How To Make Sound Effects For Games

[Music] hey in this video you will learn how to make quality sound effects all by yourself no prior experience required you will go all the way from not having created a single sound in your life to actually making some really awesome sounds you can use to juice up your games my name is Ryan Stockwell I'm a professional sound designer for video games and I run a YouTube channel called blip sounds where we teach sound design for video games my name is Jonas I'm not a professional sound designer I'm an indie game developer and I usually make all of the sound effects for my games myself today will teach you how to do the same this is the little prototype will be creating sounds for time stamps and the link to ryan's youtube channel blip sounds are of course in the video description today jonas invited me to do some sounds for smash run and i'm really excited to show you guys my approach in mindset to how I tackle sound design for this tutorial we'll use audacity step 1 download audacity the second thing you need of course is a recording device a microphone if you don't have a microphone you can get surprisingly good USB microphones for around twenty or thirty bucks online or as an alternative you can also just use your smart phone most modern-day smartphones have surprisingly decent recording quality of course if you record on your phone it'll be a little bit of an extra hassle to get the audio recordings from your phone onto your PC but then you can just drag and drop them into audacity let's start out with a quick audacity crash course this is what you should see when you open the program up if for some reason the toolbar at the top here's messed up can always go to view toolbars and reset toolbars and then you can also move these things around next thing you need to do is just selecting the correct microphone here for me that is this one as this is a mono microphone I'll also just select mono then here you can select the output though the speakers that we'll use to play the sounds make sure that all of those are set correctly and then you can hit this red button here to make a recording VC such as recording blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah when you hit play you should hear it this is recording you want to make sure that your microphone is recording with the correct volume if you want to make your microphone a bit more silent you can just break this down a little bit here you want to make sure that you don't record too loudly loudly then you'll cause clipping if the sounds touch the bounce here there is no good there will sound really and distorted you can delete rows like this just click on X and the entire line is gone this is the selection tool you can use that to select certain parts of your audio track this is the move tool or the time shift tool is what is called can use that to move the sounds around then this right here is the zoom tool or left mouse button assuming in right mouse button assuming out this right here is the envelope tool you can use that to pate the sound in or out make it louder a bit more silent dragging this outer line here you pull it closer to the center it becomes more silent and if you closed outside it becomes louder and for example if I want this to become louder and louder I'll just drag it in here and drag it all the way out here this way it will slowly grow in volume one two three one two three blah blah blah you want to edit away unnecessary parts selected with the Select tool and and hit delete you can hear at the beginning that there's a little bit of noise on the recording as well depending on your microphone there will be more or less noise in your recording luckily there's a way to reduce that a little bit by just going to effect noise reduction and now you need to make sure that a silent part of your recording is selected because then you can get the noise profile this will teach audacity how the noise in your recording sounds like and then you can select everything go to noise reduction and hit OK that should get rid of most of the noise in your recording so now what if you want to cut the file here in that case we can just go to edit clip boundaries and split that will create a split here which will allow us to move these individually which we couldn't do before by the way a different way to change the volume of the recording is here and you can also pan it to the left one two three or to the right one two three if you want to create a new track so you can play multiple things at once you can go to tracks add new mono track and then you have two tracks in here and now we can record something on top of that one two three one two three blah blah blah when you want to export your sound you can go to file export export as Slav it's usually what I go for if you just want to export a little selection of your sound you can just select the area you want to export and then you can go to file export export selected audio then you can still select the file type here just click okay a couple of times and then you should open three nah the exported sound file right here those pretty much how you use audacity oh there are three more techniques that we'll use to create our final sound effects layering equalizing and pitch shift first of all layering is pretty much what we did before where we just record multiple zones on top of each other so now I'll take all of these sounds put them all on top of each other when you take the zoom tool and select an area like this it will zoom exactly to that area add a couple of new tracks and I guess another quick way to get these into a different track is just to hit ctrl-c ctrl-v and you can see that just by putting all of these sounds on top of each other they already sound a lot different so basically layering is combining multiple sounds into one by just putting them on top of each other so now if i only want to work with that one up here i can just mute the other ones for that you can just hit the mute button here second technique second effect that is also very very powerful and extremely useful is pitch shifting the way you do pitch shifting in audacity is you select the sound you want a pitch shift and you click on effects and then you click on change speed you can use change pitch as well but usually change speed gives nicer results and then here you can hit shift your sound up or down if we click preview you should be able to hear how your sound sounds like so now if you reduce the speed of that to 1/2 to 0.5 the sound suddenly sounds a lot deeper of course it gets slower as well but the main side effect that we want is that it makes the sound sound deeper unless you can see that can have some really cool effects where a simple clap sound can almost turn into an explosion just by us slowing it down a little bit or alternatively if we pitch it up it turns into a click sound so you can see that this is an extremely powerful technique if you want to apply that effect then instead of preview we'll just click on OK and that will apply the effect this BAM let's pitch shift that as well on very analysis for educational purposes only the last technique we'll need is equalizing and this might be interesting we want to equalize this you select it you go to effects and then you go to filter curve on the left are the low frequency so the what happens if we for example move this all the way down here of the curve is on the very bottom on the left then we basically what we do is would remove all of the low frequencies and then if we hit preview you can pretty much hear that only the high frequencies are left we do it the other way around only the low frequencies are left just by adjusting this curve we can make the sound very very different you can just play around with this curve and see how it changes your sound and then once you've found something you're happy with you hit OK x-axis is the frequency and of course y axis is how loud it is so if you make it too loud it will once again become too loud and create some ugly artifacts you can hear that crackling there that's because I just made two loads need to move everything down a little bit ok let's make the first sound the walking zone the running zone so somebody walking over sent my process for making a sound effect is usually trying to imagine how I want the sound effect to sound like what I'm imagining is just choose unsent very small tiny steps once you have the sound in your head you can try to think what in my house sounds like that you want to make a sound of a shoe then why not start with a shoe and then I found something that sounds very similar to send actually I'm not 100% sure if it will work but that's what I'm gonna try ok let's use those at the very beginning here those are my favorites I'll start separating my sounds here by duplicating them in here and the reason why I'm trying to get multiple because the stepping sounds are so extremely short if it's just the exact same stepping sound repeated all of the time you'll hear that it's the same sound that is where I'll create multiple ones and then in the game I'll make sure that a random sound is picked every time stepping down displayed and that will make it sound a lot better that should be enough and then you can hear a little bit of a plopping sound whenever one of these sound effects ends and the way you to get rid of that is shading that out at the end here but another way to do it is to go to effects and then just hit fade-out and that will make it disappear as well select a little end section here effects fade out perhaps some of the zones need a little bit of shading as well and gshare with sound effects ready audio wave doesn't start at zero those are the ones that create a little bit of a clicking sound so what you can do is just removing the beginning parts of the audio wave starts to check exactly at zero and that will get rid of them clicking actually sounds a lot more like sand if I slow the sound down a bit what happens if I speed it up I think I mainly want the heights of this to come through yeah I'll go with that okay so now I have a bunch of sounds once again checking that they have about the correct volume here they should be around minus six a little more or less [Music] one of the most important skills in sound design is creativity just work with what you have most of this is gonna be pretty improvised they don't really have much of a game plan other than the recordings I've done if I want to make a punch sound effect I'm just gonna go around my house and start hitting things and gonna find what works and that's and that's actually how I figured out how to do that that balloon trick where I was punching it with my hand I'm dangling here there's no reverberation [Music] the microphone that I use for this is a zoom h6 microphone with a shotgun microphone attachment it's my favorite microphone I've been using it for six years now this is called Reaper Reaper is very similar to audacity however Reaper is just a little bit more dynamic I can move audio files around and I can also add affected directly to the track so for example if I type in EQ within our effects here I can go to B EQ and then I can simply add a change to our equaliser let's say cutting out the lower frequencies don't worry I've already shown you how to do this exact same thing in audacity I just thought because I'm a nice person I'll let Ryan use his own software of choice and Reaper is a good choice of course the only reason why I decided to go for audacity with this tutorial is ease of use speed and because our destiny is completely free yeah let's take about like let's make this like 20 seconds long just keep it pretty short and we're gonna make a looping ambience out of this I'm gonna cut this in half and then I'm gonna move the first part of this audio file right after the second one and this is gonna create a crossfade between these two files when I merge them together like this and this crossfade is going to create a seamless gap between these two sounds way to do that in audacity as you select the first part weed control X and then you can just edit back in here make sure they overlap a little bit and then you can just manually frost fade them so no problem arena make sure the volume says somewhat consistent during the transition and now we have a loopable sound here as well you can't even tell that there is a gap but if I were to play them separately like this it's a little bit more noticeable and now let's go on to the collecting diamond sound I want to work on that so I'm gonna create a new track and I'm going to take our wineglass sound here a lot of my process for sound design is just recording as much as possible and then basically finding my favorite recordings and sticking those together so along with our wineglass we also want to take our yo-yo sound which is right here yeah I definitely want to use this bit here and we're gonna kind of have it like tail off after the initial hit of the wineglass phase are really easy to add and repr you just have to click the top right and drag to the right I'm gonna do this on both of these I'm also gonna pitch shift these and to pitch shift and repr all you have to do is hit shift and 0 so I'm gonna do a cool trick here I'm gonna take this I forgot to mention this in the recording session but I recorded this sound of me going into the microphone so this is what we call white noise and the sound design world and white noise is very useful because it is all the frequencies combined and it makes it feel a little bit more full one thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna take this wine glass sound and I'm going to reverse it by hitting ctrl R this is how to reverse a sound an audacity you click on effects reverse doughnut noise Nesser of the roof glasses it and now we have a lovely reversed wineglass sound I'm also gonna raise the pitch of this wineglass sound and this is gonna be a pretty fast sound when it happens so I'm gonna make sure that it kind of happens right around here and I want this to be punchy too so I'm gonna take our white noise here and I'm gonna add some EQ I'm gonna boost the lows and let's lower the higher frequencies a little bit just having too many higher frequencies can be a little bit jarring I do like to use other tools I've been EQ but but I do find that EQ is such a versatile tool that can be used I think I accidentally dropped the microphone stand and it made that sound and I listen to that back when I'm for my pre-production and you know what we're gonna try using it just [Music] because why not I'm gonna add a pitch shifter to this you know that's what you select everything effects sliding stretch and this way you can select the pitch at the beginning of the sound and at the end of the sound so I can give it a little sweep that is pretty much ready string to the wineglass sound so I'm gonna copy this pitch shifter sound onto it again rainy isn't even higher frequency than before I said yeah I like that a lot having a pitch go up in sound light this is a very nice rewarding sound effect so I'm using automation in this way can be really helpful for making positive or negative feedback sounds if I wanted to make this a bad sound I'd probably lower it in pitch so now that you're starting to get the idea let's beat this up a little bit I don't want this tutorial to get too long next sound I want to create is the shotgun sound and I'll start out with a couple of claps next time I imagine that a shotgun has a little bit of crunch to it as well so here I'm just giving it a little more in the high frequencies and also leaving a bit more in the low frequencies because that gives it a bit more punch actually add another clap on top sometimes your experiments don't work out and then you just remove them and try something else instead so once again pitch shifting and equalizing was all that was needed to create that sound think it turned out quite nicely I'm gonna call this white noise from now on because it basically is just white noise this actually works as a nice base for our bullet hitting wall sound and also you might not need to be anything more than that it might just need to be that simple now let's do our falling off the screen sound and our losing getting stuck sound this one's gonna be a little tough because it's so it's so just like there's no animation to it and it happens so fast too but you still want a negative feedback sound for it let's do our pitch shifter trick that sounds pretty cool actually it sounds like a drum I'm gonna use the same trick that we had before with our white noise let's add EQ and let's cut off the higher frequencies a little bit maybe you should go up in pitch actually like that hey you got a second chance like here's an extra life just for the sake of making it a little bit more interesting I'm gonna duplicate this track twice and I'm gonna stretch these out just a tiny bit over each other and I'm gonna raise the volume of each succeeding one nice that sounds really cool nice yeah let's try adding one of these sounds in [Laughter] [Music] okay next sound is for when the player is trying to shoot but us out of a munitions or sound and I found these first I was looking for something that sounds metallic and small yeah something like that enough [Music] again my name is Ryan stucco and we have a youtube channel it sounds I highly recommend going to check it out we have a really awesome video showing how we make monster sounds with our voice and also how to make fighting sounds and then we go have a new video going over underwater sounds putting out a new video every single week this was only an introduction into sound design there were a lot of things that we didn't cover yet so if you want to get to the next level go check them out because sound design can be an excellent way into the games industry every game needs owns and sounds have an absolutely massive impact on how games feels though sound design is important as hell every game development team needs sounds hope you had a good time watching this video hope you got a lot out of it and have a rough idea of how to create sound effects now and the next one

Channel: Jonas Tyroller

Views: 285,825

Keywords: how to make sound effects, sound design, sound design tutorial, how to make sound effects for games, sound effects tutorial, audacity tutorial, how to make game sounds, how to make video game sounds, how to make sound effects easy, sound design for beginners, audacity for beginners, sound design introduction, video game sounds, game sounds, make sound effects, sound design basics, making game sounds, free game sounds, audacity sound design, game development, game dev

Id: Kux_LvRl57U

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 30 2019