What exactly is the difference between our CONSTRUCTION KIT and our DESIGNED sound packs? That’s a very good question. Read a detailed explanation behind the break.
What is this “Construction Kit” vs “Designed” in our products all about? This question pops up every now and then, so we will try to explain a little bit, what the differences are and why we offer those two different sets of sounds per sound-topic. First a rough and brief description, before we get into details.
“Construction Kit” collections: Those sets contain sounds as raw as possible and only as processed as needed for a specific topic, perfectly organized to make it easy for you to use them. Carefully selected, those sounds give you all the freedom and possibilities you need to design your own sounds within the given topic from scratch. For some topics it is difficult to provide recordings only, so you will find some pre-processed or synthesizer based sounds in those collections as well, but still only basic material, since we don’t want to offer it compressed to the maximum or similarly mutated. After all, the “Construction Kit” serves as such for ourselves, namely in the following process of creating the respective “Designed” collection.
“Designed” collections: The Designed collections feature fully designed sounds which originate from the “Construction Kit” stock. The sounds are of a specific topic and ready to use: mixed, processed, compressed, mastered etc. They can be easily put into all kind of projects, for example trailers, commercials, movies, TV shows and so forth or used as in-game sounds. This collection provides a quick and easy workflow and you can still use those sounds as a basic and layer, stretch or otherwise adjust them to suit your specific needs.
For the sake of completeness: there are some libraries which are not split up into those two categories. Those libraries feature content which simply isn’t meant to be designed in any way. For example animal recordings: you can use them to create new sounds like monsters and creatures, but still, the topic itself doesn’t really demand for a “Designed” version.
Why the hell do we take this effort? There are several reasons actually. With the “Designed” versions you benefit from our creativity, mixing skills and experience. Those “Designed” collections have been used in a massive amount of movie trailers, movies, games, TV shows and even at the official live introduction show of Olympia. Those collections are probably what you would expect, looking for an extraordinary well-produced pack of sound effects. We initially started with those packs for our own usage in our daily business as sound designers / sound editors. We still use them on a daily basis and are extremely glad to be able to have direct access to these sounds, especially when productions with very tight deadlines or budgets are involved and we still want the quality to be top-notch. Fortunately, our customers’ feedback confirms that.
The “Construction Kit” nowadays fills a gap which we found third party libraries sadly lacking in. Whenever we wanted to design sounds from scratch in the past, we had to go out to record new material. From our point of view, the problem is: these other libraries never contain enough variations of similar sounds and they were mostly edited in a way not suiting our workflow or already processed too heavily, so that we were not able to mix them in as desired. Of course you can use those sounds unaltered, but they are intended to be tools for creative and skillful usage. For a more detailed explanation, the “Guns” library probably serves as the best example: once a multitrack recording has been processed and furthermore mixed into stereo, you can’t go back to the original recordings. That is why we offer the raw channels of the multitrack recording; you can mix tons of unique gun sounds out of the raw multichannel files of the “Construction Kit” – however, using solely the “Construction Kit”, you do have to mix and process them to get cinematic gunshot sounds.
We are using selected top-notch equipment like high frequency response microphones to provide awesome material that excels especially in situations where heavy processing is applied. The durability of these recordings will last far into the future: their high quality will still be as good in about 20 years and probably even increasing its value until then. For example, it might be very difficult to record todays’ cars in about 20 years… Since our recordings are not processed too much, you will still be able to create up-to-date “Designed” material with them for a very long time.
We hope that clarifies things for you. ☺ If you have any further questions don’t hesitate to contact us via service@boomlibrary.com or Facebook.
