The trailer for the Ringing Rocks SFX library
My name is Thomas Rex Beverly and I am a field recordist based in Philadelphia. I love to travel the world searching for new sounds and experiences to explore. One of the places I was lucky to visit this past year was Ringing Rocks County Park in Pennsylvania. The park contains a field of ancient boulders that produce a uniquely resonant, chiming tone when struck.
A few years ago, my sister Emily, who now has a Ph.D. in geology, visited the park as part of a geology class field trip. She invited me to explore the park with her, but under one condition: I needed to bring my Zoom portable digital recorder along. As we walked around the field, I noticed little worn spots on the rocks where previous visitors had hit them. So, I took Emily’s rock hammer and hit one of these spots, not expecting much more than a dull thud. What I got was a pure chime-like tone that resonated with the rocks around it. I was captivated for hours – I went around to each boulder to find the rock’s sweet spot and made hundreds of recordings.
Ringing Rocks has the chiming, beautiful tones of an ancient boulder field
According to Emily, the rocks are a particular type of igneous rock called diabase, which formed as molten rock (magma) intruded between other sedimentary rocks and then cooled during the Early Jurassic epoch (~200 million years ago). This created a tabular body known as a sill, which was tilted slightly and exposed at the surface millions of years later. These unique boulder fields form because diabase is very resistant to erosion and on a slight slope. Repeated freezing and thawing during the ice ages that our planet has experienced over the past million years broke the diabase sill into large boulders through a process known as frost wedging. Water gets into cracks, freezes, and expands, and over time, this wedges the rock further and further apart and breaks it into boulders. The slope is very important though because too shallow of a slope and the boulders will be become part of the soil, rather than forming these ringing boulder fields.
The size, shape, and the boulder’s contact with the other rocks affect the type of sound generated, but something about the rocks is also unique. There are several theories about what causes the rocks to ring. One is that the iron content gives the rock its metallic resonance, but the diabase does not have a unique chemistry. If this were true, ringing rocks would be much more common. Many other theories exist, but none have been sufficiently tested to know for sure. The ringing rocks remain a mystery to geologists.
After my initial visit with Emily 4 years ago, I did a scouting trip to find the time of day with the lowest ambient noise levels and least airplane traffic. There was a lot of air traffic from New York City and Philadelphia but I was still able find many 5 – 10 minute gaps between planes where I could bang on the rocks to my heart’s content. I decided I wanted to go with a Mid-Side microphone setup and record on early winter mornings to avoid tourists, insects, and birds.
The ringing rocks remain a mystery to geologists
I recorded the library with a Sennheiser MKH 50 and 30 Mid-Side pair and a Sound Devices 702. I was thrilled to hear these rocks through these amazing microphones for the first time. I did my first recording session right after I purchased the Sennheiser microphones and was very pleased when these microphones sounded better than real life and captured the wild frequencies that are produced by striking these rocks.
I must have hit most of the thousands of rocks in the field trying to find the best ones. I ended up finding about 30 rocks that were particularly interesting. I proceeded to experiment by hitting each of those rocks in every way I could. I hit them on all sides with many different small hammers, crowbars, and sledgehammers. I found the rocks also make resonant sounds when you drag the head of the hammer or crowbar across its surface. This scraping brings out rich shimmering and sparkling harmonics and incredible textures of metal clattering on rock.
I was surprised at how the resonance and harmonics of certain rocks fluctuates with the amount of snow in the boulder field. On my second trip, there was more snow around the rocks so the pitch of certain boulders was significantly different.
The whole rock field tends to have similar resonant frequencies. There is a lot of pitch variety in the recordings but there are definitely certain pitches (lots of D♭ and G♭) that resonate the same way in multiple rocks. Some rocks have a very bright quality, while others have a distinctly dark sound, and occasionally I would find a wild inharmonic clang unlike anything I’d heard before.
There was a wonderful little moment during one of my winter recording sessions. As I was recording some repetitive hits on a beautiful minor-toned rock, a distant woodpecker joined in from the nearby forest. I would bang away at the rock for a few seconds and then I would hear the woodpecker. He would start his tapping, I would pause until he stopped, and then I would start banging again. We kept this little rhythmic counterpoint going back and forth for about 15 minutes.
As hammers strike stone, the powerful clangs resonate like church bells and bring to life a natural sonic wonder
By far, my favorite sounds were created by scraping my hammers and crowbars against the stone. I already knew that the single strikes were stunning but once I started experimenting with other ways to play the rocks I was captivated by the richness and variety of the drones brought out by scraping.
Sometimes I wish I was born in an earlier time when there were still uncharted places to explore. One way we can still explore in our completely mapped world is to find and preserve stunning natural sounds. I believe the best sounds are the ones you can’t imagine and don’t yet know exist, like the ringing rocks in Pennsylvania. I encourage you to go exploring to find some new sounds too!
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Animals & Creatures Amazon Jungle Play Track 49 sounds included, 357 mins totalFrom: $95From: $66.50Amazon Jungle is a collection of unique ambiences recorded in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Peru, Bolivia and Brazil. The library was recorded during the rainy season when birds are vocal and humidity is at its highest. These recordings feature species such as the Screaming Piha, Toucans, Howler Monkeys, Trogons, Tinamous, Owls, very vocal Bamboo Rats and a multitude of insects and frogs.
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Footstep & Foley Sounds contains 511 high quality professionally recorded footstep sounds. Surfaces included: concrete, dirt, grass, gravel, metal, mud, water, wood, ice and snow. Plus 141 Foley sounds covering a variety of character movement sounds. A perfect addition to add realism to your footstep sounds.
This pack also includes a variety of 160 bonus sounds effects from our full library Pro Sound Collection. ALL sounds from Footstep & Foley Sounds are included in Pro Sound Collection so if you need more sounds be sure to check it out before purchase.
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In films and documentaries there are often images of people in spaces speaking to other people, who are listening attentively.
The recordings of the person doing the talking are pristine from the set. The recordings of the rest of the room don’t exist. Room tones of empty spaces don’t possess movement and life that your soundtracks require for these situations.
Quiet Spaces is a collection of recordings of people gathered in rooms of various sizes and not talking
Libraries are a natural place to capture these environments, and so a high quality stealth kit made from a pair of Sanken CUB 01s discreetly placed from a backpack onto empty tables in various libraries. We also got access to a university campus right at the end of finals week where we recorded out in the open with a pair of MKH50s in ORTF. We captured an entire class taking a test, as well as various other lightly and sparsely populated spaces in and around campus.
Locations captured include:
• 5 different public libraries
• multiple perspectives per library
• 6 locations on the UNT campus
• 1 class quietly taking a written test
The end result is a beautiful set of recordings of quiet spaces that are still filled with texture and movement.
Available in two versions:
Full version:
• 24 bit, 96 kHz stereo wav files
• soundminer and bwav metadata tags
• photography
• 4.8 Gigabytes of sound
• 139 minutes of sound
Lite version:
• 16 bit, 44.1 kHz stereo wav files
• soundminer and bwav metadata tags
• photography
• 1.48 Gigabytes of sound
• 139 minutes of sound
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Weapon Mech & Reload Sounds is a sfx library recorded for police / military related film or video games. Recorded at 24/96,(real guns and soft/air guns) with 3 microphones (omni, cardioid and shotgun), you can use one sound or mix the 3 layers together for more impact!
Key Features:
Library ships in 96kHz, 24bit
408 files, more than 800 sounds
Effective workflow: well-grounded Soundminer Metadata
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Lethal Blow is a collection of high quality fight sound effect. It features 925 sound effects; 600 source recording and 325 designed sound effects. It comes loaded with all sorts of sounds – from simple punches to multi-layerd crunchy blows and and meaty hits.
All source sounds ware recorded with top tier microphones; Sennheiser MKH8040 and MKH8060 at 192kHz/24Bit with a Sound Devices recorder.Collection consists of two main categories:
DESIGNED 96/24 (325 SFX)
Bone Breaks – Crunchy breaks, snaps and tears.
Grabs, throws and blacks.
Bright Punches – Punches with meaty bottom and pronounces “beef slap” transients.
Crunch Punches – Punches layered with bone breaks and cracks .
Dark punches – Punches with more of a deep, organic, thump-y sound.
Rips and tears – Fatality-like, gory tears.
Simple Punches – Organic sounding, deep punches that consist of only few layers (compared to other punches).
Punches “Xtra” – Punches without Arm movement/scuffle/whoosh – just a hit that you can layer with your own woos/scuffle
Skull crashes – Gory, slimy skull crashes and splits
Swooshes, whooshes snd scuffles.SOURCE CONSTRUCTION-KIT 192/24 (600 SFX)
Scuffles, arm movements and whooshes – Cotton, denim and nylon.
Snaps – Leak snaps
Flesh drops – Dropped oranges
Cotton transients – Cotton hoodie hit with a soft drum mallet
Real chest punches – Closed fist
Meaty punches – Beefy, organic punches (punching beef steaks).
Lettuce punches and smacks – Deep, wet lettuce punches plus exaggerated transient sounds.
Real chest smacks – Open fist
Meat movement – gory, slimy, beef movements.
Meat Slaps – Beef steaks dropped on a tile floor with pronounced transients
Small crack – cracking eggshells
Bell pepper rips – Tearing, ripping apart Bell peppers for crunchy snaps and cracks
Whooshes and swooshes – Airy whooshes
Fabric Movement – random, cotton cloth whooshes and multiple swishes.325 designed sound effects will get you started right away and save a lot of time when cutting fight scenes.
600 high quality source recordings will allow you to design all kinds of punches, bone brakes and gore sound effects from scratch, exactly to your taste.All sound effects are highly tweakable. You can fine-tune them to your liking; pitch them up/down to remove/add weight whilst retaining details and clarity.
Download includes:
96-192KHZ 24BIT version (925 SFX/562MB)
44.1KHZ 16BIT version for Unreal Engine (925 SFX/264MB)
192KHZ 24BIT BONUS source recordings (58 SFX/30MB)
RECORDED WITH: Sound Devices MixPre 6 + Sennheiser MKH8040 + Sennheiser MKH8060
EDITED AND MASTERED WITH: RX, Pro Tools, Brufri, DMGAudio, Sonnox, Fabfilter30 %OFFEnds 1576709999 -
The “Electro-Mechanics ToolKit 2” Sound Effects Library features a wide range of versatile electro-mechanic motors, engines, tools and toys.
All waiting to be cut up, layered, edited and mangled with FX to become spaceship engines, robot movements, sci fi doors, weapon mechanics.
This library is not meant to be a comprehensive tools library but rather a composite toolkit to bring futuristic electro-mechanic machines, devices, weapons, vehicles, … sonically to life.
All cleaned and edited for direct use in your upcoming projects.All sounds have embedded BWF Metadata.
Categories: Air Compressor • Angle Grinder • Band Saw • Belt Sander • Bowling Alley Machinery • Buffing Machine • Turning Lathe • Buzz Saw • Chop Saw • Doors & Shutters • Electric Drill • Electric Screwdriver • Electric Wood Plane • Evacuator • Film Projector • Fine Blanking Tool • Fretsaw • Grinding Lathe • Hand Blender & Mixer • Hoist Industrial • Industrial Vacuum Cleaner • Jigsaw • Mechanic Toys • Metal Saw • Milling Machine • Stationary Drill • Strimmer • Toy Helicopter
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Looking for sounds of a remote controlled car? Here you go: This sound effects library features 170 sound effects of the Reely Core RC Car. You get several on-board and external driving sounds, pass-bys, close-up steering mechanics and idling mixtures, and of course some crashes. All sounds are edited and cleaned for direct use in your upcoming sound design projects. All sounds contain detailed BWF Metadata.
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A library containing a number of objects being picked up, put down and moved around on a number of surfaces including wood, glass and metal.
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+ free sounds with every issue: