I have a lot of sound FX in a project I'm working on, and I'm not sure how to create them. Some are easy, and others I'm not sure.

The ones I need are:

Punches/kicks
A materialization from nowhere sound
A slightly different materialization from nowhere sound
Two or three more variations on that theme.

I tried a site someone recommended, "findsounds.com," but too many of the effects they had were 8 bit, and sound fairly low quality. 16 bit, 44k versions were not available. If anyone has any ideas on how to create these sounds, let me know.

I saw some show a long time ago where a guy was beating celery with a stick for the punch/kick sounds, but I tried it and it definitely didn't sound right.

Was it fresh or frozen celery?

It was straight out of fridge celery.

I always get a kick out of movies that use those cartoonish "face punch" sound effects for supposedly "realistic" action. I saw one of those "Making of ?" shows a long time ago about a sound engineer who wanted more realism. One thing he needed was a face punch sound...so he visited his friendly neighborhood butcher to record the sound of punching a big slab of meat.

As far as body kicks and body punches, I'd think that recording someone punching a punchbag would be fine combined with the "oof" sound the person makes who has just been kicked.

I once read that for Raging Bull the sound designers brought a pig's carcass into the sound studio and they started hitting it with just about anything you could imagine. From rubber gloves to baseball bats and hammers. Also the recorded cutting into it with a knife. Sometimes they sprayed water on the carcass before hitting it.

In the end every punch heard in the film is built from a dozen layers of these punches with a different balance.

Bar3nd

Hi Josh,
Try this site:

http://www.sounddogs.com/cdlib.asp?Type=2

I hope this can help you out. Here you will find a lot of different sounds in different qualities, and you can listen to them all (I think?).

Well, anyway...

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and everybody else in our community!

Ivan

Pounding on meat seems reasonable, however don't dismiss your 8 bit options unless they need to be a dominate element of your track. If you bump them to 16 bit, and use them at 50% or less of original normal volume, I doubt if you'll notice any loss of quality, especially with this type of sound efx. If your track has music, it's even less of a concern.

Clip them tight to minimize any noise.

If you get a sound you like but the quailty is poor, try and up sample it. You may be surprised by the results. I recently got three albums to master that sounded like dookie, I up sampled them to 24bit 96Khz, and almost magically they sounded tons better. If it really sucks you probably can't polish it enough, but it's worth a try. Also try a small bamboo stick (like the green ones used for plants) whacked on a pillow, you'll get a nice whoosh too. If you decide to pound on some meat let us know and we can all come over for chicken fried steak afterwards! (I'll make the gravey)
my 2 cents
Mark
p.s. you KNOW you are welcome to come to the studio (or my home studio) to try it Josh.