I’ve been foraging through sound effects libraries for 15 years. It’s a great feeling when I can find what I need without leaving my desk or putting work on pause to go find and capture it. But inevitably, I always have to mess with sounds to place them where I want them to be. I’m not talking about outrageous, weird science fiction-type SFX, but everyday sound effects that probably weren’t recorded on set.

I add reverb, delay, and/or eq to create the correct depth of field to match the ambient space of the visuals for which I’m designing. Sounds diffuse in a room, which helps us identify and locate them. Most Foley and SFX sound like the recordist was going for some sort of ASMR thing – the microphone is WAY too close to the sound source.

I also always adjust the stereo spread. When you take a stereo microphone and record a frying egg up close, you’re getting too much left/right information. When was the last time you stuck your ear up to a frying pan? Our minds don’t even perceive a sound like this as a frying egg, because we’ve likely never experienced it from mere inches away. So I pan the sides toward the center, almost to mono, remove a bunch of high-frequency information, add room ambience, and turn it down until it sounds realistic. I go through these two processes on probably 95% of the SFX I get from libraries.

When I need a sound that I can’t find in a library, I set up my Sennheiser MKH 416-P48U3 and record it about three or four feet away. The Sennheiser is a well-known on-set production boom mic, also great for voice-over and automated dialogue replacement (ADR), the process of re-recording an actor’s dialogue in a studio during post-production. I’ve used it for rustling clothes, zippers, footsteps, rubbing hands, thumps, drops, mouth sounds, crumpling paper…everything cloth, walking, and props. It’s the one mic that I use every day. Highly recommended.

However, I don’t carry a bunch of sound gear everywhere I go. For film work, you can never have enough sounds – exterior ambience, vehicles, wind, waves, rain, tools, dogs barking, crowds, etc. If I’m not at my desk and hear something I want, I record Foley/SFX on my iPhone with the Voice Memos app. The iPhone has an omnidirectional mic, or close to it, which means it captures sound in every direction.

With phone recordings, I get a mono, lossless m4a file. I rarely need to do any of the time-consuming reverb/delay/eq work, because the sound was captured in 360 degrees, preserving the natural ambience of where I captured it. No ASMR-ish, overly close recordings. As with the Sennheiser studio-recorded mono sounds, I can easily route the audio to a short reverb if it needs a little stereo width. It’s amazing how well the iPhone recordings integrate into virtually any sound design project with no tweaking.

Talk a look below at some of the sounds I’ve recorded on my phone. Many of these ended up in films on major streaming services.

The idea is to strive for true to life realism when it comes to everyday sounds. Imagine that you’re in the room where it’s happening. Is it too close? Too detailed? If thumbing through sound libraries and trying to ‘make’ sounds work eats up too much time and in your projects, I urge you to try recording sounds yourself. Or hire me to help!

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