I recently submitted one of my recordings of crowd sounds (or “walla”) to The Sound Collectors’ Club, which I joined earlier this year. Michael, who runs the site, wrote me back to let me know that my recording didn’t quite fit into any of their pre-existing categories. It turns out that this would actually end up working out for the better though.

I emailed Michael back and made a suggestion in passing that it’d be cool to add a new “walla” category for the sound I submitted, not thinking much else about it. I was pleasantly surprised when Michael wrote me back and said that he thought that was a good idea. He asked if I could narrow down my idea to something a little more specific than just ordinary crowd chatter though.

After thinking for a few days about what types of crowd sounds would be good to add to my (and everyone else on The Sound Collectors’ Club site) collection of sound effects, I remembered a project that I worked on several months ago. It had a few scenes that needed a medium to semi-large sized crowd that were talking — but were talking quietly and/or whispering at some points. I didn’t have any personal recordings that fit this description and I also had a lot of trouble finding any recordings online that worked for these scenes.

I emailed Michael back with my idea and he decided to use it as the new “theme” for Spring 2015! Click HERE to read more about it, including a minor complication that we ran into. It turns out that a library called Quiet Spaces has a similar type theme and it just came out a few months ago on the echo | collective: fields website. I listened to echo | collective’s Quiet Spaces library and it sounds great, and is very reasonably priced. I definitely recommend checking it out, along with their other libraries. Signal Return seems like it would be especially fun to use.

It’s always cool to get the chance to contribute something to the community of professional audio folks. Sharing ideas with other sound designers, field recordists, etc. is always fun. I’d already planned on writing something about the new theme on The Sound Collectors’ Club and when I saw last week’s “Sunday Sound Effects Roundup” on the Pro Tools Expert site with my name listed in the article HERE (update on 4/27/15 — this edition of Sunday SFX Roundup is no longer active on the Pro Tools Expert site) I figured that I’d go ahead and write about it today.

Eric