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Sound Effects / Sounds Wanted!
  • RRRRRRRR

    I've been looking for some very particular sounds these last couple of days and I was thinking that we might be able to help each other collectively with wanted / hard to find sounds.. Feel free to add your own wanted list or provide sounds for others!

    Personally, I'm looking for the sounds of buzzing flies or one buzzing fly and of mice moving about / screeching.

  • 10 Replies sorted by
  • JackBayerJackBayer

    There´s a CD series on iTunes you could try, it´s called "Natural sounds of the Wilderness".

  • RecklessReckless

    If you haven't checked out freesound.org before you should give it a shot they have a pretty extensive collection.

  • RRRRRRRR

    Thanks for the suggestion, guys.. but I'm afraid they don't have what I'm looking for. Great resources though!

  • Mark_the_HarpMark_the_Harp

    Have you tried rats? I recorded some of those while at the BBC. By the way I discovered rats and mice don't particularly squeak unless you squeeze their tails - but don't tell the animal cruelty people. I borrowed 36 of them from a pet shop and only discovered about the squeaking once I'd set up for recording. I don't have this recording any more otherwise you'd be welcome to it. If you can't find free rat / mouse sounds, could you just fake it with mouth sounds? Bats? Something else, speeded up? Or maybe you could steal audio from a youtube track, such as this one - the squeaks with no background sounds could be noise-reduced and by the time they're in a mix of other things it will sound fine: http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=O-arhKPfDrc (remove the gap in the url)

    We had access to thousands and thousands of sound effects in my job but it was still a matter of doing things to them before they were useful - changing the speed, layering them, editing them etc, because they're seldom exactly what you want unfortunately.

  • RRRRRRRR

    yeah, I doubt I will find something that is the finished article, I just need the right sound to be able to get the effect that is desired.. their movement is pretty silent so I guess it would need to be sound coming from f.i. paper or something similar as they move about. I'm now onto the idea of using rat / mouse sounds from a film, since there are fly sounds in the opening scene in "Once Upon A Time In the West" that could be used. In this case the sounds will be used in a performance, so it's a bit easier concerning copyright.

    And yes, I've tried rats..

    If I can't find anything good I'll just have to try and create some sounds of my own.

  • soundgh2soundgh2

    More rats inc :)

  • Mark_the_HarpMark_the_Harp

    As an aside I had a colleague had a lot of fun with sound FX when he worked in radio and TV. He once played the sound of a wasp into the radio announcer's headphones at a sports event, so the guy was swatting away at an invisible wasp during his commentary. We also used to play sound effects roulette - you'd pick a random effect from the big catalogue and were required to work it in somewhere during a live broadcast. I once worked in the sound of a cheering crowd during a Russian news bulletin and got away with it. There was also a famous recording of tortoises mating which appeared somewhere on most children's programmes in the 1980s, thanks to a particular outbreak of sound effect madness (or boredom) in BBC Schools Radio.

  • RRRRRRRR

    hehehe, great stories @Mark_the_Harp such things are what make relatively boring jobs fun... :)

  • killagramkillagram

    @Mark_the_Harp great stories, man. I used to work as a sound engineer at a 24/7 news station in Florida. On our soundboard used for news segments we had various sound effects including pigs squealing and other embarrassing noises. During live telecasts I'd make some of our anchor people crack up by playing them (at a lower volume) or solely into their monitors. As RRRR says, sometimes you just have to spice up an otherwise dull position.

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