#soundfx

Varial - Empty Club / Eurorack Jungle Techno Breakcore Drum and Bass

This is a message adressed to every person who records, has recorded and will ever record sound effects.

As a very frustrated sound mixer and collector of all kind of odd noises and sound bits, I have perused many a sound bank online. I know that a lot of people who record and post royalty free sound effects (and sometimes even people who sell sound effects for money, ahem) don’t necessarily know how to name them properly.

Naming a sound file is extremely important, as a sound mixer/editor will have tens of thousands of files coming from dozens of different sources and will need to rely on the file names to search quickly for what they need, and renaming every single file you download from a bank is not the kind of work they should be doing.

So how can you make their life easier? There are elements that should be part of the name [with examples].

-> Type of sound [Impact, Footsteps, Whoosh, Stabbing, Crushing, Voice, Music, Ambiance etc...] - What kind of sound is it? Did you hit something, scrape something? If it’s a voice, is it a scream, a laugh, a mumble? -> Object/Material(s) [Metal, Leather, Car, Heels, Rifle, Suitcase, Paper, Wood, Wet, Dirt etc...] - What did you use to make the sound? What kind of material are the things made of? -> Length [Short, Medium, Long etc...] - How long are the sounds in the file? This has nothing to do with the length of the file, just with the sounds themselves. -> Intensity [Soft, Loud, Hard etc...] - How hard did you hit the thing/scrape the thing ? How loudly did you scream/cry?

There are exceptions to this : an ambiance doesn’t need a Length qualifier, a voice might need more information attached to it (gender, high or low pitched, number of people etc...), and music does too. If you’re not sure what to put, imagine that you’re trying to find a sound like this in a big database : what kind of word should you be able to find it with?

Examples of good file names :

“IMPACT_Wood_Axe_Short_Hard.wav” “Jennysounds car engine idle start Toyota Yaris 69 VVT-i.wav” “MUMBAI-CITY-STREET-AMBIANCE-cars-conversations-car horns-soft wind.wav”

There are a few rules to remember :

- You can make the name as long as necessary. Don’t be afraid to add more if you think it can be useful.

- You don’t have to just put the stricly useful things in there, don’t restrict yourself to those if you want to add your name for example. What matters is that the descriptive elements are in there.

- You can and should add what the sound is “supposed to be”, like if you recorded a growl for a monster, even if you recorded it with a human voice, do add “Monster” in the name.

- If you’re precise, be also vague : naming the precise model of gun and ammo you used will help the people looking specifically for this model of gun or ammo, but most people will look for “gun” or “rifle”, so add less precise qualifiers as well.

 My first public musical performance. Performed in the Pace Studio of De Montfort University.