While it’s possible that you’ve heard the name of Thomas Crapper – famous London plumber and also certainly the namesake of the colloquialism ‘crap’ – Thomas didn’t actually invent the modern toilet.
Nope, we can actually thank Queen Elizabeth for that grand feat. She didn’t invent the toilet herself, she just… exiled her poet godson John Harrington for 8 years. It was during that time – in which Harrington was an embarrassment to all of England for his bad poopetry – he developed a toilet with a raised cistern which held water to be flushed into the toilet bowl!
Now as sound designers and musicians, we also love to invent (just, with sound moreso than poop). But sometimes – whether we’re in a rush, just need placeholder, or we’ve run into ‘Blank DAW Syndrome’ – we turn to sound libraries and smaller sound effect packs for help.
Today, I want to announce to you that in a few months we’ll be selling our first sound effect pack here at nir.media. Seeing as you probably didn’t initially sign up to this list to get sound effects, I want to share why this is awesome, important for you, and three specific reasons why we’re doing it.
- To reduce ‘sound library overwhelm’ (SLO ™)
- To make sounds that are quickly usable to game sound designers, specifically
- To create a smaller, curated, unique experience for you
Many sound effect libraries are huge, and untargeted.
If you’re not careful, you can run into ‘SLO ™’ – ‘sound library overwhelm’. That’s where you’ve bought an awesome large library of effects like BOOM BASICS (highly recommended) and suddenly you go from not having any sounds to having a ton of sounds. You spend time scrolling through your library, entering various keywords and trying to find something that’s cool to start with – but you could end up wasting time because you’ve got a bunch of things to scroll through that you may not use.
Especially when you have absolutely nothing, it’s a better problem to have too many sounds than too few. But, option paralysis is a thing, as well as buyer’s remorse if you ever get to the point where you realize you’ve bought a bunch of sounds you haven’t ever actually used for anything.
And well, we haven’t even crossed the consideration that some libraries are so big and famous that their sounds are well known and sometimes used as in-jokes and memes. While none of that is objectively bad or wrong, sometimes you just want exactly the thing you want and to ensure it sounds unique.
That’s a big goal of ours. Part of the way we’re going to get there for you is to be specific in who we’re making sounds for.
There are no sound packs directly oriented to video game development.
At this point, libraries are almost guaranteed to give you produced sounds and dry source. But in working with sounds for games, you’re often concerned about repetition (user overexposure to a sound), in what context sounds will play back, having clean loops, and the feel of a sound in your hand itself. At the end of the day this means you still have to work and think a lot about context when using library sounds.
We’re interested in beginning to tweak this for you a bit. As an example – some libraries give you plenty of one-shot variations, while others may not. Very few libraries break sounds down into their component parts (like transients, body, and tails of gunshots) in a way that allows you to drop them right into Wwise containers for fully randomized playback and more freedom for interactive mixing/effects.
As game sound is really wide open in what’s possible for interactivity and how you communicate to the player we think it would be cool to simply give you more time to play and experiment. It’s not that what you already have is extraordinarily limiting, but we also recognize that every minute of your day counts when it comes to being able to play with new ideas.
You also don’t have time to waste on bad sounds.
Whether it’s ‘SLO ™’ or just being unsure if what you’re buying is any good – the last effort we want to make is towards curation.
You can go on great sites like A Sound Effect, Glitchmachines, ProSoundEffects, Boom Library and others to get great sounds (not kidding – we encourage you to do so!). But, there’s almost nowhere right now that provides small sound packs specifically curated by sound designers and recordists which emphasize audio designer usability across a variety of contexts.
Whether it be adhering to a naming standard like UCS, breaking sounds down into their component parts for flexibility, unique editing for use in games, or not blowing up the download with a bunch of stuff you won’t use – we really want to make a point to give you just what you need so you can get back to crafting cool experiences (even if you just intend to use library sounds as temp!).
So, with our initial releases, you won’t see packs with hundreds of wav files, thousands of sounds, and multiple gigs. Instead, we hope to give you hand-crafted, manageable content.
“But wait just a second…” you say, “…while this is kind of cool – how small is small? Is it going to be like these larger libraries where I only get one sound of the thing I need, and it’s not even really what I need?”
Not at all. In fact, if you feel like you get frustrated when you see generic “gun sound” libraries or generic “forest ambiences” – this is one of the problems we’re out to solve.
That’s why our intent is to hyper-focus our sound packs. Instead of “cyber weapons” that will give you every science fiction gun under the sun, we’re starting out with “Small Sci-Fi Weapons”, recorded and created by recordist & sound designer James Thatcher (SkyRiverSound).
James has put together a small pack of only high quality, “small” sounding Sci-Fi guns – not huge, over-the-top booms. While we recognize you may have some guns covered through your other, bigger libraries, our intent is to give you less intense and harder-to-craft gun sounds. This pack will also serve as an exciting example of what’s to come from us in the future.
So all that being said – why sound effects again?
- To reduce ‘sound library overwhelm’ (SLO ™)
- To make sounds that are quickly usable to game sound designers, specifically
- To create a smaller, curated, unique experience for you
Look, we don’t really advocate you getting exiled for 8 years to invent the next great thing in sound design.
So we’re going to try and help you come up with things easier, certainly faster, and less frustrating. Because you got into sound design because it’s fun and exciting – not to be overwhelmed, exhausted, or digging through libraries all day.
So if you’re with us and that sounds interesting to you…
You can actually sign up for the waiting list for “Small Sci-Fi Weapons” right now by going here: https://nir.media/product/small-sci-fi-weapons/
As we get closer to the release date, we’ll be giving more updates about the timing, price, availability, and examples.
– Adam from nir.media