WIP Wednesday #2 - Designing a lighthouse for your ear (and a .wav gift!)
This week I want to share a fun little sound I made for Episode 13 of The Witches of Wederra Keep! In this episode there's a lighthouse, and I wanted to make a mysterious tone that would capture some of the sound of a rotating lighthouse lamp and a feeling that it was passing over you.
I found some base components - squeaky gates from Soundly and another set of Squeaks and Moans from a royalty free sound pack somewhere deep in the internet.

Each one alone maybe had characteristics of what I wanted, but wasn't quite right. I started playing with fading in and out, spiking the volume and layering them in different places to get a kind of shifting tone that, to me, almost mimics a doppler effect. To enhance this, I later added a pan - a bit deeper on the trailing part of the sound. I normally let Julian who does mixing and mastering take care of the depth (in this case, how much right and left it is), but because it's such a repetitive element I wanted to do a first pass on it.

I know it's a lot of work for a simple background effect, but I think this attention to detail helps me achieve my vision of what this show can be and how I can help paint an audio picture for an audience. I like to think it's this intention and effort that earned me a Best Sound Design nomination from NJ Webfest this year!
Below, for paid subscribers, you can have a .wav of the sound itself for your own use, and a preview clip of how it sounds in an unmastered work in progress of The Witches of Wederra Keep Episode 13 π