Creating a realistic and immersive experience for your audience requires ambient sound effects. These effects provide background and atmosphere, enhancing your content's depth and realism. Below, we guide you on using the ambiences sound effects presets within Krotos Studio to create realistic and immersive soundscapes.
Josh Beal, ACE - Editor (Fleishman Is in Trouble, Locke & Key, Jupiter's Legacy)
Ambience Sound Effects Presets in Krotos Studio
Krotos Studio offers a wide selection of ambience sound effects presets, ranging from natural environments like forests, beaches, and marshlands, to urban settings such as cities, suburbs, and specific locations like London Downtown and Berlin District, as well as indoor spaces like apartments, offices, and various types of public spaces including restaurants, hospital rooms, and transportation interiors, and even unique settings like submerged environments and starships. Explore all ambience presets, and watch what they include and sound like.
Why Krotos Studio for Ambiences?
Gone are the days of trawling through sound effects websites in search of high-quality ambiences. With Krotos Studio, you have a vast selection of curated Hollywood-grade ambience presets at your fingertips.
Krotos Studio eliminates the time-consuming traditional process of collecting individual sounds, then layering, editing, and looping them to build a soundscape. Instead, it generates a unique, seamless and neverending soundscape, with each sound element customisable by you. You don't have to worry about the duration of the soundscape, either. Whether you need a short sound clip or a prolonged scene, you can generate the perfect ambience for any duration.
Quadrants in Krotos Studio
Quadrants refer to the corners of the XY pads in the preset interfaces, each containing up to four types of sound effects. These contain unique sound elements packed with numerous variations. These sounds can be mixed and matched to create various ambience effects, customised to your specific project needs and duration.
1. Use a Single Quadrant
For example, in the ‘City’ ambience preset, one XY pad contains the sounds of a city skyline at the top left quadrant and traffic sounds at the bottom right, and another pad contains sirens and car horns.
To use a single quadrant, you position the dot on the XY pad according to the sound you want.
For instance, if you only need the sound of traffic, you position the dot at the corner with the traffic sounds. This will start generating a never-ending, unique stream of traffic ambience. Krotos Studio continuously records what you hear, and the sound is ready to be dragged out onto your project timeline or folder.
Tip: Placing the dot at the bottom left corner of XY pads (or where there’s no sound label) will mute all sounds from that pad. Think of it as intensity or volume control.
You can slide along the bottom of this pad to gradually increase the intensity of traffic.
A single quadrant allows you to isolate and use specific sounds from a preset. It's a straightforward way to add a specific ambience to your project.
2. Use Two Quadrants
From the above example, in the ‘City’ ambience preset, one quadrant contains the sound of a city skyline and another traffic sound. You can combine these two sounds.
Position the dot between these two quadrants on the XY pad to blend both sounds. The top right corner will blend them at their full intensity. Move the dot around the XY pad to craft the perfect sound that matches your content.
Tip: What you shape and hear is what gets recorded. You can sculpt your ambience sounds in real-time. This is great for movement or changing scenes within your project.
3. Use Three Quadrants
You can combine two XY pads. You could blend the sound of traffic from one XY pad with the sounds of sirens and car horns from another XY pad to create the ambience of a traffic jam!
Using the ‘City’ preset, for example, you can blend three layers working together for a busy city scene with police cars driving by. Once the police cars have passed by, you can move away from the sirens and return to your busy traffic soundscape.
Pro Tip: If you are working within a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), you can load Krotos Studio as a plugin and automate the movements of the dots.
4. Use Four Quadrants
To use all four quadrants, position the dot on the XY pad to find a suitable mix between all the sounds. For instance, you can position the dot closer to the skyline quadrant for a steady city soundscape or move it closer to the traffic quadrant for street-level sounds. You can follow the same process for the sirens and horns quadrants. You use all four quadrants to create the most detailed city ambience.
The closer you position the dot to a particular quadrant, the more present that ambience layer will be. Move the dots in the XY pads up to the top right-hand corner to use all four quadrants at maximum volume and intensity.
5. Use Four Plus Quadrants
Some presets have up to four sounds on an XY pad instead of two. This allows you to create a mix of up to four sounds. You can combine these layers by moving the dot closer to the centre of the XY pad. This provides you with an even more complex and layered soundscape.
But it doesn't stop there. You can then bring in the sound effects from the second XY pad.
Top Tip: You get access to over 50 soundscape combinations from certain presets, providing a vast range of possibilities for creating the perfect ambience for your project.
With four plus quadrants, the combinations of ambience sound effects are truly endless.
6. Combining Presets
To combine presets, you drag the sound effects generated from one preset onto a track in your editing software and repeat the same from another. This allows you to mix and match sounds from different presets, creating a perfectly tailored soundscape to your project.
You could combine various presets to create unique soundscapes; for instance, blending the 'City' and 'Suburbs' presets could produce a town-like ambience, merging 'Forest' and 'Marshland' presets could result in a dense nature soundscape, or pairing the 'Countryside' and 'Suburbs' presets could evoke the ambience of a village.
Summary
Krotos Studio's Ambiences category offers an incredibly versatile and powerful tool for creating immersive and realistic soundscapes. From the simplicity of using a single quadrant to the complexity of combining multiple presets, Krotos Studio provides a vast array of possibilities for enhancing the depth and realism of your projects.
With Krotos Studio and a bit of imagination, the combinations of ambiences are endless. Explore all Ambience presets, and watch what they include and sound like.
Start your journey today and unlock the potential to create Hollywood-grade ambience sound effects in seconds.