Building the ‘Black Walla Pack’: How the team at Walla Craft filled a gap in the sound effects market:

We wanted to share the journey behind our Black Walla Pack (currently available at a special discount here with you. It’s been quite an adventure, and we’re excited to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how it all came together.

It all started when we were working on a project and hit a wall. We were searching for authentic African-American voices to bring our characters to life but kept coming up empty-handed. The vast majority of commercially available walla is English/Caucasian. That’s when we had our lightbulb moment: if we couldn’t find what we needed, why not create it ourselves?

That’s when we had our lightbulb moment: if we couldn’t find what we needed, why not create it ourselves?

A few months later, we were setting up our studio right here in Atlanta. We reached out to the local voice acting community and found eight incredibly talented individuals – four women and four men. We specifically chose actors with different vocal timbres to fill out the frequency spectrum, thinking ahead to how sound designers might use these recordings.

A behind-the-scenes highlight from the Black Walla Pack

Preparation

Preparation was key. We developed detailed emotion Excel sheets and created various scenarios to guide our actors such as ‘rejoicing in church’ or ‘whispering in a frightened manner’. We wanted to capture authentic, nuanced performances. Sometimes, we had to coach the actors to strike the right balance between genuine emotion and usability in a sound design context. Our sound engineer even developed a ‘bang’ technique on the talkback to help actors transition between emotions seamlessly. The ‘bang’ technique was a method employed by the sound engineer to signal actors during a performance. By saying “bang,” in the actors headphone mix the engineer cued the actors to intensify their emotional expression in the current scene. This simple ‘bang’ verbal prompt allowed for dynamic adjustments to the performance’s emotional intensity without interrupting the flow of the action.

This simple ‘bang’ verbal prompt allowed for dynamic adjustments to the performance’s emotional intensity without interrupting the flow of the action

During the recording sessions, we faced some interesting challenges. Sometimes emotions would blend together in ways we hadn’t anticipated, requiring some on-the-fly problem-solving such as giving alternative prompts or specific directions for vocalizations to the performers. But these hurdles only made the final product more interesting and versatile.

Hear the audio demo for the Black Walla Pack above

We captured a wide range of emotional wallas, some of which are pretty rare in existing libraries. The collection features a diverse range of vocal tracks, including male-only, female-only, and mixed ensemble recordings. Many of the files are structured with distinct beginning, middle, and end sections, facilitating seamless editing within your DAW.

We also paid close attention to the dynamics of each recording. Some wallas feature breathing room and space, while others are intentionally chaotic. This variety came from our realization that different projects would need different energy levels.

On the technical side, we recorded in mono, stereo, and LCR (Left-Center-Right) formats. The LCR recordings can actually be broken down into three separate parts. We thought this might be useful for sound designers who want to mix and match to create new layers of sound.

All recordings were done in a dry studio. We made this choice to give sound designers the flexibility to add their own spatial processing in post-production, whether that’s outdoor slapback, room reverb, or any other effect. We suggest playing around with plugins like Cargo Cult’s The Slapper alongside various ambience sounds to create your own scenes.

Looking ahead

As we were putting this all together, we started thinking about the future. We’re fascinated by the potential applications of this kind of data in AI algorithms. As voice synthesis technology advances, we believe authentic samples like these will be crucial in developing more natural and diverse AI voices.

We’re curious to hear about your experiences with walla recordings. If you’ve worked with them before, what challenges have you faced? What kinds of wallas do you wish existed? Your insights could help shape future projects.

Thanks for letting us share our story with you. We’re excited to see how voice and walla recordings evolve in the future, and we’re glad to be part of that journey.

 

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