Free Sound Effects and Music

The questions keep pouring in! Here is another one that I thought would be great for a blog:

“Do you know of anywhere I can get free sound effects? And background music for thrillers?”

-itssawyer

Have you ever watched a movie where the image quality wasn’t that great? If the story is good enough, within 10 minutes you’ll have adjusted to the image and stopped noticing it’s less than stellar quality. (A good example of this would be “Once”.) But now watch a film with bad audio. You will never adjust, and it will be an annoying experience from start to finish (Like “Miami Vice”… Though pretty much everything about Miami Vice was annoying.) For this reason I think sound is actually more important than the visuals. I’ve seen a ton of short or indie films that could have been pretty good, ruined by bad audio, cheesy sound effects and awful music.

When it comes to on-set audio, make sure you have a good shotgun mic, throw it on a boom poll and get it as close to the talent as the framing allows. And if you have the software, in post do a little ADR to tweak the parts that are less than perfect. (I know that wasn’t a part of the question, so… consider it a freebie.)

Sound effects aren’t only for action films! No matter what genre you are working in, sound effect are vital. If someone is walking, we should be hearing footsteps. Little add-ons with sound do a great deal to give your film “production value.” There are a ton of great FX library’s out there, unfortunately they can get pretty expensive. But if you look hard enough, there are places online that offer good sounds for FREE! Here are a couple:

http://www.soundsnap.com/

http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/pir/PIRsfx.shtml

Soundsnap.com is by far the best in my opinion. Their site is easy to use (unlike the others) and has some of the best quality of free sounds I’ve heard on the web.

If you are looking for music it is the same. There’s good stuff out there but for a price. Most royalty free music isn’t that good to begin with, so once you are looking for completely free stuff, it gets even harder to find anything of any value. But check out these sites, they have a few pieces of music that I think are worth the listen:

http://music.download.com/3607-8272-0.html?tag=MDL_browseAllNode

http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/

http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/

I hope this helps. When it comes to sound effects and music, I think it’s best to do all original. But if you don’t have the capacity to create Foley or compose music, I think these are great alternatives.

-Ryan