Need an explosion sound effect for your video but don’t want to use a standard sound? You can create your own effect directly in Adobe Audition.
The best part about making sound effects yourself is that they are yours and completely free. You just have to create them first. Mike Russell from musicradiocreative.com walks you through all the steps to create your using just your mouth. That’s right. Just your mouth. You can create the effect using your own voice and it should only take a couple of minutes.
Check out Russell’s tutorial if you want to turn your mouth noises into explosions in Adobe Audition.
All steps
Record your voice to create the explosion sound effect
To start editing, you’ll first need an audio recording of your voice. Grab a microphone and start recording in Adobe Audition. Russell decided to get a little silly with his mouth noises. You can do the same, or if you want, get as close to the original as possible. In the end, you’ll have a base for your explosion sounds.
Once you have made multiple mouth explosion sounds, you should layer them on different tracks in the multitrack. Right now it only sounds like you are making explosion sounds, but that will change.
Time-stretching tracks
This is where the sound effect starts to sound less like mouth noises. Select all the existing tracks and stretch them in time. This will already give you a slightly different sound. You can also pan some of your tracks from left to right to give them a stereo sound and reduce distortion.
Start a new multitrack session and start adding effects
Open a new multitrack session and drag in the mix of the explosion sound effect you were working on earlier. Now you can use some Audition effects. These are available directly in Audition. For example, you can add some chorus or studio reverb to the track.
Equalizer
Now you’re ready for the equalizer. In Audition, go to Filters and EQ and select the parametric equalizer. There you can add some bass and take away some of the treble. At this point, your performance should no longer sound like your voice – more like a real explosion.
Make the explosion sound effect even more authentic
You can further enhance your sound effect and make it more authentic by going to Effects, then Special and clicking Mastering. Russell recommends the Subtle Clarity preset. You can also use Amplitude and Compression, Dynamic Processing and even the Multiband Compressor.
There is a lot you can improve this sound effect on, but after the tutorial you will have a track that can be used as an explosion sound effect.
Image courtesy of Stephen Radford