GAD 01: Plasma Shotgun

Hi everyone, in this brief post I’m going to detail how I created my first ever game audio asset, which you can hear here below, as well as all of the layers that make up the sound, individually:

This sound resembles some sort of futuristic “Plasma Shotgun” sound a-la Halo, with a tight, heavy hitting impact.

Creating the sound was quite straightforward, employing only a few layers:

• A base layer synthesized with Xfer Serum.
• An impact layer by combining multiple samples.
• A tail layer, also by combining samples.

The Synthesized Layer

This layer was made in Xfer Serum using only one Oscillator with a wavetable that has similar qualities to a regular Sine wave. This is the layer that gets us the “laser” sound by using the classic technique of quickly pitching down the sound by using an envelope on the pitch modulator of the oscillator. This is the same technique that is used to synthesize a kick-drum, but in this case the pitch fall is quite a bit slower. The important thing here was to use a simple waveform in order to get a clean “laser” and to have nice and clean sub frequencies which are important for the “thud” of the gunshot.

A few effects were applied to make the sound more interesting and have a wider stereo image, all topped of with a compressor and a small reverb for even more added dimension.

The Impact Layer

This layer was created by using some of my personal impact and riser samples, as well as some royalty free gunshot sounds that I found online.

This layer doesn’t start directly on the “hit” of the gun, but rather has a short pre-hit sound (literally a few milliseconds long) in order to ease-in the sound. Here I used a standard white noise riser and a slice of a shotgun reload right before the main hit.

The main hit is made of two impact sounds, the same types that can be found in almost all EDM sample packs. One of the two has a hard-hitting kick sample and the other just a random impact which I thought fitted well with the rest of the composition.

Important to note the use FL Studio’s Sampler Channel window, which offers many cool and quick ways to edit your sound, such as time stretching and pitch shifting. In this scenario, I decided to use the Pogo knob, which applies a pitch bend to the sample to match the “plasma” feeling of the gun.

The Tail Layer

A very simple layer composed of the tail of a regular royalty free gunshot sound, and interestingly enough, the tail of a kick-drum. Yes, a kick-drum.

So, how does a kick become the tail sound of a gunshot? The kick sample in question had some interesting high frequencies caused by the “click” of the kick. If you’re not familiar with kick sound design, a kick is usually made from three layers: the bass, the mids, and the “click” (highs). In this case, playing around with the time-stretching and Multiplier (MUL) settings in the Sampler Channel window really brought out the character of this click, so I decided to high pass the bass frequencies of the kick, because the other two layers of the gunshot already had enough bass, and only keep the interesting details of this click.

I’m quite proud of this, as it ended up really sounding like the tail of the Portal gun:

All in all, I’m quite happy with the result considering it is only my first attempt at making a gun sound. I suppose sci-fi was a solid choice for a first attempt as you can get away with almost any design you wish as there are really no real life equivalents to compare how realistic the the asset sounds.

Originally published at lfaltoni.wixsite.com.