Today marks a very special day for EPICOMPOSER as I’m finally able to unveil the project I’ve been secretly working on for the past 2 years: EPICOMPOSER’s very first original product MONUMENT – a cinematic trailer sound effects library!
In this article, I’d like to introduce you to the MONUMENT library, talking you through its creation, its features, and who this new sample library might be for. I’m super excited to show you everything, so let’s get started!
MONUMENT – OFFICIAL RELEASE TRAILER
OVERVIEW
Before we take a look behind the scenes, let me quickly familiarize you with the most important features of MONUMENT – Cinematic Trailer Sound Effects!
MONUMENT is a roughly 4 GB large sample library packed with over 200 professionally produced sound effects for cinematic music composers, video creators and editors. The SFX are structured intro 11 categories including Atmos, Bends, Booms, Braaams, Downers, Drones, Hits, Risers, Short Hits, Whoosh Hits, and Whooshes.
Here are the specs:
- 4GB of Cutting Edge Cinematic Trailer Sound FX
- 220 Professionally designed sounds
- 660 Variations (Warm, Ambient, Crunch)
- 11 sound categories
- 800+ Total audio files
- Full Definition WAV files in 24bit / 48kHz
- Metadata embedded for quick search & find
- Royalty-Free Usage
DEFINE THE PROBLEM, FIND A SOLUTION
As some of you might already know, in my job as a composer and sound designer I create music and sound for TV, commercials, corporate shows and motion picture advertising campaigns aka movie trailers. In my work with various music supervisors and trailer music houses, one phrase I came across a lot in recent times was:
“…AND PLEASE DON’T USE THE SAME SOUNDS EVERYBODY ELSE IS USING!”
Since there are quite a few sample libraries on the market practically every trailer music composer has got in his or her repertoire, poor music supervisors and creative directors are forced to damage their ears (get it?) with the same old trailer hits, percussion sounds and riser effects over and over. It comes as no surprise that they grow tired of listening to the same stuff as it also makes their job, marketing their label’s music as unique and valuable, quite difficult.
When I was facing more and more of those “don’t use commercial stuff” briefs from my clients, I made the decision to start growing my own, custom sample library of powerful cinematic trailer sounds.
THE ORIGIN OF MONUMENT
I took my mobile recorder and simply started capturing everything that sounded remotely interesting or “processable” to me. What began with smashing together all sorts of household items, cupboard doors, and small electric devices quickly turned into an obsession for me. I set up an experimentation zone in my studio’s recording room and started capturing the sound of larger objects, setting various things on fire and misused musical instruments until they sounded nothing like they were intended to. My goal was to compiling a large pool of raw sound sources I could later process and layer together in order to create my final sounds.
While I was recording all those sounds, I began studying hundreds of recent movie trailers, trying to find out what sound effects they used, how they implemented them and what they could be made of. I watched every kind of tutorial I could find on the topic and quickly found out that in order to create larger-than-life sounds, you don’t necessarily need to have larger-than-life sound sources. I spend many nights heavily processing and mangling my raw sounds with all sorts of plugins and hardware equipment until I finally started getting something out of them that resembled what I was hearing in the movie trailers.
The processing part of the production was an ongoing learning process for me and with every sound I crafted, I was getting more confident in feeling what processing a raw sound might need and what I could make out of it.
As my personal collection of designed trailer sound effects started building up, I began using them in many of my productions, eventually leading to some of those very sounds being featured in various international movie campaigns and featurettes including Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Avengers: Endgame and Captain Marvel.
DESIGNED FOR MAXIMUM IMPACT
After several years of heavily using my own sounds and keeping them for myself, I felt like it’s finally time to move on and to start creating new ones again. I was talking with many of my business colleagues and friends and eventually decided to lift the lid off of my self-proclaimed “sonic treasure chest“. Especially my video creating and editing peers were very keen on getting their hands on ready-to-use, professionally designed cinematic sounds they can quickly drag and drop into their deadline-ridden projects.
I created a compilation of only my most favorite sound effects from all the essential sound categories in trailers including hits, booms, risers, drones, downers and many more. To round everything off, I spent the last months adding completely fresh content deriving from heavily processed analog synthesizers and acoustic instruments fed through experimental guitar pedal chains.
What I came up with were over 200 original, meticulously designed sound effects that would provide composers, video creators and editors with an easy and professional way to enhance every cinematic music or video production. Project MONUMENT was born.
SONIC VARIATION FOR EVERY SITUATION
As a special feature, I fed each and every one of those 220 sounds through three additional processing chains in order to generate useful variations of the original audio files. Many of my video creating friends were complaining that although they had good sounding SFX sample libraries, most of them were lacking flexibility. Since not all video creators are well-versed in using audio processing tools to adjust the sound of their sound effects themselves, this narrowed their sample libraries’ fields of application considerably.
To make my sample library more flexible in connection with different visual contexts, I wanted to provide three distinct types of variations: Ambient, Crunch & Warm. Here’s what they sound like:
Ambient adds a strong sense of space and depth to the sounds. To achieve this, the original sounds were fed through high-quality reverb and stereo width enhancing tools. The Ambient category is perfectly suited to support large-scale imagery and epic landscapes.
Crunch provides you with a saturated and distorted version of the original sound by making use of fine analog tape and tube saturation. These variations are great for aggressive action and combat scenes as they inherit an edgy and overdriven sound.
The sounds found in Warm feature a darker, warmer tone created by careful filtering of the high frequencies. These variations sound less in-your-face and lend themselves perfectly as a subtle enhancement to your visuals.
TRY OUT MONUMENT’S SOUNDS FOR FREE
Being a composer and frequent sample library user myself, I wish I would always be able to try out the sound and feel of a new product before committing to a purchase. Acquiring pro audio production software isn’t exactly affordable and returning digital goods rather difficult in case you don’t like what you bought. However since with my own product I’m allowed to do whatever I like, I decided to provide people interested in my sound pack with a comprehensive demoing opportunity to try out the sounds for free at their leisure before buying:
MONUMENT – FREE TRY PACK
The MONUMENT Free Try Pack features 20 original sounds from the full sample library which you can download and use for free – no strings attached.
MONUMENT – AVAILABILITY
MONUMENT – Cinematic Trailer Sound Effects is available now as a digital download through our brand-new EPICOMPOSER online store for $149.
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