One of the video clips that I’m redoing the soundtrack takes place on a wooden billboard scaffolding. I needed to record clean footsteps, impacts, and friction sounds, but it can be difficult to control all the variables. There are some boardwalk areas near my house that I’ve recorded in the past, but I’ve always had to struggle with noise from the wind and waves, not to mention distant boat and car traffic. I found a wooden pallet outside of a dumpster the other day and saw my golden opportunity.

This turned out to be pretty good (and free) foley stage.

The clip involves a couple of bodies falling onto wood, so I made myself a foley dummy. I filled a gym bag with shoes, clothes, and books and dropped it from various heights to record these.

This should be good for the main meat of the body falls.

I wanted to record some heartbeat sound effects for a game project to use as an auditory health cue, so I set out to try and build a sort of stethoscope using household items. I took the plastic lid of a cd spindle and wrapped the open end with saran wrap and affixed a rubber band around it to form a diaphragm. I drilled a hole in the other end and attached a cardboard tube that was just wider than one of my condenser microphones.

This is one of the recordings, after a little bit of compression and noise reduction: