Earthquakes are big and intimidating forces of nature, but creating earthquake sound effects is easy! Today I am going to show you how to create your own earthquake or earth rumble sound effect using a granular synthesizer and some plug-ins.
Keep reading below to learn how!
You can also grab my FREE earthquake SFX here!
What source recordings do you need?
First, you’ll want to start with some sort of plastic or other material with a crunchy texture. For my sound, I crunched up a plastic file folder.
This sound will be the foundation of the earthquake or earth rumble sound. Later, you can add other layers to this base sound, like the sound of rocks, pebbles, sand, or dirt falling.
What software do you need?
Next, you’ll want to drag your sound source into a granular synthesizer. I used Padshop 2 by Steinberg and made a few adjustments.
I changed the position, the spread, and the offset of the sound so that each instance is not starting at the same place and so that multiple instances of it can play at once.
First, I moved the position towards the middle. Then I added the number of instances to play back. Then I spread them out so they all played together.
Next, I put the speed up to 200 (2x speed), which is the maximum speed. You can make the speed higher or lower than this, depending on how fast you want the crackling of your rumble sound to be.
Next, I added just a bit of offset.
I set the duration around 7.5 or 8. Too low and you’ll lose some of the sound texture, and too high and it will be too crackly. You have to play around with this knob depending on the recording.
Finally, I increased the length to about 54%. Set this too low and you just get little pops. You could set it to 100 but it might be less clean. Again, depending on the sound source, I may change the setting here.
This will get you the core idea behind the earthquake or rumble sound. The rest of the sound design is going to be done by adding plug-ins.
What plug-ins or effects do you need?
Now that you have the base of the sound, you can really bring some interest and variety by adding plug-in effects.
First, I brought the pitch down by 41% using PitchDriver. This added a lot of variety and interest to the sound.
Next, I added Trash2 by iZotope distortion to make it sound crunchier. This is where the character of the sound comes through.
You’ll just want the mids-to-lows of the sound since this is a rumble sound. You’ll probably have some crackling and high-end frequency noise that you don’t want. To solve for this, I cut those out using an EQ.
I added Recenter by Boom Library to make the sound very wide. Adding width in this case made the sound much bigger and feel like it is in your face. I also selected Multiband to more accurately widen the sound.
Next, I added Spectre by Wavesfactory. I added a bit more of the low-end frequency sounds. It gives you more of a rolling sound, but you want to be careful not to overdo it.
Next, I used bx_subsynth by Brainworx to add to the sub-bass rumble. I cranked it up a lot to make the effect really noticeable and then brought down the mix until I felt it sounded good.
Finally, I added a bit of reverb to place it in space using Stratus 3D by iZotope. I used the preset called “Box Canyon”.
And that is it. Get creative and have fun creating your own earthquake or earth rumble sound effect!
Remember to download your FREE earthquake SFX here!
You can watch the full video of how I made this sound effect on my YouTube channel.
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Have any questions?
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