Two Ways to Instantly Improve your Sound Design
- Akash Thakkar
- Feb 24
- 1 min read
There are two common issues I see with a lot of beginner sound designer's work and reels, but both can be solved pretty quickly.
The first is using bad source material. Whether it be choices from a library or Freesound, I often hear source material that simply doesn't fit whatever they're designing to.
Thankfully, you can bolster your SFX library with some great stuff using these free libraries:
You'll of course still need to design your sounds to fit whatever it is you're doing, but it's going to work out a lot better if the source is of high-quality.
And the second issue is not knowing how to layer their sound effects well.
Whether it be timing the layers so each one has room to breathe, making sure each one's frequency response is appropriate, or blending/balancing them well to create a cohesive whole, something along this process usually falls apart.
Yes, I have premium courses to help with this on my site, but if you're brand new, I have a playlist of me making sounds from scratch right here.
Just watch through that, and you'll get a way better grasp of how to layer your sounds.
Even though there's a lot more to sound design than good source and good layering, just fixing up these two will help you take things quite a bit further than before.
