It’s been real quiet here… well, not really… been working a lot on wrapping up Episode I of my web series, 7 Shades of Lenity, working on Sound Design and Scoring for Angela Cecile Lee’s, Sunset in McDade, and my own romantic short, Perseverance.

Episode I has been fully released in 7 parts, and I will upload a full 43 minute version soon — I just need to normalize the sound and make sure the transitions are good.

Perseverance is almost done. Sound and Color are both done, just doing last minute tweaks and then I’ll upload it and start submitting it to festivals.

Now, onto the main topic of this post: Freebies!

These are pretty cool, if you’re working on some Sound Design. One is a soundfont and the other is a Loop pack, so you’ll need some sort of a DAW. I use and highly recommend Ableton Live.

The first pack is a sound effects pack (not Foley) for making music. Think Native Instruments Evolve Mutations or Paranormal Spectrums… only smaller, and free.

http://soundcloud.com/artifexstudios/artfx-sound-effects-volume-1-preview

You can download it from there by looking for the MegaUpload Link near the bottom of the page.

Next, the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra is a small yet usable soundfont in SFZ format (you’ll need the free sfz soundfont player – a vst plugin).

In the author’s own words: “Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra is a free orchestral sample library. While not as advanced or ambitious in scope as commercial offerings, SSO contains all the basic building blocks for creating real virtual orchestrations. It’s primarily aimed at beginners, but also more experienced composers looking for something lightweight and/or portable might find it useful.”

The sounds are really good, and whereas you may not have all the flexibility of some commercial packages, this stuff’s pretty good… and FREE!

http://sso.mattiaswestlund.com/

Check ’em out and let me know what you think 🙂

Val Gameiro
Writer, Director, Filmmaker
Austin, Texas