How to Make Impact Sound effect

Whether you’re using a sophisticated music production DAW to create, edit and refine your audio (such as Logic X, Ableton and Pro Tools), or just a basic editing suite to collect and polish your foley (like Garage Band, Adobe Audition or Audacity), creating great-sounding and bespoke impact sounds is an excellent way to enhance your storytelling and add a cinematic quality to your videos. And it’s far more straightforward than you would think. Learning and referencing very simple mixing principles to your technique doesn’t require a great deal of time or effort and will pay dividends during your editing process.

Generally speaking, creating believable and functional impact sounds from scratch using complicated sound synthesis is a difficult task. Especially considering the abundance of available pre-recorded audio that is readily available on the internet, it’s really quite difficult to imagine a scenario that can’t be adequately be soundtracked either using, modifying or layering stock sounds. Sure, perhaps you’re having a hard time matching the audio hits you downloaded to footage you captured of a ball bouncing. Maybe the transitions between scenes in your fast-paced travel video blog are missing the OOMPH factor you feel will make them really stand out and pop. But help is here. Read on for a few simple yet essential tips to get your audio chops in sync with your video creation skills.

As previously mentioned, the internet is literally swamped with hundreds of sound banks containing thousands of samples catering to virtually every type of sound cue imaginable. They’re usually very descriptively titled as well so if you’re looking for “fist punching face close miked” (if that’s your sort of thing), chances are you’re only a few clicks away from a good match. But what if you don’t want to shell out your hard earned cash for every cut you make? What if the sounds you’ve (somehow) sourced are close, but not close enough to what you’ve been looking for?