Swamp Thingy
My first sound effect package is Swamp Thingy which is inspired by Finnish swamps. I have spent lots of time in these swamps when I was young while I was picking cloudberries and selling them to shops. It was kind of summer job for me. The cloudberry is a very tasteful berry and people pay good price for it too. Price is good because it is not easy job to walk on wet swamps. Especially when you have big pickets full of cloudberries.
Wet swamp can be very tricky to walk around. Deep bog holes can suck you deep into it and it is hard to get out from it! You also don´t need to be alone in these places. There is always millions of mosquitos flying around and sucking your blood. It sounds terrible but it is not that bad when you get used to it. When you can enjoy it you can also notice the beauty of soundscapes. Usually swamps are very quiet and you can only hear the sounds of nature – birds, insects and grass movement in the wind. The real fun and nasty sounds come from the swamp itself and from the bog holes in it. These can make very brutal burp and sucky sounds when you step in them. I have listened these sounds so many times and I still love to hear them.
I have recorded swamp sounds several times and I find these very useful for gore and creature sounds. This is the reason why I made this sound effect package. I think sound designers find lots of useful sounds for different things from this package.
I recorded these sounds with three setups. Sennheiser M-S stereo microphone and Sennheiser 8000 series microphones as LCR and with stereo hydrophone setups. M-S Stereo recordings are from very close of the sound source, while LCR is pretty close but not too close and hydrophones are obviously stuck inside the swamp. I think MS stereo recordings are useful when you make detailed sounds or need to use side signal as “distant” sound. LCR is more overall experience and you can play lots of with it because Sennheiser 8000 series have great frequency response and these recordings are made as 24bit/192KHz. Hydrophone recordings are weird – in a good way. They are not crystal clear underwater recordings. They are very deep, crispy and scratchy, combining the movements of water and mud. These can be used for example for sound design stuff or for underwater sounds.