How to make Impact sound effects and the basics of IR Reverbs…
Impact sound effects are hugely common in electronic music – from intros to build-ups, they’re a great way of creating continuity.
There are several ways of going about creating your own unique Impact sound effects, using or manipulating samples or synthesizing your own from scratch. A very common effect used in the process of creating impacts is of course a Reverb, simply running your kick or any other percussive sample from your track through a decent Reverb is enough to create a good sounding Impact sound effect.
If you’re already comfortable with synthesizing your own kick sounds from scratch, then even better – you have a LOT more control over the resulting sound when you have access to the synth parameters as oppose to just the sampled sound. Furthermore, using a synth plugin is a far easier way of determining the pitch of the sound, and setting it to the key of your track can help to create a sense of continuity going into a breakdown.
Let’s talk about Reverbs…
Keep in mind, Reverbs are a very subjective topic – everyone has their own favourites. I personally enjoy the depth and variety that Impulse Response Reverbs offer, not only do you have the ability to load your own samples as Impulse Responses, you also usually get a wide variety of parameters to manipulate the loaded sample. You can also create your own impulse responses of effects racks or hardware reverbs you may have, but that’s a topic for another day!
Cubase has a wide selection of Reverbs built-in, but for those who aren’t Cubase users, check out Convology XT, it’s a free IR Reverb (They offer paid addon packs, but the base plugin is free), visit their website here.
There’s also an awesome Impulse Response library by Samplicity sampled from a Bricasti M7 Reverb, check that out here.
I’ve made a video with a run-down on how to create these impact sound effects using samples and synthesising them from scratch, check that out here:
[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/5sX5MOs4SC0″]
