Kpow Sounds - Sound Effect Production
Kpow Audio has decided to branch off into the sound effects creation business. We are going to call this arm of our business Kpow Sounds. The decision to create and sell sound effects for the sound post and game sound market was not one we took lightly. There are already numerous boutique sound creators recording and designing sounds, and although the market is not exactly flooded, it is certainly fairly full.
Since there is some competition already out there, we knew we would have to follow some very strict criteria to make it worthwhile. The first would be to create high quality sounds. We would need to maintain a low noise floor, and record with quality microphones in quiet spaces with little reflections. Once we could meet these objectives, we knew we would then need to only create libraries of materials that could be useful, and that were not already available.
In order to ensure their usefulness, we would need variety in performance, variety in microphone perspectives, and logically edited sound files, with accurate and precise metadata. The question of what kinds of sounds would be useful to create a library for was answered through staying busy in the game sound profession, and active in the sound post online discussions. There were times when we found great difficulty in finding good materials to use on projects, despite so many resources now available, and these were noted down. We have a numbered of planned future sound libraries, and have released our first – Toots and Squeaks, which features whistles, horns, squeeze toys, party blowers and melody pops. It’s a big collection of audio for such a niche type of sound, but we wanted to ensure that those purchasing the collection were sure to have everything they hoped for after reading the blurb and purchasing the library.
Coming soon we will have a Sproinks and Sproings collection, and once this is out, we will release a UI collection which was our first experiment into sound effects collections. It offers something different to the usual sound effects collection. It is mainly aimed at games audio professionals, and game developers, and contains 14 soundpacks of User Interface sounds, packaged in various ways for easily creating a comprehensive user interface experience. Each pack contains ‘enter’ ‘select’ ‘scroll’ ‘back’ and ‘error’ sounds, with both variations on these sounds, and subtle variations of each type for random no repeat playback.
