BOOM ONE UPDATE: CRACKS, BREAKS, AND UI MOVEMENT

BOOM ONE is your reliable source of fresh, new cutting edge sounds, updated every month. And we hope you’re hungry for effects this time around, as our latest upload is full of salad bar crunching, along with sounds to liven up your UI design and make your audio more animated.

ADDING SOME CRUNCH

In our ongoing quest to provide you with the best sounds to further your designs, we’ve turned to helping you design some huge cracks, breaks, and crunches. This latest update is a massive layering toolkit, turning to some of the classic vegetable-breaking methods as well as getting up close to falls and collapses so you don’t have to.

Layering is akin to weaving a sonic tapestry. It’s where ordinary sounds collide, fuse, and emerge as something extraordinary. It’s about creating depth and texture. Cabbage and other vegetable breaks, with their raw, crispy high-ends, regularly serve as the basis for bone crunches and gore – admittedly over-the-top to drive in the visceral action. Where other cracks and breaks are harder to imitate with vegetation, we’ve gone to directly recording the authentic sounds.

We’ve included:

• Food: Cabbage cracks, breaks, squishes
• Ceramics: Breaks, scrapes, fragment movements
• Pasta: Cracks
• Eggshell: Cracks, grinding, movement
• Pepper: Cracks and tears
• Glass: Breaking, smashing, crunching, shards movement, friction
• Plastic debris: Cracks, crackles, breaks
• Brick and clay wall: Impacts, bricks falling
• Wood: Breaks, stressed cracks, tears

UI DESIGN

The sounds of a user interface are like the secret spices in a gourmet dish – often overlooked, but essential for creating a memorable experience. At worst, they’re simply sounds that give us a notification that something in the app has happened. At best, they’re little earcons that feed us the information we need to streamline the use of the app, giving us a little Pavlovian reaction and jolt of dopamine. Shortly put: Good UI sounds make app interactions much more enjoyable.

One focus of this BOOM ONE update was on crafting modern sounds with an intense sense of movement. Visuals must feel that they’re whipping across the screen, and it takes a bag of sonic tricks to really get them moving and cause them to pop out at you.

For the user interface sounds, we explored two different ideas: keeping it organic, and intense processing.

Keeping it organic

Depending on the source sound, organic sounds can add either a touch of humanity and warmth, or – if metallic materials are used – some chill and depth. They resonate with our senses, grasping at sounds our minds can already identify, and thus carry over the nuances and conditionings of those sounds.

When crafting the organic user interface sounds included here, we wanted to only add subtle touches of processing, just enough to give them a vibrant energy. Here we used various materials we could scrape, like combs, ratchets, and uneven metal bodies. For more “constant and smooth” sounds, we used a lot of scraping and friction elements from smooth surfaces. And then there was a general playground of sound with bicycle chains, fishing rods, metal latches, and more.

Upping the intensity

Of course, there’s sometimes when a nice, natural sound just won’t cut it. Like with modern, sci-fi and thriller settings, you need more raw dynamics and power with your sounds, sounds that bend nature and challenge the extremes. So, we made sure to include high-quality effects that are much more futuristic, modern, abstract, and larger-than-life.

It’s all about experimenting and trying to get incredibly unique and interesting results. Here we took a heavy-handed approach, often using over 10 FX plug-ins per sound.

For instance, we might use a transient shaper to bring out a rattle. Then we’d modulate the wet and dry signal on a frequency shifter to give a kind of phaser. Then create a tremolo effect with some ring modulation, some EQing to get it all polished and mixed well together, some dynamic processing to further glue it in, and delay and reverb to add some depth and room.

Another popular approach we often did was to use the delta from restoration plug-ins like Izotope deClick or our Debird. The delta from these plugins is everything that usually gets removed from the audio signal to revive restoration. So instead of cutting those sounds out, we would use only those sounds, and further work on them to craft them to full-fledged audio FX in their own right. There’s no such thing as an unwanted sound, just an untapped potential.

EXTRA TREATS

That wasn’t all we included with this update. We’ve also put in some odds and ends like every month. In this group of additional sound effects, we’ve got a vintage rotary dial telephone and additional wood handling sounds. There’s also a real treat for any scenes of celebration: some Ambisonics B-Format (AmbiX) New Years Eve fireworks.

GET BOOM ONE TODAY

As we explore these themes of digital movement and destruction, we invite you to dive deeper into the world of sound design with BOOM ONE. Recorded and curated by our skilled team of sound designers who are always willing to push the envelope and try out new methods and techniques, we make sure you have the hottest and freshest collection of sounds available. Our BOOM ONE subscription is more than just a library – it’s a gateway to inspiration.

Discover the sound of BOOM ONE. Subscribe today and let us accompany you on your creative journey.

Already own BOOM ONE and have used our effects on some recent big projects? Let us know! We’re happy to share your work and would be thrilled to highlight your career in our blog.