Silence is golden:
Sound editors over the years have been tasked with crafting a multitude of dramatic crowd scenes, but the most difficult ones occur when the music cuts out, the performance stops, and we are left with . . . silence. . . that is, what most viewers might call “silence.” But in order to keep crowds in these dramatic scenes alive, we expect to hear subtle sounds; some cloth rustling, a subdued whisper, an awkward chair scuff, perhaps someone clearing their throat… this library contains several very long takes of these rare quiet crowds. They were expertly crafted by trimming out all of the performance, crowd reactions, etc., and cleverly weaving together all those great subtle moments into one, seamless take.
Perspective matters:
For several locations, a near and distant perspective were captured to give sound editors the options to place the listener at different locations in the audience. These time aligned perspectives allow for easy checker-boarding during the sound edit. This is helpful when crafting sound for a crowd scene when the camera cuts between different perspectives in the same space. Your mixers will no doubt appreciate you saving them time for providing these natural sounding alt perspectives.
The post process:
Great care was put into the editing and mastering phase of this library in order to maintain clean heads and tails for as many recordings as possible. In some cases, multiple takes have been seamlessly edited together for those perfect sounding effects. Extra time was taken to edit out any and all extraneous noises such as stage sounds, distracting or distinct audience voices, offensive nearby claps, and more. In order to maintain the greatest dynamics, these sounds were all mastered at theatrical monitoring levels, giving you the most options in post.
Metadata means everything:
Metadata has been thoroughly fleshed out for all files which makes searching for sounds a breeze. This library is proudly UCS (Universal Category System) compliant, with proper catID, category, and subcategory assignments for all files. Description and keyword fields are thorough yet concise, and there’s even info in the “Scene” field that gives the crowd size and age range (Example: 200 People / All Ages) which helps you find the proper sounds easier than ever.
A long endeavor that was worth the wait:
This library took over 3 years to plan, record, edit, and master. The goal of this library was to capture unique audiences that were genuinely reacting to live performances, and it was no easy feat to do so! Most shows have music, stage movement, and other extraneous noise that make the crowd reactions unusable. Finding the perfect shows that offered clean and uninterrupted crowd reactions proved to be a great challenge. Many performances were captured but only the best made it to the final mastering stage. Every sound effect has been reviewed many times, possibly to an obsessive extent, providing you with only the richest, highest quality crowd sound effects.
Gear Used:Â Sennheiser MKH40/30 in MS setup, Sound Devices 744t, Sony PCM-D50
Christopher Battaglia –
Great sounding library with lots of natural crowd reactions, movement, and wallas. Perfect for theater, classrooms, and small indoor crowds. I highly recommend this library for that kind of material
Michaël –
Great material and well edited! It feels refreshing when you’ve been hearing the same crowd sounds again and again. It saved me a lot of time searching too as the folder structure is well made.