Tag Archives: special FX

Sounds of the Season 2: War Eagles!

audiobook adventure, audiobooks, Genre - Fantasy Stories, Two-World Tuesday,

Because Sometimes Only Hearing is Believing

I believe good sound FX are always in season and for those interested I’ll be sharing some on my site, while I work through projects as an audiobook narrator.

Many times my FX are drawn from a marvelous website called Freesound.org.  I cut, slice and alter them using effects found in the Audacity tool (also free to download and use). Sometimes I create the sound myself, using my voice or things to hand.

Featured Sound: Giant Eagle

I don’t know if I ever had more fun than when narrating the ripping adventure yarn by Debbie Bishop known as War Eagles. This Indiana Jones-level barnstormer was intended by Merian C. Cooper as a follow-up to his work on King Kong back in the 1930s. I mean, lost tribe of Vikings rides giant eagles to fight the Nazis, what else could you want from a story! But the heart of it, of course, was being able to replicate the sound of the eagles themselves.

Here’s the sound:

How It Sounded

I built this sound on one of many terrific entries by user “CraigSmith”, called eagle-cries (#437968). The background noise needed reduction, and I lowered the pitch slightly (I always seem to want to pull the sound lower!) as well as adding some echo.

How It Looks

Many fantasy fans will be familiar with the Giant Eagles of Tolkien and this certainly hearkens to those. I also think of the epic hawk, eagle and condor cries from that fabulous cartoon series Johnny Quest.

Here are giant eagles doing their thing, with Orcs standing in for the Nazis, from The One Wiki to Rule Them All:

Hope you’re enjoying the ride with these fun FX. War Eagles the audiobook is available on Audible and I can highly recommend it if you’d like a rollicking adventure tale that quite literally “flies by”.

Sounds of the Season: Stone Statues

audiobook adventure, Genre-Fantasy, Lands of Hope, Two-World Tuesday, ,

Because Sometimes Only Hearing is Believing

I believe good sound FX are always in season and for those interested I’ll be sharing some on my site, while I work through projects as an audiobook narrator.

Many times my FX are drawn from a marvelous website called Freesound.org.  I cut, slice and alter them using effects found in the Audacity tool (also free to download and use). Sometimes I create the sound myself, using my voice or things to hand.

Featured Sound: Stone Statues

In Harbingers of Hope, the adventurers are in a strange, glass-walled dungeon of sorts known as the Hopeward. In a bisected chamber stand two ten-foot tall marble statues of armored warriors, one white and one black. And just as you would expect, when the glass-doors open to admit them, the statues move to attack. Here’s the sound:

How It Sounded

I built most of the sound from two FX on Freesound:

  • “Ertfelda” created hidden wall opening (#243699)
  • “Jamesrodavidson” created dinosaur footsteps (#192365)

I added some Distortion and lowered the pitch a step.

How It Looks

Here’s a quick attempt at him (the black one, natch), from another wonderful site where you can design and print out your own figurines, called Hero Forge:

So now you know what a pile of carved marble sounds like when it’s coming to make you a part of the cavern floor. Harbingers of Hope will be out in audiobook format this fall.