Put a sound in a place

About 8 minutes

You will build a rumbling impact in a big stone room, then place a ping to the right of it. You will learn noise colour, Reverb and Pan.

Start from nothing

Open a blank sound (opens in a new tab)

1. A burst of noise that closes down

  1. Press + Noise. Set Length to 0.4 and Volume to 0.3.
  2. Switch on Filter (lowpass), set Cutoff to 3000 and Sweeps to to 200.
  3. Play. A whoosh of static, like the explosion lesson's first step.

Hear step 1 (opens in a new tab)

2. Change the colour of the noise

Noise comes in colours. White is bright static. Pink is softer and warmer, like rain or wind. Brown is a deep rumble, like thunder or an engine.

  1. Under Noise, set Colour to brown.
  2. Play. The same sweep, now with weight. Try pink too, then put it back to brown.

Hear step 2 (opens in a new tab)

3. Put it in a room

Reverb is the wash of echoes a room adds to a sound. A small room is short and tight; a cave or a cathedral is long.

  1. Switch on Reverb. Set Room length to 1.5.
  2. Play. The rumble now carries on after it stops, fading away. Look at the layers' count line: the sound is longer than its layer, because it includes the room's tail.
  3. Amount is how much of the room you hear. Try 0.1 for a hint of air and 1 for a drowned, far-away sound, then leave it at the default.

Hear step 3 (opens in a new tab)

Reverb costs more to play than the other effects. Use it on the sounds that need a place (impacts, magic, voices) and leave it off quick, frequent ones such as footsteps and shots.

4. Place it left and right

Pan moves a layer between the left and right speakers. It is heard on stereo speakers or headphones, and a download becomes a stereo file when any layer is panned.

  1. Select the noise layer and set Pan to -0.6 (left; the hint beside it says so).
  2. Press + Tone. Set Pitch to 880, Starts at to 0.3, Length to 0.25, Volume to 0.15 and Pan to 0.6.
  3. Switch on Reverb on it too, with a Room length of 1.5.
  4. Wearing headphones, play: a rumble on the left, then a ping that rings out on the right.

Hear the finished scene (opens in a new tab)

Panning is for sounds that come from somewhere. A sound the player causes, such as a jump, usually stays in the middle; a distant explosion or an enemy off to one side gets a pan. In a game you can also pan the whole sound when you play it.