90 Second Sound Design - Electrical Arcing

90 Second Sound Design - Electrical Arcing

Discovery

Alright… so you may recognize the metal table from my Creature Vocalization video (part 2 is still in the works). I didn’t really plan to use the prop to demonstrate anything else but while I was editing my recordings I found some other great potential for these sounds.

It’s very common that I’ll play around with sound while I’m editing my raw recordings. I find it helps break up the monotony and every once in awhile I come up with some interesting stuff that I want to keep.

Processing

Pitch shifting is probably the most common thing I’ll do. I consider this a sort of quality assessment, I like to see how my recordings behave when mangled up ya know? Little Alter Boy is something I’ll commonly use just because it’s simple and I like having the drive knob in addition to the pitch controls.

That’s what I started with here. I cranked up that drive and started tweaking the pitch and formant. I found that without much effort, this bowed metal table was being transformed into some pretty good electrical arcing type of sounds. Randomizing/automating the formant control a bit improved it even further.

The other processing I used was more for refinement of the tone than anything else. As I continued making variations most of those choices were switched up quite a bit.

Conclusion

So I ended up derailing my entire edit session to make a bunch of arcing sounds. Enough that I decided to put together a pretty significantly large library, that I’m happy to announce is available now!