Sound Effects

British Stately Home is a collaboration between two award-winning sound designers, Stefan Henrix (Chernobyl, Batman Begins) and Steve Fanagan (Room, Frank). It is a collection of 256 files recorded at 24bit/96kHz, totalling 18.6GB. The recordings are a mixture of mono, stereo, LCR and 5.0 files. In some cases there are multiple perspectives on the same recording (close, mid and wide). There are also Impulse Responses from several of the building's more characterfully reverberant rooms, which have been recorded from different perspectives and edited for use with Altiverb.

Sounds for this library were recorded over two days in a beautifully maintained rural British Stately Home; a late-18th-century neo-classical mansion. We set out to record any and all aspects of the building and its surroundings. The collection includes doors, windows, fireplaces, clocks, drips, keys and various unusual, period specific props we came across.

The interior of the building was one of the quietest places either of us have ever recorded and the Roomtones we've captured here are some of the most still and neutral recordings we've both made.

All of the sounds are authentic and the spaces we recorded in are reverberant, have their own ambience, and have coloured each of the recordings with the natural acoustic of this magnificent building.

We often set-up with multiple mics to capture different perspectives of the same recordings and these will hopefully offer the user interesting options as they work with these sounds.

At times we have left our own movements at the beginning and end of recordings, as they captured something of the building's unique acoustic and have proven useful to both of us in our own film work with this library. This is a diverse and versatile library and the recordings take well to pitch and time shifting, and to other plugin manipulation.

Equipment Used: Sanken CMS-7S, DPA4060, Sennheiser MKH60, Rode NT4, Sound Devices 702T, Sound Devices USB Pre-2, Roland R26