Do you want to Create your own Epic Trailer Hits?
I love sound design, because it is so creative and fun, and you end up with completely original and unique sounds.
I am now going to share my top tips on how to sound design massive hits for epic trailer music, hybrid cinematic music etc.
Heavyocity Punish Effect
I can highly recommend this Sound Design Effect for Epic & Heavy Processing.
1. Define your Vision
There are many types of epic hits, from low boomers to explosion type impacts, to earth-quake rumbles, to massive punch hits etc. You need to first know what your end goal is. How would you describe the sound once finished?
2. Pick Sounds for Layering
Epic Hits type sounds are all about layering. I recommend that you really focus on the role of each layer. For example, one layer providing the low-end boom. Another layer providing the low-mid punch. Perhaps a third layer in the mid range for snap. You might want to have a whoosh type layer to fade into the main hit. Or a layer to provide a tail to the overall sound.
3. FX Processing for Power
The main effects you want to focus on for really making your hits epic, are compression and distortion (saturation). For percussion, and especially massive sound effect hits like this, you can often go very extreme with the settings. You should also experiment with parallel compression which is a blend between the non-compressed and heavily compressed sound.
You should also consider if you want to put the effects on the individual layers as well, or if you want to go all in on the final output. Perhaps you want to leave the lowest range more clean when it comes to distortion, to make that sub energy more focused.
Then I like to shape the overall tonal range of the final sound with an equalizer, as well as the attack and sustain part of the sound with transient designer. Finally, you put a maximizer at the end to boost the overall loudness level.
One of my favorite effects for extreme and epic sound design is Heavyocity’s VST effect Punish. The great thing about it is that it has all the essential effects in one single and really cool user interface. It is an epic sound effect best suited for heavy processing in my opinion. Epic music, trailer music, heavy metal drums and guitars, massive trailer braams etc.
4. Render out the Final Epic Hit FX
I like to bounce out the final result after all these steps, so that I can save the audio file in high quality WAV-format in my personal sounds and samples library. I recommend you to do the same, and to slowly build up your own library of custom sounds. Then you will have a lot of completely original sounds you made yourself at your disposal for future music compositions! =)