Epic Trailer Braam FXWant to Create your own Epic Trailer Braam FX?
This sound was “invented” or at least made popular by Hans Zimmer in the movie “Inception”.

Essentially it is a mega powerful “horn-like” sound that blasts with a long sustain and screaming “Listen to me, I am important!”.

You can think of a Braam sound as a mix between huge brass instruments playing at high dynamics, and a big cruise ship horn sound. All mangled with heavy effect processing!

I am now going to share my top tips on how to sound design epic trailer braam effects.

Step 1 – Brass Power

I like to start with a very powerful low brass sound, using a big ensemble patch. I also love to layer for example tubas, bass trombones and a general low brass patch.

An important note here is to really shape the dynamics curve of these layers, and you will use mainly the F to FFF range. Do you want it to slowly open up, or blast at full right from the start. It’s up to you, but you can do a lot with automation curves on dynamics and expression here.

Step 2 – Big Bold Sustain

To really maximize that authority and power feeling in the braam sound I like to also add a layer that provides a very bold sustained sound. Something like a ship signal horn for example. Or even a pipe organ with some extra effect processing on it.

Step 3 – Heavy Processing

Now a braam is all about power and authority, so using extreme effect processing is a must. Heavy compression and fat distortion are basically mandatory. For this I love using a plugin called Punish by Heavyocity, since it includes all the main effects I use to create massive and powerful trailer braams. Compressor, Distortion, Transient Shaper, EQ and Limiter.

Check out Heavyocity Punish Effect

I can highly recommend this Heavyocity Punish Sound Design Effect for Epic & Heavy Processing.

Step 4 – Bounce out the Final Result

I find that having the final braam as an audio file gives me more flexibility in the project to place it, edit it, stretch it, compress it, reverse it etc. It is also much lighter on the CPU since the final audio file will have all effect processing burnt into the wav-file. Finally, it is great because you can save the final trailer braam effect into your own custom made sample collection! =)