TAXI.com

I had a return from a listing that stated "Cutting-edge sound design elements and high-impact instrumentation could really help you stand out" and asked for "Alarms, Sirens, Vocal yells/screams/grunts, Braams, Sub hits, Pings, Rises, Mechanical sounds, Foley sounds, Drones, Pulses, Stabs, and other signature sounds."

When someone mentions "sound design" I think "the entire auditory experience", so I submitted a track that included voice-over(short phrases that might be from the movie), environmental sounds(birds chirping, boat/oars sounds, subway train etc...) and music. However, the track was returned because "Generally, you would want to leave all vocals out of trailer music." and "This track unfortunately lacks all the elements of a trailer - sound design, hits, braams, signature sounds, etc." Which I vehemently disagree with, but it's not worthwhile to pursue further.

So what do these things mean? "...Pings, Rises, ...Signature sounds"? seems rather vague.

Is there a page on Taxi.com that defines various terms in the listings, with examples? If not, I'd be happy to head up the effort to create a page(s) for this. For example, many listings mention: braams , which to me means pedal tones with tuba and trombone patches, maybe mix in some bassoons or double basses for variety. So if the page had a series of items like this:

Braam - pedal tones with tuba and trombone patches, maybe mix in some bassoons or double basses for variety, also similar sounds generated by a synth. Example 1 (in isolation) Example 2 (in context)

The "Examples" would be links to an audio file with the named sound by itself, and another with that sound used in the context of a complete track. Additional metadata such as date of creation, genre, timeframe for the popularity of a particular audio effect (wilhelm scream) could be included to guide composers in creating period pieces or determining if something sounds "dated" vs "fresh". We may not be able to nail down all things, but we should be able to give 2-5 short examples of a few seconds each for a lot of terms. This means composers get closer to what the client wants and the client receives more focused results.

Thoughts?

myk

Wow, now THAT is an ambitious project! Given the amount of sounds out there, I guess it would quite literally cost thousands of hours... and if you labelled something "fresh" when you started, it would probably be "dated" when you were done)))

As for the terms themselves, google for something like "trailer SFX library", there's plenty of free stuff around, download some of them, and most stuff in it will have named series of samples of the words you mentioned (braam01, braam02, etc), listen to them and you get the idea of what the word means.

More impotrant than that, obviously, is that you subsequently need to figure out how to actually use them in a track...

myk247365 wrote: ↑

Thu Oct 01, 2020 2:39 pm

I submitted a track that included voice-over(short phrases that might be from the movie), environmental sounds(birds chirping, boat/oars sounds, subway train etc...)

Wow ! Sounds like a pretty full on track you have there.

And you supplied your own voiceover .... For a trailer to a movie that may not even have been made yet ?

Sadly voiceovers haven't been used on trailers for about 15 years, I think they pretty much died with the voiceover guy that used to record them all ....so how did you know what to say if you have no way of knowing which movie it may be used for ? That's some major clairvoyancy on your part.

Sound design for trailers generally means hits, risers, pulses, braams etc. There are Kontakt Libraries dedicated to this sort of thing, try Googling Keepforest who make some of the popular ones. They're quite specialised and not very cheap, and there's often some worthwhile threads with user reviews over at VI control forums.

Of course you can roll your own sounds but it would be very time consuming and not really viable of you had to make a bunch of them.

As for the other sounds, you'd be extremely fortunate to find a trailer that included footage of birds, a rowing boat trip, a subway train etc to match the environmental sounds you have included.... How would you expect it to get used ? The music has to support the picture, not the other way around.

Did they give examples ? If not I suggest you study a bunch of recent trailers and make notes. There's generally a 3 act structure to these things.

As far as making a database library of these things, it's a moving target, things change and evolve. New fads come and go. People who are into it tend to get to know these things after a while, the info is out there already if you look.

Zaychi and Cosmicdolphin,

Thanks for your comments. I saw in the description "Cutting-edge sound design elements" and decided that meant the whole kit and kaboodle. There was quite a bit of detail in the description and I thought "Perhaps someone is looking for a composer to work with and not just a one off track". Am I right to assume that all clients are looking for is the one off track they can throw behind their trailer with little editing?

As for the sounds themselves, I prefer to make my own because who knows how much those popular library sfx have been overused. I find it very easy to emulate movie trailer soundtracks from the last 10 years or so, they all kinda sound the same. The fact that one of you identified the boat scene tells me I achieved my goal. I guess from here on out, I'll pay much closer attention to the examples and stick to them. But there's so much I'm trying to determine, apart from the technical details, what do things like "broadcast quality" mean? So much of what comes out of studios sounds too clean and sterile to my ear. I like hearing the scratch of the bow on the string and the little fret noises from a guitar, it's akin to the "ghost notes" I throw in when playing drums. These things give the recording more life. Otherwise we fall into the trap of sounding mechanical/quantized when that isn't warranted. just my $0.02.

Thanks again,


and if anyone else is interested in putting something like this together, hit me up.