Acid Magic and Thoughts on Overworking Sounds

I’ve been creating some acid magic sounds for a personal side-project lately and have been having a lot of fun exploring fizzy, bubbly textures to create some pretty hard designed sounds.

The source material for these designed sounds are a wide range of collected textures that I’ve run through Whoosh to press them down into a little library of (surprise, surprise) whooshes, and impacts.

I often find myself going down a processing rabbit hole - trying too hard to squeeze interest out of sound with plugins and manipulation rather than focusing on the basics of what makes that sound interesting in the first place.

Embracing the idea of moving on from source material that isn’t very exciting or interesting rather than trying to make something from it has been a real game-changer while working on these. Especially since fizzy acid sounds can very noisy, flat, and sustained - digging a bit deeper to find sounds that bring a bit more character has been very rewarding.

I’ve tried to balance interesting movement and texture alongside the noisy “acid-sounding” layers while making the building block sounds. The idea I’m chasing is that combining them over time in the edit and letting those movements chain together is what makes them come alive while still retaining the aesthetic of acid!

Thanks for listening, and for reading the thoughts I had while making them!