 I recently played through Doom 2016 and it was awesome, though the sound design in a few places was a little underwhelming. For example, the Mancubus reveal. I thought the monster sounds could be much better. So I wanted to try my own skills and see what can I come up with. Let's do it. Hey, I'm ANFA. I'm an electronic music producer and sound designer, so I only use open source software and Linux. In this video we're going to design some monster sounds for Mancubus. And we'll see if I can beat its software. Here is my hardware session. I've already loaded and prepared my video reference. And the first thing we'll do is just listen and watch the original. The Mancubus growl here. I find it to be not the most satisfying thing ever. So let me see where it is. Exactly. Okay, I'm going to mark it on my timeline. All right, we can see it on the wafer. I'm going to make this smaller so the video reference doesn't obscure anything important because we're going to mostly work on the audio. Okay, so here is... I'm going to put myself range markers. Little clicking. This is going to be growl one. Here is going to be smash one. Okay, let's start with these two sounds. I'm going to mute my reference and make it smaller. And now the original, the original DOOMs or DOOM2s, sound effects for Mancubus where I believe based on the pig squeal. I don't have a pig in my house, so I can't really record that. I can record my own voice and I want to try that. So first I want to try something that anyone can do. And that thing is called freesound.org, which is a fantastic repository of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Creative Commons licenses are so-called permissive licenses or some rights reserved as opposed to all rights reserved. And specifically a license called CC0 allows us to do everything. We can take the sound, use it in a commercial product and we don't even have to credit the author. It's basically public domain. So I'm going to use such sounds because when I worked in a video game studio and I was making sound effects, I used that resource a lot. And I limited myself to Creative Commons zero licensed sounds for that reason. I don't have to credit the author and it doesn't create any headaches, legal headaches for my employer. And we can just grab the sounds, I can use them as elements, transform them, do whatever I want and it's all good. And I've also published over 900 sounds on my own on freesound and they are all licensed under Creative Commons zero as well. So you can grab my sounds and do something with them. All right, so let's search for a pig squeal. And I'm going to limit myself to Creative Commons zero. And let's just listen to what we have here. Yeah, I don't think that's a real pig. Let's listen to some more sounds. Okay, again, this is not a real pig. That is a real pig. So I know this author has access to actual pigs. So these sounds are not squeals. So I'm going to see if there's a collection of these sounds. Okay, I guess he's just was passing by some pig and recorded that. Death metal pig squeals done by yours truly. Okay. Okay, guinea pigs is not what I'm looking for. That's what I'm looking for. Okay, let's open this one. I'm going to download it in a while picks MP3. I don't like MP3s because they sound like crap. But it's a great resource. I'm downloading this. Okay, MP3 or not, we're going to use that as an element. Pig multiple snorts. We could use that for something as well. Let's see the next page. Okay, there's a lot of noise and not a lot of meat. Okay, I don't know what that is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Jared G Gibb, okay. That dude has access to some nice pigs. Wow. It's not a very clean recording, but I think we can use that as well. All right. To download sounds from free sound, you need to create a free account. And that's to track who downloaded what so you can credit authors if needed and just to make sure everyone knows who downloaded their sounds and you can also comment. So it's really no big deal. Let's download the sounds. It looks like there is a problem with free sound at this moment. Okay, so while I'm waiting for free sound.org to become available again, I thought I'll try my own and record some squeals with my own mouth. All right. So let's create an audio track. We could make a bunch of them as to start with, maybe four will be due, we'll do good. Okay. And now let's make sure they are all using the same first input. Okay, and I'm just going to open up my video reference and get a feel for this mancubus. Okay, what do we have? Is that usable? Let's try some more. That's a different thing. Let's try an inhale, exhale thing. Let's try again. Yeah, so what I'm doing is called pig squeal in metal, I believe you're inhaling and that creates a very different sound from anything you can do on exhaling. All right, let's see what we can do with that. Gonna unmute this track. Yeah, I'm going to hide my video reference for now because I don't really need it. And the first thing is this is very quiet, so I'm going to make it louder. Or even hit alt, no, no, no, hit alt two, no, hit alt three and normalize these sounds. Okay. You know what? It's going to be nice to see the video reference as we're working, even if it's small somewhere in the corner. Oh, yeah. That will do. Yeah, the timing is a little bit bad. It should start in here. That's not a problem. What I'm going to do is move all the other recordings down and maybe split them among these tracks. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to mute the other ones. It opens its mouth around here. So yeah, that should be the good timing. And what about this? Oh, it's already growling there. Yeah, it's starting to growl in here. Okay. So I'm going to move this back and I'm going to time stretch this part. T, I'm going to, yeah, monophonic instrumental. We can actually resample without preserving pitch because we're going to pitch shift this down anyway. So this way we're retaining a little bit more quality. I should probably do the same for my other squeal, just to make it compatible. So let's time stretch it as well. I hope by the same amount. Let's listen. Okay, I think that's good. But now it's too long, so we'll need to shorten it. Yeah, that's nice. Okay. All right, let's see. I would like to compress this a little bit because the levels vary and I would like to have this be a bit more consistent in volume. So let me use the stuck compressor. I'm also going to enable auto return so I can just, oh, auto return doesn't work when I'm using jack sync so I can disable jack sync. The timing is going to be wrong, but okay, it doesn't matter. We have the sync locked in already. That'll do. Now let's see what we can do with a pitch shifter also. There is an interesting pitch shifter. It's called MA pitch shift. Again, all the plugins I'm using are open source as well as the DAW. The cool thing about this pitch shifter is you can make some wacky noises and it has a crossfade which would be like mix. Okay, let's make the window shorter so it's not going to be laggy. All right, that's nice. We're adding a little bit of lower pitched version of this and it's blended together. Also, I'm going to click here and disable strict IO so we do have stereo output. Let's see. Okay. MA pitch shift on its own creates a wide stereo image and we may reduce that later if it's too much. Actually, I'm going to do this right now. With stereo tools is a very nice plugin for managing stereo converting from mid-side to stereo and back. I'll just go side level. Yeah, so we have a nice stereo image but it's not too wide. It's not like it's a horde of monsters all around us. It's one monster in front of us. All right. We could try and make this more guttural. I'm going to see if I can do auto talent. Ah, yes. This plugin is a pitch correction plugin but an interesting thing which is quite unique unfortunately is that it has formant correction as well. We can disable the correction so it's not auto tuning our squeal but I think I'm going to move it upward so it operates on the raw signal that's going to probably have less trouble. I can do formant warp. Oh, we need to enable it as well. And we can automate that so we can go like touch and now. And then. Yay. Okay, we have a little bit of like a little click here. Oh, yeah, that's the click. Okay. Let's just cut that out, move this over, crossfade it. Yep. We also have a tiny bit of noise in here. Yeah, we're going to cover this with reverb later. But it's good to have as clean source as you can get. My PC is a little bit noisy in here. That's why there's this thing. Okay. Let's see what we can do. We could do also pitch modulation to make this more wet and sound more growly but we would need a chorus for that. Or maybe we could use chow tape because chow tape is a very interesting plugin that we can use it to saturate that. And that could also give us some nice growl and grit. Oh, here's our automation track that we made. I'm going to move this in here and see the user interface. Oh, but we can make it larger. I love scalable user interfaces for plugins. Every single plugin should do that. Especially when you're working in 4K, imagine tiny plugin user interfaces that you can't scale. That's not going to work well. All right. Let's listen. I can enable ultra-return because I'm not using jack sync. Let's see what we can do with saturation on this. That's too much. Let's listen without it and with. I think it's a little bit too much crunching on the bass. So I'm going to lower this in the tone and up the treble. Okay. Filters. We can enable filters and make-ups. Makeup gives us clean signal. For example, if I filter out low-end, like I did here, if I enable make-up, it's going to filter out the high-end respectively from the dry signal and give it back so that now it's not like I cut off lows. It's that I only distort highs and mids and the low frequencies are clean. So that's also something to do with this. What if I crank the bass now? Yeah, you see, because distortion still operates on that. All right. Now, we can go with flutter and flutter. Let's see what do we get if I increase this. Syncs. Sync to tape speed. Oh, we get a little bit of that wobble and that's really interesting. I just want to make sure this is consistent with. I think it's consistent with the session transport. Let's see what we can do with wow. Sync to tape speed as well. Okay, let's give it more depth. Let's disable flutter for now so we can only hear what wow is doing. Yeah. Sync to eight bars. Whoa, that's one bar. I'd like this to be faster. Variance. Definitely we need less depth. Oh, we had flutter going on all along. All right. See what else we can do with this plugin, the grade. Okay, that's not going to be useful. Chew. What does chew mean? All right. Chew is like cutting up, cutting out sections of the tape. Loss. Okay, I don't think I want to do any of that. I can actually disable it. Because I'm not really into emulating tape with this. I want to just use it as a saturation and pitch modulation plugin. Let's see how does it work with our video reference. This was recorded at 1080p, but I downscaled it to 480. Oh, okay, this is out of sync. Now I need to press this. Okay, all right. I think we could now, I want to add a reverb bus. Make it a stereo bus. Add an aux send to that bus. Let's make it full. And now I'm going to go and insert ether. Which is recently my favorite reverb plugin. It's quite flexible, really. Okay, hide my reference for now. Okay, we're in solo and now I'm going to also like remove dry. So this is, let's change the seeds. Okay, that's only earlier reflections. What if we modulate them? Okay, that sounds ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous on its own, but if I make this a little bit, just a little bit. Yeah, it can be nice. The late reverbs is a bit... I think this means if the late reverberations are applied after early reflections or post. So post will probably use this as a source for this. And I would like that. Now I'm not sure if I want to... No, actually I can do that. I thought maybe I'll apply this reverb as a plugin right on the track, because then I can compress it together. But I can also sidechain compress it with the source signal, and that's not going to be a problem. Let's do this. Audio 1. Oh, it has a mono output. Oh, no, I just have a mono input, okay. Unable sidechain. Yeah, of course that's well overdone. Still. And on the other hand, I would like to sidechain gate this. Sidechain gate. Sidechain gate. Oh, no, I'm going to be copyright stroke. Sidechain gate stereo. I would like a VST version. Let's be sidechain gate stereo, yes. Okay, there it is. Let's root in the sidechain. Okay, let's make sure we are using the external input, so the sidechain actually. All right, this is of course way too aggressive. I want to raise the threshold and increase the... and also increase the release and lower the attack. Okay, so now we're kind of blending the reverb as a part of the sound rather than an effect of the environment. I think I'm going to lower your reduction so it's subtle. We're kind of doing the opposite things with this. Yeah, so maybe the compressor doesn't make sense in here. Fear some clicks. I don't know where they're coming from. Not from here. That'd be some dropouts. Yeah, it could be some dropouts. Alrighty. Let's see what we can do with the other tracks. Of course, this is going to be useless unless we pitch shift it down, so let's T. Let's maybe do it like twice. Resample without preserving pitch. Yes. Now we can layer these two. Oh, the length is ideal. This one at least. Not for this one. Oh, no, no. Let's better cut in here to have the natural tail. Let's have this on solo. Hey, that's not bad. It sounded really weak before pitch shifting, but this makes it sound really nice. Let's see the video reference. How does it compare? That's nice. It's not bad. What if we blend it together with this? Of course, it's going to be too quiet because it's highly compressed. Okay, I'm going to just copy the compressor. We're getting there. We are definitely getting there. I think the timing is a little bit off. Yeah, it's ending too late. I could shorten this part, so I'm going to... No, no, wait a minute. First I'm going to locate where it should end, then I'm going to stretch. Yeah, okay. Now I'm going to stretch that... Wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, stretch, and now I'm going to use crisp monophonic unpitched percussion with stable notes. Balanced multi-temporal mixture. Let's try this. Who knows? Okay, that sounds really good. I can't tell the difference between this time stretch and non-time stretch part. That's good. Is the sync all ready? It's like shutting its mouth. Starting to shut its mouth here. So we're doing this too late. Too early. Should be longer, right? Okay, and now when it opens its mouth again, it's here. I'm doing this way too early. Wait a second. This timing is not correct with this timing. That's going to be a problem. Now it's correct, okay. Now it's not corrected again. So in some parts it's correct, in some parts it's not. That's kind of weird. Okay, it's difficult to have the sync. Looks like we need to... kind of eyeball it. Unfortunately. This used to not be a problem. I don't know why now it is. Let's see, maybe we can send this a little bit to the reverb as well. I think I hear the story. Are we clipping something? Yes, we are. I'm going to add a limiter. Okay, so I think what I've heard before was speaking. Actually clipping on the master bass. That's not good. Yay! Sounds good. Save the session. What else we could do to improve? I would like to try some EQ. Because it's... Oh, and also maybe make this... allow it to be stereo. Minimize the... reference and disable jack sync. Yeah, some of that low... That sounds like guttural. I think this one is too loud now. We could use some of that. Maybe just this tail. Time stretch it so it's very slow. Yeah, kind of like that. Have it be like a... Of course it's too quiet. So let's paste the compressor again. We need to... cut off the very bottom of that. Because it's going to... That could be interesting. Let's move it before the compressor so it... I think we're not getting... enough volume out of that. And also I could add some chorus. Let's use cough multi-chorus. It's a nice one. Let's just listen to this part. Let's make this stereo. See what we can do with some extremes. Madam delay. Let's see what that does. Okay, it's very distinct. Right, now it's just some part of this whole thing. Let's see what we can do with this last recording. Let me just pitch shift this down. Auto talent. Auto talent can be used as well... as a pitch shifter. Because if we disable the correction... we can do pitch shift. Informed correction. That's an interesting element. It is. It's too long, of course. Let's close this plug-ins window. Let's see. That's too short. I'm gonna stretch it out. This time, let's go this balanced multi-timbrel. We got some really nice guttural sounds out of that. Let's see what we can do with an EQ. Maybe let's remove the lows. Actually, you should have used this type of filter instead. Now, right now, I'm using EQ in sound design, so this is not mixing. We do need a compressor to bind it together. I think we should have a master bus. I'm gonna control shift N, make an audio bus stereo. I like to call my sub-mix busses... I should have made this with a sub-mix bus. Okay, let's do it like that. I like to call my sub-mixes and all caps, so it's easier to tell what they are. Now, I'm going to reroute all of these tracks... to the ground, sub-mix, and even the reverb. Okay, now everything goes into here. What we can do is now multi-band compressor this. Let's go LSP multi-band. We can use something a bit easier to use, like ZAM as a multi-comp stereo. This is a free-band multi-band compressor. Let's turn them on. Okay, these are thresholds. Let's lower them. This is makeup. No, this is knee. Where is makeup? Okay, makeup. Okay, here's... Let's see how that works with our reference video. Mute this region. Let's see how that compares to the original. I think the sync is better on the original. I think these are too long. They are ending too late. Let's try again. Okay, I think this is the growl. I think that will do. Let's see free sound is available. That's a bummer and I never had this problem, honestly. That's it for this video. If you can't growl yourself, you can use pre-recorded elements that you can find on freesound.org. I recommend using sounds licensed under Creative Commons 0 because these are legally the safest ones. I hope this video was inspiring, interesting. Let me know in the comments if you think I've done a better job than its software on this mancubus growl. And yeah, thanks for watching. Oh, I would also like to thank everyone who is supporting my work financially. Without these people, I couldn't be making videos. So huge thanks. And if you, dear viewer, would like to join them, please go to patreon.com.anfa or liberapay.com.anfa where you can give me a buck or two every month. That's greatly appreciated. And if you would like to get some help or just hang out with people who are using open-source software and Linux for audio production, please check out my community chat chat.anfa.xyz There is also Discord, but Discord is proprietary so I am promoting Rocket Chat instead. All the links are in the video description. Now go! Make some growls.