EPIC: Cranking Minecraft Ambience to 1000

So in quite a few of my videos I tend to do a cinematic segment that features sound design heavily now in film making what you can see is important to storytelling but arguably the second most if not the most powerful asset you can use in a video making is sound bully

Is the art of replicating any kind of sound whether that be walking I’m cold fully is the art of replicating sound whether that be the ambience or perhaps a mob or maybe even a motion now I’m not 100% sure but I’m pretty sure dialogue is separated into a different category

But regardless what I’m going to focus on is the sounds that come from the world so now let’s take a listen to some footage I’ve already edited and then I’ll talk about my thought process and how you can do this yourself okay so we are now in my editing software you can

Do this in anything from iMovie to Final Cut Pro but Premiere is my editing software of choice I’ve collected quite a bit of extra footage that I didn’t end up using all of and if you’d like to see that you can find it in my Discord server which will be linked in the

Description I generally will post teasers and behind the scenes stuff for my videos and it’s just a nice place to hang out with you guys now this is the footage I did end up using if you look at the video section you see I have them labeled under different colors this is

Kind of just to show the different locations and down here is the mess that is all of the different audio tracks we’re going to start out by watching the whole thing just uninterrupted and you guys can get a sense of what I’m about to teach you w Is one of the most important things that you have to think about when doing sound design is if this camera is actually in the world of Minecraft what is the microphone above it going to hear I use these purple tracks quite a bit and those are to represent drones or

Ambience and so for this shot I use a wind drone which sells the idea that we’re on a high peak and then fade out into a less powerful wind and then we have me walk past the camera for Simplicity sake I’ve made all of the footsteps one color and to answer your

Question yes I animated every footstep because I’m a Madman one thing I do want to mentioned though is when I’m farther away from the camera I actually do have the audio lower and you can see that by the spikes in the audio graph the spike in this audio file is much shorter than

The one in here and that’s because I’m much closer to the camera well I’m actually off the camera here but I’m much closer so therefore the audio is louder another tool we can utilize is the pan tool and this allows us to differentiate the left ear and the right

Ear so when I’m walking in the middle of the camera I want to hear the audio in both of my ears but if I’m say off to the right here I’m going to want to have the audio only in the right ear as if I was a camera in this world and the

Microphone were pointing straight where the camera is looking I would only be able to hear this side next up we have this water shot I’ve got two ambient tracks here I have one that’s just kind of a drone very deep sound and then this other one which is the movement in the

Water that could be the fish or anything else moving and then put together you have this really nice combination that sounds like you’re underwater these audio tracks are green because this is audio that interacts with the camera we have one sound effect that’s right before the camera comes out of the water

And and then this one is the water coming off the camera and this top one is a larger Splash that goes well when put together with the smaller one so when all three are put together you get this and then the magenta color is the sound of the Boat Moving which I have

Fade in as the camera comes out of the water and then I have pan from the center to the left of the screen when it starts to move over to left in the mangrove forest the wind is not going to be as active so I didn’t

Bring a wind track to this scene ever I did get an audio track for the Crickets and frogs and any animals that might be here once again we have our boat sound which also Fades to the right okay the ancient city scene this might be one of my favorite ones first

Of all you got once again those footsteps that pan from the left to the right I did add a little bit of Reverb too because we’re in a cave so it’s going to be echoey now this one was a little bit tricky I had a subtle drone that was lasting through the entire

Shot but it does get overpowered by some of the other sounds depending on what part of the scene you’re in this is another cave sound but it is more alien sounding so it starts out quiet and then once it switches to the portal it gets louder but I didn’t stop there I have

Another cave sound that this one works very well with the first one they sound pretty much identical so when you play them together it’s almost the same sound but because they’re almost the same sound they’re more powerful when they’re together now these yellow tracks here are my favorite because these are risers

Risers tend to emphasize a powerful moment in a film for example we’re getting closer to the portal so it’s like oh no and then once it jump Cuts back to that first shot then it’s like oh nothing’s that bad okay risers are often used in horror films to emphasize

A scary moment but for here I’m using it as a kind of joke because you expect something crazy to happen but then it just ends up being nothing when you play Both of the risers together you just get this combined sound which is more powerful than just

Having one on its own one of the things I was thinking about when I created this shot is I wanted to bring tension to the scene so I added some screams in the background in hopes that that would make this portal scarier cuz maybe you’re thinking oh this portal eats people oh

No that’s terrible so then it gets louder and it’s like oh this is awful oh my gosh what’s going to happen nothing and the Folly here works too because I didn’t need any dialogue to make this a funny moment when you watched the shot I wanted it to allude

To something terrible something that would make you feel afraid to go in there so that even though I didn’t say anything you know in my mind I was going nope all right the forest scene this is the one couple of shots I actually did use audio from inside the game and that

Was the foxes snoring reason being Minecraft already had that asset available to me and I couldn’t find one on my audio library I wanted to keep the continuity so even though the camera has changed you still know where the fox is because of the way I was moving and

Because I did add an extra Fox snore off to the left paying attention to those smaller changes in the sound design can make or break your video we also have some footstep sounds that pan from left to right and then from right to the middle of the screen these footsteps are much more

Grassy because the terrain I’m walking on is different from when I was in the cave but in real life when you walk on grass it doesn’t just make a sound when you step on the ground you’re also pushing around the grass with your feet so I added a layer of audio that’s just

Pushing the grass with your feet so when you play that in tandem with the step sounds it makes for a very immersive walk I wasn’t completely sold on just the birds and the wind for this scene so I did add a third track which simulates the sounds of the leaves

Blowing and finally last but not least we have this river cave while this does look the simplest it was arguably the most difficult to replicate for this shot I focused on the fact that we are in a jungle so I have a jungle Ambience track playing that progressively gets

More and more louder as we exit the cave but there is also water which presumably isn’t stationary now the camera starts off in a cave so there’s a lot of surfaces for the sound bounce off of so Reverb is going to be very powerful at the start of the scene now the track

Right above it is the same audio file but it does not have the same effects this doesn’t have the Reverb as we are not exiting the cave we are no longer in a room but to my knowledge there’s no way to transition from having no Reverb

To reverb so my workaround was to have two tracks one with the Reverb One without the Reverb and then have them fade into each other so that way you get this sound as we exit the Cave the sound becomes more powerful and more clear and it’s a little bit louder in the second

Track too because it’s a more open space I am by no means a professional this is all trial error and experimentation so it’s probably not perfect but I put as much detail as I possibly could into these scenes so once again if you’re planning on doing any kind of sound

Design really pay attention to what you want the audience to hear there are many instances where just a few audio tracks is all you really need now personally when I look for sound effects I like to use epidemic sound I’ve been using this since the start of coldcraft and it has

Been my favorite audio tool of all time I highly recommend it this isn’t an ad for them at all I just really love their services but unfortunately it is a paid one they have thousands of audio assets to use including pretty much all the music I use in my videos but if you

Don’t want to pay for a subscription freesound.org is a fantastic tool as well now this site you’re going to have to do a lot more digging to find the perfect audio but for 600,000 assets for free that is a fantastic deal you also have access to all of Minecraft stuff as

Well that sleeping Fox is actually from this fox over here all I had to do was find a spot in the world that didn’t have any conflicting sounds and then replicate the environment where it made those sounds another option is recording your own sound effects if you have a

Pretty good microphone you can make your own sounds music is another really important part of setting the atmosphere in your story so let me know if you want me to do a video on that too I hope that this was somewhat insightful I love doing this kind of stuff and I love

Sharing it and although it takes a lot of time it is one of my favorite things to do and the thing that I hope to do for the rest of my life if you like the video please let me know in the comments and by subscribing it means a lot to me

And if this ends up being the last upload before Christmas I hope you guys have a wonderful winter season keep being awesome you guys bye-bye