The Potential of Everyday Sounds

I’ve mentioned this at least several times before but if you didn’t know - I teach audio classes at Orlando’s public library. It’s a really awesome building with no shortage of cool sounds. Before I start my day or when I’m leaving I try to take the opportunity to capture some of them.

Collecting Sources

These two doors specifically have always caught my attention. Both are very heavy, solid wood. The walls in the building are all concrete. One is a storage closet - when the door slams the whole room resonates in a pretty special way. The other door leads to an entirely concrete emergency exit stairwell. The reverb in there is quite impressive and I’ve taken advantage of the space for other reasons in the past.

I also recorded the door mechanics of one of our big studio doors to layer in with the rest of the sound.

The Processing

I imagined blending these two doors together would work pretty well with minimal processing and they did for the most part. When designing most gun/weapon shots I frequently use some type of transient designer to adjust the attack and sustain. Additionally, I added some different layers of distortion. I just recently picked up the soundtoys bundle so decided to give Decapitator and Devil Loc a try. Each door layer has it’s own Decapitator settings and I placed an instance of Devil Loc on the aux.

Conclusions

I have a list of other things I’d like to try recording to make more similar material. I’ll probably also go ahead and record more variations from these sources - trying different perspectives and mic placements. With relatively few layers involved and minimal processing, I was pretty surprised what I could do.

It goes to show how important listening is. I try to make this a constant effort of recording all sorts of things just to see what’s possible.