Creating great indoor room tones are more important than most people realize. If you use a heavy gate on a narrator or actor’s dialogue, it sounds unnatural. That’s why it’s so important to have a realistic room tone as a base sound during any visual production. It adds a sense of authenticity to a scene. Without it, a viewer may feel a disconnect between what they are seeing and what they are hearing. You also risk jeopardizing the emotional tone of a scene, and thus a viewer’s full engagement.
In this quick tip from Gobbler, we will show you how to use a background module from Audio Wind to create a basic room tone.
How does it work?
First, we raise the level of the Background module so we can get a full and clear idea of what we’ll be listening to. Next, we use the Shape module to choose a starting point from the preset library. In this case, we decided on a simple flatlands shape. Because we want a toned-down, indoor room sound, we reduce the Rate and Variation parameters to as low as they can go, for a nice, flat tone.
Then we set the filter frequency to 0.1 and the Q to roughly 0.3, to further reduce our background sound to a low rumble. We also set the low-cut filter to 300Hz, to tighten up some of the low end rumble, and roll off the high frequencies at about 200Hz, to create a very simple yet very effective room tone. This will make any narration or dialogue in your scene seem more much natural and realistic.
We hope this quick demonstration has proven how incredible important and versatile Le Sound’s Audio Wind plugin can be for anyone needing to create natural and authentic indoor room tones, or outdoor air tones for any kind of video content.
