- Top Gun, surely the movie of this year.
Well, watch to the end of this video
as I create some of the sound effects and voiceovers
from the movie and let me know in the comments,
which is your favorite.
(airplane engine)
Okay. Let's hop in.
I've got Adobe Audition on my screen
and I'm ready to record.
Now later on, we'll have a look at some of these beautiful
sound effects I've recorded just around the house.
That's how easy it is to make the sound effects.
But first of all,
I'm gonna go ahead and start a brand new audio file here.
I'm gonna call this VO and I'm generally just gonna do
a plain voiceover
saying some of Mr. Cruz's favorite lines
from the movie like, good morning aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
I probably can't do it in a British accent. Can I?
Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
Was that good? Let's try one more time.
Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
Do I sound more Australian? I don't know.
No turning back now.
Here we go. In 3, 2, 1.
So we got enough there, haven't we?
Let's take this.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
- Let's take that.
And let's just chop out everything we don't need.
So we've got this.
- [Recording] No turning back now.
- And we've got...
- [Recording] Here we go in 3, 2, 1.
- Perfect voiceover to work on there.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and use favorites
and I'm gonna normalize this to .1 and that could
probably do with a little bit more.
And what I'm essentially doing is just making this all
a little bit louder so we can hear this nice and clearly.
And I'm gonna apply all the voice effects right here
in the wave form view.
Obviously I've got lovely spectral open.
This helps me when I'm working with sound effects.
I might close it for now, shift and D to close,
all this icon up here and now I can really work away
on the Tom cruise stuff.
So what's going on in Top Gun?
What exactly is happening with Tom Cruise's voice?
Well, one of the major elements is that there
is a bit of a roll off in the low end of the voice.
So a lot of the base has gone to get that kind
of airline pilot sound.
And that's really easy to do in software
like Adobe Audition.
You simply go ahead. I'm gonna use this effects track
so I can jiggle these effects round as I need.
And we'd go into filter an EQ and we'd roll off the low end.
Super simple way to do this is actually to pull in
a scientific filter like that,
and if you look at the presets,
there's a really good one here called
drop off below 250 Hertz. So let's listen to it with it on.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
- And then let's take that effect off.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
- So notice in the first line there, I sound more full,
more rich, more studio recorded, if you like.
And then in the second version.
- [Recording] Here we go, in 3, 2, 1.
- There you go. That's applied. And this is without.
- [Recording] Here we go in 3, 2, 1.
- So I'm gonna add that in straight away
and leave that there.
What I'll also do is add a little bit of compression
because what tends to happen when airline pilots
are up in the air, they're using these microphones,
they're close to their mouth and their voice is very loud
and it has to be loud. It can't have loads of dynamics,
loads of peaks and troughs because otherwise pilots wouldn't
be able to be heard over the other machinery going on.
So I will go ahead and I will go to
amplitude and compression dynamics.
And I'm gonna add a very basic compressor here.
So we'll leave the threshold where it is.
We'll crank the ratio right up,
maybe an extreme of five there.
We'll pull the tack and release down,
so it works really hard on the voice,
and if we look at the preview mode now you can see
how that voice has been compressed in the second one.
Let's turn the makeup gain up.
So we've still got quite a loud voice. There we go.
A little bit more, I think, and play from the start.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
- Sounding really good.
- [Recording] No turning back now.
- Okay. So we are getting there and there's just
one final element I'm going to introduce,
and it's very, very subtle.
You might notice this if you've watched the movie
or seen the trailer or whatever,
is that there's some kind of like,
just like airline kind of distortion,
light level distortion, nothing too intense.
And we're gonna put this on.
We're gonna put it on as the third effect here,
but it may be that I need to jiggle that up to be
in the first effect slot. It might be more effective there.
I'll explain a bit about that if I go ahead and do that.
So again, to do this in Audition, I'm just going to Special,
because it's a special effect and I'm looking
for distortion.
I'm looking for the right kind of distortion.
Now I can jiggle these lines around to make distortion.
There's some epic presets as well.
Green Room Angus. That's probably gonna be too loud.
We might need to open the dynamics and just whack down the
makeup, 'cause he's too loud that pilot.
Now I think this is gonna be probably too much.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
- Yeah. It's not too bad actually.
Infinite distortion. We definitely don't want that.
That just looks like ruined. I'm not even gonna play that.
It'll hurt your ears.
This one's quite good.
- [Recording] Good morning.
- No, that's probably too much.
So far, I like the Green Room.
Maximum Pain, will avoid that.
Ooh, Pick Scalpel that looks good.
- [Recording] Good morning avi....
- No that's too much.
- [Recording] Good morning.
- Too much there again. Snake Skin.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
- Ooh, this is good. Snake Skin and Green Room.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
- Now, even though that's a lot louder
and I can actually turn down the output dial here,
that's actually sounding better.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
- So I would say that's pretty much done now.
- [Recording] No, turning back now.
Here we go, in 3, 2, 1.
- Okay. So that's great.
So actually what I'm going to do is I'm gonna apply this
and we're going to save this as VOFX.
So we know we've got that.
I'll also undo that and save the version without
all the effects. So we'll go ahead.
Actually, we'll save this as a custom rack
and I'll tell you why, so we'll call this Top Gun,
and I will now just get rid of those for the moment.
And I'm gonna save this as a plain VO file,
which actually that was not my intention,
applying the effects, saving it and then undoing.
Let's do that. Right?
And get rid of these effects now default,
and we'll save this as just VO.
That's what I meant to do as well.
So we've got the clean file I will go into Multitrack.
I'm gonna use Multitrack maybe for some
of the sound effects as well.
And we'll use just a default template here.
I'm gonna bring the voice over in like this.
I'm going to apply to track one, the Top Gun.
There it is. Top Gun effects.
- [Recording] Good morning aviators.
- But instead of using the distortion here,
I'm actually going to take it and I'm going to do something
quite clever here. I'm going to send this to a bus track.
So a mono buss track here.
So I'm actually sending the output of this to the bus track
and I can choose how much of this audio I send
because on the bus track, I can add the distortion,
which gives me a little control as to how much
distortion I have. So this is more of a pro tip.
Special. Distortion.
And I might go for that more aggressive Snake Skin one.
- [Recording] Good morning aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
- Now there's no, notice there's no distortion.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
- Now it is sending to Bus A here.
Let's just call this Distort Top Gun, like that,
but I can control how much distortion I have by turning
this volume nob up here. See it's nothing at the moment.
So if I turn that up, you'll actually hear,
let's actually zoom right in on this Shift D to get rid
of unused tracks, control or command back slash
to zoom right in.
- [Recording] Good morning aviator.
- Now let's turn this up.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
- So you see, I can finally control now using
this volume dial how much distortion we get.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking. Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
- Yeah, and I think around there we're in a good place.
So I might mix that down and actually save
that entire session. And we'll call this one...
That's a weird bit of distortion.
Then it's like a little crackly click.
Anyway, let's save that.
And we'll save that as VO Top Gun Multi
to indicate that it's the multi track.
And we'll put that in my downloads folder. That's done.
Okay, fantastic.
Now we'll get onto some sound effects and I had some fun
with a vacuum cleaner let's look at spectral frequency here,
Shift D to open that up, look at the frequencies.
And actually it might be a good idea for me
to drag in the video, as I was recording a vacuum.
Our vacuum on a Rode Wireless Go,
you can see there, there's the Rode Wireless.
I actually held it up to the vacuum on the second take,
'cause I got a better piece of audio there,
but here on the first piece of audio,
I actually started the vacuum up.
Like so (vacuum whirls).
It's only coming from the left hand side,
by the way, you might notice.
And then I cycle through to go further.
But what I can actually do,
now we kind of know what's going on there with the video,
pull it right back down.
And I love this kind of (motor powers down) like that.
So we could kind of create a jet engine
or something like that.
I'm just gonna mute out the right.
I'm gonna take this left and I'm gonna take some of that.
Copy it into its own audio file. We'll call this,
what should we call this? Let's call this just, yeah,
Airplane. Let's do it, paste it in.
And we've got (engine sound) that's nice.
OK, cool.
(engine sound)
Now what I can actually do,
one of my favorite effects to introduce is time and pitch,
the pitch bender. And now I can draw on the kind of sounds.
I want to go (distorted engine sound).
Something like that.
And I can even (distorted engine sound).
That's probably a little too much.
(distorted engine sound)
That's kind of like lowering the pitch there
is definitely introducing that airplane sound.
(engine sound)
And then we'll bring it up at the end.
(distorted engine sound)
That's good.
And I'm gonna do a real pitch down at the end as well.
(distorted engine sound)
Nice.
Okay. I'm feeling quite good about that.
And now we'll simply drag this into Multitrack
to have a play with it.
We can keep maybe my Tom Cruise style sounds
and we'll bring this into its own track here.
So we're gonna bring in this and place that.
Actually we didn't need the video version. Do we?
All we need is my copied vacuum. Where is that?
That's there the Airplane. Okay.
Let's grab this, fade this in here and sort of play it back.
Might be a bit loud.
So we'll turn it down a bit in the mix here.
- [Recording] Good morning aviators.
This is your captain.
- Okay. And then on this track,
I'm also gonna add a little bit of reverb.
Definitely reverb is needed.
Studio reverb is good and we can go for,
let's grow for the Great Hall. Let's try that.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain.
- Okay. So that's sounding quite good.
So let's actually move this voiceover along a bit.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
No, turning back now,
here we go, in 3, 2, 1.
- There we go. Fantastic.
And we can actually like cut that to size.
So if I want, I can just cut that up a little bit.
- [Recording] In three, two.
- Oh, that's probably not the best place to cut the effect.
Let's cut it a little bit earlier right there.
- [Recording] No, turning back now,
here we go, in 3, 2, 1.
- Nice. And then we've got like a nice ending there.
I can fade that out.
And the reverb will take care of the rest there.
(engine sound fades)
Can hear how the reverb allows that to decay
just a little bit further?
Something else I did, I used a robot vacuum again.
I can bring in the video to show you exactly
what I was recording here.
Again with my trusty Rode Wireless Go Two.
And we've got some beeps here on the vacuum,
as it like tries to let go of its cradle.
And clunks around trying to clean things up
so you can see that's what my robot vacuum was doing.
But now I can actually go ahead and take some of this again.
It's the left hand channel only.
So I'm gonna copy some of this and maybe take
some of that clunking and put this into Robot Missile Launch
or something like that.
Let's just see what we can make of this.
Paste it in here.
There it is (beeps).
So this is actually gonna be good and we can actually,
we can actually copy this multiple times
and we can do some cool stuff with it.
So let me go ahead and see, let's copy it three times.
And we might just go in, add in,
again time and pitch the pitch bender,
again, only available in (indistinct).
(high pitch sound)
That's quite cool. Let's default it and let's do something.
I'm going to make this a little spikier.
(laser sound)
So we could do like almost like laser guns.
(high pitch laser gun sound)
So that's a good one. And then we've got this.
(low pitch laser gun sound)
And then this one coming up (laser sound).
So let's apply that and use those and you can see
how it nicely shapes things out there.
(distortion sound)
And then that, I don't know,
maybe this could be an ejector seat or something like that.
So let's go into effects and let's go into time and pitch,
and we'll go to the pitch bender again.
And what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna simply drag this up.
So it's like, it's all going up as it were like so,
and we'll take this and do that.
Let's just see how that's gonna sound.
(distorted engine sound)
There we go. So that could work.
(high pitch distorted engine sound)
That's quite nice.
So that could be our little ejector seat.
Let's just try that out.
And we've also got the (beeping sound),
and let's drag that all into Multitrack again,
exactly the place we're working from.
And we are looking for here, the Robot Missile Launch,
let's drag that onto the reverb track (beeping sound).
Okay. So I'm gonna drag this and cut this
and I'm actually gonna layer this up a couple of times
and maybe change the pitch.
So let's create a couple of new tracks here
and do pitch shifters on those tracks.
So time and pitch, pitch shifter.
Let's bring that one down a few semitones
and then we'll go time and pitch, pitch shifter.
And we'll bring this one up a few semitones.
(high pitch beeping sound)
And then maybe we'll also pan this as well.
We'll pan this to the left,
pan this to the right, as well over here.
Let's try that (high pitch beeping sound).
Let's bring that down (beeping sound).
There we go (beeping sound).
And then we've got these like kinda laser effects
that we'll use, so let's bring this in there, and we've got,
(laser sounds) that's quite cool.
And then we'll delete that and we'll just use this here.
(laser sound)
So we've got some kinda laser gun effects if you like.
And then what I'm thinking for that little ejector seat
at the end is I'm gonna bring in that clunking sound again,
'cause that works quite well. Maybe pitch it a bit.
So let's put a pitch in there and double it up down, there.
(laser sounds)
So that's cool.
So what we've got here now is we've got
Top Gun style voiceover. We've got like an airplane.
We've got like all kinds of like mechanical beeps
and stuff like that. We've got laser gun sounds.
We've got ejector seats.
Let's play everything in its duration.
- [Recording] Good morning, aviators.
This is your captain speaking.
No turning back now. Here we go, in 3, 2, 1.
- That's pretty cool to start with, then,
(beeping sounds)
and we've got these,
(laser sounds)
and finally the ejector seat. Fantastic!
My goodness, me.
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