what Taylor calls "some limited production studios" in San Antonio, the bulk of its music comes from independent composers who are scattered far and wide. "We're just finishing up a CD this week that will have some tracks from a writer in Hollywood, another up in the Dallas area, and another writer in southern California," he offers. "It's a light- to medium-rock CD; kind of an easy-rock feel. We don't even have a title on it yet."

As for Production Garden's overall place in the increasingly competitive library field, Taylor says, "A lot of libraries specialize in one or a couple of kinds of music. Maybe they're going for the extreme sports [sound]; another might have a preponderance of urban hip-hop grooves and might not have any classical or orchestral. There are companies who are going for the prosumer videographers. I would call what we do a 'full-service library.' We have about 190 CDs now, and we try to cover most of the bases in some way. Our libraries appeal a lot to post houses in medium to larger markets; these customers usually want somewhere between 50 and 150 CDs and they want the variety we offer because they do everything: they need classical one day and something extremely edgy the next. The 4M Library is our premium, largest product line, currently with about 120 CDs that pretty much cover everything. But some of the corporate producers might want to streamline and come down to a focus of say, 50 discs, and we're happy to help them, too.

"We're not one of the big guys," he adds, "but we're not small, either, and we feel that one of our strengths is that we have high-quality music that's not overly saturated in markets. We've run into customers who say they're tired of hearing tracks they've used from some of the bigger companies all over radio and TV spots in their markets. So we're offering something a little different. We're like a best-kept secret—when people find us and they like our music, it feels a little more exclusive because it is different."

For more info, go to productiongarden.com.

---

Star Wars SFX: Mixing a Masterpiece

So, here I sit in my office, wearing my vintage C-3PO T-shirt and Admiral Akbar boxer shorts (he's the guy who looks like a space trout), reeking of Chewbacca after-shave and drinking margaritas from a mug shaped like Darth Vader's helmet. I've been told I look like a cross between Brad Pitt and Jabba the Hutt, but I'm trying not let it go to my head. Anyway, here's an exclusive scoop for Sampler readers only: There's going to be a new Star Wars film opening next week! They've tried to keep the news under wraps—absolutely no publicity!—but somehow the information leaked out to me! Can't anyone keep a secret anymore?

But I'm not here to make cheap, cynical jokes. Or maybe I am, but I also have another point: I truly want to salute the Star Wars series for the endlessly creative SFX work of the sound crew, headed by Ben Burtt, over the course of the past quarter of a century. The original Star Wars, and its five sequels, changed the way we hear movies and influenced and inspired at least two generations of audio professionals.

I thought it might be fun to devote a little space in our two May issues to how some of the SFX in the films were done. In Part One, we'll look at sounds from the first trilogy. Some of these descriptions were lovingly purloined from Sven Carlsson's superb filmsound.org website; he in turn cribbed the info from various interviews with Ben Burtt.

R2-D2: The diminutive droid's "voice" combines electronic noises with the sound of water pipes, whistles, and altered vocalizations by Ben Burtt.

TIE fighter: According to Burtt, the core sound of these speedy space fighters is a heavily modified elephant bellow.

Chewbacca: As you might expect, the vocalizations of wookies like Chewy were constructed from the sounds of walruses and other animals. Burtt says, "You have bits and fragments of animal sounds which you have collected and put into lists: Here is an affectionate sound, and here is a angry sound, and, just like with R2-D2, they are clipped together and blended. With a Wookie, you might end up with five or six tracks, sometimes, to get the flow of the sentence."

Luke Skywalker's landspeeder: Burtt recorded the roar of Los Angeles' congested Harbor Freeway through a vacuum-cleaner pipe.

The voice of Darth Vader: "The concept for the sound of Darth Vader came about from the first film, and the script described him as some kind of a strange, dark being who is in some kind of life-support system," Burtt says. "That he was breathing strange, that maybe you heard the sounds of mechanics or motors, he might be part robot, he might be part human—we really didn't know. And so the original concept I had of Darth Vader was a very noise-producing individual. He came into a scene, he was breathing like some wheezing windmill, you could hear his heart beating; you move his head, you heard motors turning. He was almost like some robot in some sense and he made so much noise that we had to sort of cut back on that concept. In the first experiment—the mixes we did in Star Wars—he sounded like an operating room, like an emergency room, you know, moving around."

In the end, of course, the voice was that of actor James Earl Jones, with breaths added separately. "It's my breathing," Burtt says in another interview. "I went to a scuba shop and took a tiny microphone and put it inside the regulator of a scuba breathing apparatus, and just breathed in and out a number of different ways. That became the breathing for Vader."

Lightsabers: "The lightsabers [were] the very first sound I made for the whole series. … When the script had first come out, they had some paintings that Ralph McQuarrie had done. … I could hear the sound in my head of the lightsabers, even though it was just a painting of a lightsaber. … At that time, I was still a graduate student at USC, and I was a projectionist and we had a projection booth with some very, very old simplex projectors in them. They had an interlock motor, which connected them to the system when they just sat there and idled and made a wonderful humming sound. It would slowly change in pitch, and it would beat against another motor and they would harmonize with each other. … [That] sound was the inspiration for the lightsaber. I went and recorded that sound, but it wasn't quite enough. It was just a humming sound; what was missing was a buzzy sort of sparkling sound, the scintillating [sound] I was looking for, and I found it one day by accident.

"I was carrying a microphone across the room … and when the microphone passed a television set which was on the floor—it was on at the time without the sound turned up—the microphone passed right behind the picture tube, and as it did, [it] produced an unusual hum. It picked up a transmission from the television set, and a signal was induced into its sound-reproducing mechanism, and that was a great buzz, actually. So I took that buzz and recorded it and combined it with the projector motor sound and that 50/50 kind of combination of those two sounds became the basic lightsaber tone."

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.