Sound Effects

Sound effects are wonderful, aren't they?

The T1000 sound effect was created by emptying a can of dog food. Listen carefully to the film and you'll recognise it.

Low-tech but effective. I once created the sound of a door being kicked in using a metal biscuit tin lid. Yes, I kicked it... But with the image of a big door buckling, you just had to imagine it. Terminator 2 had very impressive visuals to aid the imagination.

The BBC have a whole set of sound effects albums. My favourite was always the Disasters album, altho the "Out of This World" has one or two sfx that turn up here and there. The obligitory howling wolf sfx is on one of the horror albums, of course. The "explosion with metal" from Disasters turns up pretty frequently, too. Even these days.

Yep, I am that sound effects anorak! I used to use 'em in homemade plays - on tape - with a friend. Mixing several effects together was rather effective (this pun intentionally left naff). 3+ tape machines plus a mixer strongely recommended. We used to use several cassette decks plus an open reel machine, with a 5 channel Sony mixer tat today would be called a "DJ" mixer, but in the 70s such people were nothing special, so the mixer was pretty basic by today's standards. With 5 chans, you could feed in one stero tape, 2 mics, plus a mono tape feed, with the output going to another tape machine, in this case open reel for easy editing. For mixing sound effects, we sometimes used up to 3 machines going in. That tape would then be the "backing" for the actors (that was us!) plus cued sound effects via the mono channel.

For example, we once created a spaceport tape by using an album of jet aircraft, overloading the meteor section to make the jets sounds less like aircraft and more like spaceships, and overdubbing it several times. Then we fed that tape in chans 1 and 2, voices in chans 3 and 4, plus a cued sfx (thunder) via chan 5, using the pan control to make the thunder roll across the stero image.

In the 50s and 60s, people recorded pop songs this way! We wrote and recorded very naff - but humourous - SF plays...