Hey team so in my last two projects I've worked in the same kind of genre. Admittedly they do have slight differences, Castlevania was more anime horror while NosVRtu is more subtle and ambient. These two have a lot in common however and I've learned quite a bit about how certain effects should sound in these kinds of worlds. I hope you learn a thing or two out of this blog which is designed to teach you a few tricks regarding making a darker more ominous soundscape.
1. Werewolf Howls
Werewolves are a classic addition to the fantasy horror genre. In NosVRtu we were thinking of ways we could add some subtle ambient noises in the background as part of our soundscape. We thought why not add some howls seeing as theres a big full moon in the background. I had never recorded any but while we were in the studio we recorded both Ryan and Brad's best werewolf impression which sounded like this.
Not a bad first recording, we ended up just using the NTG4 shotgun mic we used for our foley recording and it turned out really well... but it was still missing that something. That something was a bunch of little things like pitch, speed and or course reverb and distance. While pitching it down I started by stretching the takes slightly with the varispeed tool in Protools. This makes the track longer and deeper as you can imagine stretching out a waveform it gets deeper. This already makes it ominous as its now not as bright and tinny. Next I add an EQ taking away some of the high end again making it sound further away and taking any brightness out of the howl. If you take out too much it just sounds muffled so you have to be careful how far you go with the EQ (see my example below. Next I add a generous amount of reverb and and finally the main trick is in the Pitch II plugin. As an added bonus the plugin has this feature that allows some of the 'dry' sample to be played with the now pitched down sample. This adds an effect your probably already familiar with if you've seen any show where a character is possessed or has some kind of supernatural power. The effect can be as subtle or on the nose as you want but it adds the final layer to this edit, a supernatural distant cry for others of their kind.
2. Making Sound Effects Fit a Dark Castle
When you make sound effects for the supernatural horror genre you don't typically want them to be bright or tinny. For example a lot of our recorded foley for NosVRtu started very bright and contained a lot of high end details like our samples for our pots breaking, chains clinking and candlesticks being thrown around. So how do you make this original bright samples fit your soundscape?
Above are three examples of foley samples we used in the game, the first is our chain, second our candlestick and lastly our pot break. As you can tell they are all uncut and are much too bright to go into Dracula's castle. Obviously if we had access to larger chains, brass candlesticks and clay pots we would actually use them to make more realistic samples but we have to work with what we have on hand to make it work. So we edit and edit until they fit right.
First things first they need to be deeper, so I started by stretching them with Varispeed. This makes them sound heavier as the sample is now deeper and longer which adds weight to a lighter sample. All my edits are in moderation as well because you can go too for with these kinds of edits.
The next step is an EQ taking a little off the high end, similar to the werewolves but not as much as we don't want them to sound far away just deeper. The pots I didn't take too much out as most of the sample is high end so I still wanted that clarity.
Next I added another pitch tool and make them just a bit deeper and darker. Stretching a sample does help them become deeper and heavier but if you stretch it too far the sample will be too long we don't want a pot break to last more than 2 seconds or it just won't make sense to the player. So to make sure it sounds low enough I usually take it down one or two octaves to suit the sample.
Once it's sound low and edgy and of course not overly edited (you have to walk a fine line sometimes) it's time for reverb. Reverb as I've mentioned in previous blogs is essential in post production, in an environment like a spooky dark castle reverb is what makes a sample make sense within the space. So I added a healthy amount of large reverb and made sure when I bounced each sample I gave them enough space to allow it to ring out. With all these edits out of the way they start to sound like they belong.
You can hear the difference those four simple edits make to your samples. Low dark and edgy is a matter of removing the high end, stretching them down for weight, pitching further down if needed and adding reverb for environmental effects.
3. Secret Passageway Effect
A really exciting sound design challenge I came across in NosVRtu was a secret passageway that was unlocked when players found a certain book on the bookshelf. Activating this book sends the bookshelf slowly lowering into the floor and allowing the player to access the dungeon hidden behind it. We asked what kind of sound the designers had in mind when the bookshelf lowered and he said something magical, "Well that's up to you two", music to my earholes, heres how we went about it. While recording foley in our post production studio we realised we needed some kind of scraping sound for the bookshelf as it descends into the floor. Looking at the environment it's mostly stone but the bookshelf is also made of wood so we recorded two samples using pieced of wood and bricks. After mixing these together, stretching, pitching and some other general edits I realised it wasn't enough and looked for some more sample to add to the event. I thought and looked at other examples online and found a cool steampunk elevator that had some really nice (kinda cliche) cog turning sounds and a creaky wardrobe which suited it perfectly to I mixed them all together. Here are the four separate elements (as well as the lever click at the start) and the end result.
I had a lot of fun making this but let me know if there was something you'd do differently. Theres heaps of ways I could've gone about this but I'm happy with how it turned out. Hopefully I can get a video of the sound to event in the game soon and I'll update the blog when I get my hands on it.
I hope you learned something out of these three quick tutorials and like always let me know if you have any questions or feedback on my work. Thank you for reading!
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