Tungsten Filament Group

I’ve been working on some punchier, more disgusting gore sounds for the mod No More Room In Hell. Not having a fresh corpse and an autopsy room to record in, I decided to record the various squishes, squelches, stabs and tears using food items I had in my refrigerator and pantry.

I started at breakfast by slicing up and stabbing some fruit to go with my morning oatmeal. I got some nice squishy bits from this, and as I stirred the fruit in, I realized that I could use the oatmeal itself for blood drips and squishy guts, especially after thickening it up with protein powder.

Dinner came and provided the opportunity to record some vegetable abuse. A bell peppers and an onion were my next victims.

And finally, since the game deals with the undead, I wanted something a bit more leathery and dry to add into the mix for the sound effects. I sliced, stabbed, and eventually tore apart a rotisserie chicken to give me some zombie flesh sounds.

For your listening pleasure, some examples.

I’ve been working on sound effects for the mod No More Room In Hell over the past couple of weeks. Some of my challenges have been to create sound assets for breakable doors as well as the player’s makeshift barricade system (consisting of a hammer, nails, and some scavenged boards). I was able to record myself using some household tools and a few pieces of scrap lumber, but there were some elements that I couldn’t easily record myself such as a tree getting chopped down or a car being crushed in a junkyard; these I sourced out from my collection of sound libraries.

Once I had assembled the palette of splintering wood, screaming hinges, and the furious fists of the undead, it was time to assemble the bits and pieces into sound events.

Below are a few examples from that session. The first sound is a wooden door taking heavy damage, which is followed by a barricade board being broken, a heavily damaged metal door, and finally the player pulling the barricade tool out of their inventory.

The barricade hammer is not only used for defense and can be used as a weapon in a pinch. I had recorded some swings with a claw hammer but it just didn’t sound dangerous enough or big enough in the Hollywood sense. Enter the racket!

I was able to get a wide variety of swooshes and swishes from the racket by altering the speed of the swing, and the angle relative to the microphone to get more or less of wooshing of air over the strings. This example has one of the better sounds that came from the claw hammer session followed by one made by a tennis racket.

Look for an update to No More Room In Hell in he near future.