Get with the programmers

The award-winning sound designers have entered the world of plugin development with a boom…

Enforcer is a sub-bass generator effect that can be triggered by incoming audio. How did you make a creative tool that responds to a dynamic audio input?

AR “Boom Library is a sound design company: we produce sound effects for games, movies, commercials and postproduction. Today’s clean, punchy styles of music demand controllable low end. It takes time to get more ‘kick’ into existing recordings manually. We use subharmonic generator plugins, but we tend to need more control and ‘solidity’. We used to layer lowfrequency samples with those sound recordings, but with machine guns, footsteps and similar fast and repetitive content, this manual editing is so time-consuming – this can really slow down your creative flow. So we came up with the idea to create a more intelligent, highly controllable ‘helper’ that easily creates clean low end by avoiding hard-to-handle rumbling sub-frequencies.” How exactly did Enforcer’s development process work? AR “Jan, our genius programmer, created a prototype rather quickly for us to experiment with, and to set feature goals for things that create headaches when done manually. Our Turbine plugin took us a year of research, but Enforcer was straightforward. The initial version was already capable of adding customisable synthesised sub-frequencies dynamically, so we developed a list of features that would make Enforcer even more of a flexible tool for sound designers. We added these features step by step, and also came across great new features during the development process. The trigger detector, for example, evolved a lot during the development process. Basically, we started with a simple tone generator that created sine tones via a custom pitch envelope. We then added in different kinds of synthesisers, with the possibility to better visualise the input, and therefore give an easier setup of the trigger detector’s newlyadded thresholds. We added curve types, metering and the ducking filter that removes the exact same frequencies that Enforcer produces from the original input signal.”

“Today’s clean, punchy styles of music demand controllable low end”

Which part of Enforcer’s coding are you most proud of, and why? AR “We focused on getting the most accurate sound generator, and being as CPU friendly as possible. A fun fact: one of our clients sent us a screenshot of a project using 2560 (!) Enforcer instances, and the CPU meter was only hitting 6%!” What’s next for Boom Library? AR “We’ve only just started developing plugins. The process of creating both Turbine and Enforcer have helped us understand different approaches and tools. We will make more sounds, too. We’re currently working on several libraries. We expanded the Noisy Places series with Harbor & Industrial, and are currently on the final stages of a library called Modern UI, featuring a modern user interface and fresh sound design elements. And we’re also developing our next plugin instrument: a special-purpose synth for creating interesting but – again – very ‘controllable’ sounds.” URL www.boomlibrary.com