Sound Design

This overview will be a bit watered down. I’ll go over the main parts of the sound and anything interesting or unique to certain weapons, but the bulk of the layering work won’t be covered because it follows a pretty similar process. My aim for layering is to hit different parts of the frequency spectrum with relevant sounds and to make each layer fill a specific role or frequency range.

Ordovis’s Greatsword

The first weapon I worked on was Ordovis’s Greatsword. Its weapon art has a long windup but dishes out a lot of damage, so I felt its audio should have more power behind it.

By stretching the kick sample out with Ableton’s texture warp mode and syncing looped sections of it to the spin of the sword, I was able to get a low oscillating noise to fill in for the spin sound. This is an early draft:

Adding an additional layer of formant shifted up then helped match the sword’s weight. For the higher pitched spin noise, I took a percussion hit and used similar warping techniques and Crystallizer to get a “holy” sounding windup to match the holy damage and theme of the weapon. After this, distorting and stretching the kick out ended up creating a nice impact sound.

Here’s a breakdown of the layers:

In context with the game’s other weapons, I think the original fits better, as Elden Ring’s holy spells and weapon arts tend to sound thinner across the board. This also seems to be a general trend across Elden Ring’s player sound effects, many being thinner with less low-end emphasis. This was probably a stylistic choice; if you take into account enemy sound queues, ambience, and the game’s deep cinematic music, the choice to give less impact and attention to player sounds makes a lot of sense.

Magma Blade

The Magma Blade swing was fairly straightforward. The core of it is a “swish” sound made by pitching the kick, smoothing it out with reverb and Crystallizer, then adding some pitch automation. The Magma Blade redesign also introduces the base fire sample, created through similar warping techniques from before, which I later repurposed for the Prelate’s Hammer and Bloodflame Talons redesign.

The Magma ambience that plays just after the swing is slightly more interesting. It was made by feeding a stretched out kick in through a noise-based vocoder and adding a low-pass filter, which resulted in a deep bubbly ambience:

Breakdown of the Magma Blade:

Prelate’s Inferno Crozier (Prelate’s Hammer)

In the original Prelate’s Hammer audio, the flame noise felt a bit out of place without anything indicating the hammer being dragged into the ground. In the redesign, I focused on adding this element, using a few modified versions of the magma ambience from the Magma Blade in the layers.

Creating the crackling fire ambience was a little tricky. A sudden jump in amplitude causes an audible click or transient, so by cutting off the beginning of the kick’s waveform close to its peak, I was able to record a click transient and piece variations of it together to make a fire crackle sample.

Breakdown of Prelate’s Hammer:

Stone of Gurranq

For the next redesign, I chose the boulder spell, Stone of Gurranq, because I felt the original was slightly messy and out of sync.

By stretching the kick out, pitching it down, then raising the grain length parameter, I got a crumbly earth-like sound to use as a windup for the boulder spell. The toss sound followed a similar process, but with a low grain length instead to get a smoother “whooshing” sound, as well as a bit of volume automation to match the power behind the throw. After this, I topped each part off with a bit of layering to cover the frequency spectrum.

Breakdown of Stone of Gurranq:

Bloodflame Talons

Bloodflame Talons is typically thrown out quickly during openings in an enemy’s attack cycle or in anticipation of an enemy approaching. Similar to the Stone of Gurranq, I felt that the attack’s audio didn’t feel “cut tight” enough compared to the animation and timing.

The redesigned sound is made up of three elements: the seal noise, the cut, and the explosion. For the most part, the process used similar techniques as the other sounds and also repurposes the base fire noise from the Magma Blade. One thing worth noting is the blood gushing sound layered on top of each part, made by feeding the kick sample into a noise-based vocoder once again:

Breakdown of Bloodflame Talons:

Fortissax’s Lightning Spear

Fortissax’s Lightning Spear was one of my favorite parts to create. I first made an electric-sounding sample to use as a base by stretching out the kick, pitching it up, then lowering the grain size, resulting in a high pitched buzzing noise:

To get this closer to a lightning strike, I lowered the clip’s pitch, then used Crystallizer to add some mid-high frequency echoes. After this, I created a deep thunder sound by added distortion to the kick, and repurposed the base sample to create a sound for the waves of lightning. Compared to the other redesigns, this one involved a lot more layering and revisions.

Breakdown of Fortissax’s Lightning Spear:

I still prefer the original because I wasn’t quite able to match its fullness, but the process of designing lightning was still a fun challenge.