Floor Surface in Foley Studio

If you're sending video to a foley studio through a 75 ohm patch bay, have trained foley artists on staff with acoustically treated rooms, plenty of props, and specialty mics designed for foley then don't bother reading this. But my guess is some of you doing sound for film or video may not have that luxury. I know I don't, and for some reason Mel Gibson won't return my calls....

That being said, I can tell you from personal experience that dragging those foot step sounds from your sound libraries and synching them to your video is not exactly the most efficient experience, no matter how many quick keys you know or catalogs you have organized in your workspace browser. There are variables that range room acoustic simulation, floor surface type, shoe type, velocity of the step, the variations in those velocities, and don't forget scuffing while turning in place.

What I'm going to do now is present to you the framework of how to build your own custom designed footstep combinator within the program Reason. This (module / Reason session / foot step beast!) will cover all the variables allowing you to achieve pro results in your home studio.

Now for my disclaimer. You will need an intermediate understanding of Reason to build this, which you could easily get by taking course number 115 "Reason in the Real World" and to apply it to your film in Pro Tools I would recommend 202 "Pro Tools for TV and Film." But I'll do my best to explain the framework here so you can give it a shot.

I also want to mention that this is no small project and it will take some patience. The design and implementation team included White Dog Studio's owner Curt Bush, Carlos Henao and me. We had to hand select quality cohesive samples from our libraries. Then it was necessary to edit, normalize and export them using Pro Tools making notes each step of the way. Be sure you map what you need and how you will name them before you start otherwise you'll be going back to this step more then once scratching your head.

After you have your samples, you will want to start with a 14:2 Mixer, A RV7000 as in insert to Auxiliary 1 on the mixer. Then create three combinators. Within those combinators you want to put a 14:2 mixer and about 9 NNXT samplers. Route all of the NNXT out's 1 and 2 to the Mixer channel inputs within that combinator channels 1 - 9 and send all three combinators to channels one through three on the main mixer.

The three Combinators you created should be labeled (Sneaker, Hard Heal and Leather). Combinators also allow you to add photos by option clicking on its surface. This will allow you to quickly identify what you're working with so we chose pictures of the actual shoes for ours. Within those combinator categories you will load your individual footstep samples into your NNXT's.

How the NNXT's will be organized is based upon the surface in which that shoe type is contacting. A good example would be (leather wood, leather cement, leather snow, leather grass, etc) Be sure to put the first variable prefix (leather, wood, etc) before the surface type so when you launch a midi channel in Pro Tools you can see know which output to choose for your application.

Because NNXT is a flexible sampler it will allow you to trigger different samples based upon how hard or soft you hit the key. So we chose three samples at three velocities for each key. You also want to be sure you map all of your steps consistent across the keyboard, meaning that the scuffs for instance are all on the same key when you move through the different outputs of your midi channel selecting shoe and surface type.

After you have completed your footstep combinator, be sure you save it as a contained session in Reason. That way Reason saves all the audio files within that particular reason session. After that you’re ready to rock. Simply rewire Reason in your session, launch the footstep Machine, create a midi track in Pro Tools and play your footsteps choosing the appropriate output. If you want to be slick (I know I do), record and automate your RV7000 to to create proper dimension. When you're done working with the scene, simply bus the Reason Output to new Audio Track in Pro Tools and move forward to the next thing.