D&D Sound Effects?


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Your body.

Place a mike in contact with your stomach for example and record at maximum volume. If you have a sound editor, fool around with the sound, until you come up with something you like.

The more you experimint with sounds, the more you know what it is like to be a sound editor working on a movie, or simply a foley artist.
 



I've recently been entertaining the idea of working sound effects into my games via computer as well. I went and downloaded rpgsoundmixer which is a great tool (and pretty inexpenive at about $20 USD) which not only comes with a god selection of sound effects and fantasy tracks, but the heart of the program allows you to set up "sound scenarios" that allow you to easily access all of those sound effects and muscial scores through hotkeys. You can integrate them in about any fashion you wish. I haven't used the program in a game yet (I will be this weekend) but I think it will go over fantastic.

Although rpgsoundmixer comes with a variety of sound effects, there are some other good sources out there that you can download onto your computer and then add them to the soundmixer directory for use in its program.

Here are some good sources I've found:

Toxic Bag Productions: http://toxicbag.com/gmc.sht

Midnight Syndicate CDs (musical scores, no special effects): http://www.midnightsyndicate.com/

A good source for finding sound effects on the web: http://www.findsounds.com/

If you peruse the rpgsoundmixer boards, you'll find some good links in there for sources of sound effects as well. Warning: rpgsoundmixer is a german company, but they do their best to translate information into english, but the boards are a mix of english and german.

Good luck!
 


I've taken sound effects from EverQuest, Doom, F.E.A.R., WoW, and Neverwinter Nights (as well as few oddball ones here and there) and used them for my games. I use a program called Audacity when I want to mix a loop (prepared before the game, naturally).

To play the sounds, I use VLC Media Player because it is very light (on system resources) and I can open multiple copies of it simultaneously. So before the game, I may have a handful of ambient sound loops ready to go (e.g. thunderstorm, drippy caves, wading through water) and I'll also have some event- or npc-based sounds ready too (e.g. a sudden strike of lightning, a dragon's roar, a huge door slamming shut).

My players really have taken to it.
 



Halloween sound effects CDs are also a good source for various dungeon sounds - creaking/slamming doors, chains, torture, etc. usually inexpensive, especially the day AFTER Halloween.
 

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