Sound Effect Special: How to Download & Use Royalty-Free Sound Effects
A common misconception among creators is that sound effects are for advanced creatives only. We're going into depth about where to find sound effects, how to use them, and highlight their importance.
“I like the idea of it, but I’m not sure how to use it.” A common perception among novice creators is that sound effects are for advanced creatives only. We beg to differ. This blog post will go into depth about where to find sound effects, how to use them, and highlight their importance.
The idea that sound effects are unnecessary or only associated with advanced creators; that’s an idea we can bury here and now. The benefits of using sound effects are, in fact, immense. If you want your content to draw the viewer’s attention, engage them, and make your videos realistic – sound effects and sound design, in general, are vital. Want an example of great sound design? Check out the video below.
Video by afilmbytim
Benefits of using sound effects
We’ve collected some thoughts from our community on what they see are the benefits of using sound effects.
“I build in sound effects as part of my sound design, so the scene sounds like it does in my head.”
In other words, sound effects help ensure the context is fully immersive. Including sound effects can elevate your content and help to build the scenes. Using sound effects in podcasts is also a great idea to structure the storyline.
“I try to mix sound effects with small snippets of music to indicate a transition or grab the attention of my listeners.”
How to find sound effects
Epidemic Sound’s sound effects library spans over 90,000 different premium sounds – whatever sound you’re looking for, you’ll find it.
We’ve recently added more categories – and more tags – connected to each sound effect, so that you can be more specific when you search for sound effects and still get results matching your search term. We want you to be able to use the word that comes to mind when you think of a certain sound effect straight away, without having to think about synonyms or phrasing.
How to use sound effects
When you watch a movie, every sound happening on the screen is added on afterward in post-production. When you think about that, you soon realize just how important the mastering of sound effects is when making films and videos.
For every transition happening – use a sound effect. For everything that you film that would make any sort of sound – add a sound effect. Think about where the scene is set and add all sounds that would be there in real life: wind, traffic, breathing, flies, sirens, rain – you name it. The more you do this, the savvier you’ll become. Check out the video below with Dean Rojas to hear how he’s resonating around sound design.
Sound effect trends
Do you lack inspiration for what sound effects to use, or perhaps you’re curious about what the most common sound effects searches are? We’ve gathered some insights from our user base.
Sounds like ‘wind,’ ‘whoosh,’ and ‘beep’ are among the most popular sound effect searches. Did you know there are about 100 different ways to search for the same sound? ‘Whoosh,’ ‘woosh,’ ‘swoosh,’ ‘swosh,’ ‘slow whoosh,’ ‘long whoosh,’ ‘wind whoosh,’ fire whoosh" are just some of the ways to find wind sounds.
Some other popular themes in sound effect searches are human sounds like ‘scream’ or ‘breath,’ nature sounds like ‘rain’ and ‘forest’, and transitional sounds like ‘pop’ or ‘impact.’
If you want to learn about stems in a more visual format, check out our video with Epidemic Sound ambassador Premiere Gal below.
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