In this article, sound designer and re-recording mixer, James David Redding III M.P.S.E. demonstrates how he recently used his voice to modulate sound effects to ‘perform’ water movements in a scene.

Krotos Audio Reformer Pro is one great sound design tool. A plethora of sound libraries with the ability to use your own sounds to create and perform sounds to picture makes it not only powerful but fun and intuitive.

On a recent TV series I was working on, we needed to do some water movement; some of it going under the water, some of it coming out above to the surface. Although it may seem obvious, it was important to have a fluid motion between the two. Trying to do that by cutting in sound effects can be a pain trying to get the right movements and get it in sync with everything. Yes, your Foley team can do so much and in this article, I am going to show you how I used Reformer Pro and my voice to augment everything that they have done. Alternatively, if you don’t have the budget for foley, then you can do a convincing job using sound effects that you might have in your library already.

You will need to go through your library, using a sound effects management system like Soundminer and select some suitable sound effects. To save time I've already pulled some sounds. For underwater sounds I used all sorts of little underwater booms waves, with a variety of ambience. For the above-water sounds, I pulled a whole group of waves on beach waves on rocks but they just weren't quite working well enough for the motion that I needed, which was more like a person swimming in water. So I ended up going with a little more splashing and a little more above water type of sounds.

In my Pro Tools session, you can see I set up an Aux Track fed with the output of a microphone and have an instance of Reformer Pro on it. You then bus it to an Audio Track so you can record the output from Reformer Pro. Even though Krotos doesn’t recommend this workflow, I find it works well for me.

Next, we need to create our libraries in Reformer Pro. Using the Analysis Tool, navigate your way to the folders in which you have dropped your selected sounds. Select the Underwater sound folder and give it a name in Krotos and then do the same for the above-water sounds as a separate library in Reformer Pro.

Once that is done, close the Analysis Tool and restart Reformer Pro, by removing the instantiation on the Aux Track and instantiating it.

Now that we have Reformer Pro set up and with our new libraries in there, we can go ahead and replace the libraries in the modules that we want to use. In this case, I'm replacing ‘Black Leopard’ with ‘Underwater’ and replace ‘Electronic Pro’ with ‘Water Movement’.

Since I'm only using two modules, I recommend that you mute the bottom ones so that you don't accidentally trigger them. Because this scene starts underwater I am going to move the cursor in the XY section of Reformer Pro to the top left of the Underwater quadrant.

Because I am under NDA, I can’t show you the actual footage I was working on so I went to Pixabay found some underwater swimming from Engin_Akyurt.

When you play the underwater sounds, experiment to see how you can control the sounds with your voice. I also found that using a reverb plugin, in this case, Revibe II, on the Aux track before it goes into Reformer Pro adds a little bit of a tail so that the water sort of ripples away like it would naturally. I didn’t want it to be triggered and stopped by my voice. I wanted to just tail off a little bit more and adding reverb to my voice on the way into Reformer Pro fixed that ‘cutoff’ problem.

Now move the cursor in Reformer Pro across to the above-water sounds and experiment with how you can modulate that with your voice. It's not quite how I did it for the swimming scene, but we'll get to that in a moment. At this point just get the feel of how your voice is being triggered, and it doesn’t have to be your voice it can be just about any sound. I did this with ADR for an underwater scene while the actors were grunting and groaning underwater and bubbles were coming out of their mouths. I use the ADR to trigger my Reformer Pro ‘bubbles’, but in this example, we're going to perform along with our swimmer.

It’s a fairly simple shot that starts off underwater, breaks the surface then splashes around above water. Let's go ahead and give it a shot.

Note that in this video tutorial you are hearing what I am doing with my voice so that you can get an idea of what I did, but with the way I have configured Reformer Pro in Pro Tools my voice is just a modulation signal, it doesn’t get recorded. Most of the time I'm just sort of humming but those types of sounds are just helping me modulate.

So there you have it. As a result, I make the strangest noises and my family thinks I'm crazy when I'm in my home studio. What else is new for us? Sound artists, right?

That's how I triggered water movement for a scene. Using Reformer Pro has sped up my process so much. Just recently I used it also to do some cloth ripping in a scene. Again, unfortunately, an NDA prevents me from showing that one too, but hopefully you get the idea.

I hope that has helped you and shown you a solution to a problem you might not have thought of. Reformer Pro is so powerful that I now keep it in my sound design template.