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On SoundDogs, I found the sound of a marker drawing on paper for ca. one second:

Hi Liter Marker- Draw Line, Long; Pens & Pencils

The problem however is that I need the sound of a marker (or felt-tip pen) that lasts for 2.5s.

Are there methods to extend that sound so that it still sounds natural?

What I already tried:

  • Stretching the sound. As expected, the result is unnatural, especially in the beginning and in the end.

  • Repeating parts of the sound. The repetition is clearly audible.

  • Repeating parts of the sound, and crossfading between them. During the crossfades it is clearly audible that there is a transition between sounds.

What I may try is recording the sound myself, but I don't have experience with that, I don't have perfect silence here, and I only have my laptop, my smartphones, and an ancient digicam for doing the recording. At least, I don't need very high quality, and a bit of ambient sound doesn't hurt.

Software at my disposal:

  • Sony Movie Studio (light version of Vegas)

  • Sound Forge Audio Studio

  • Everything free that runs on Windows or Linux.

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Recording it yourself is definitely the best and easiest way. You will just have to see if your equipment is up to it, though it's not a difficult sound to record so you may be ok. Portable recorders are so cheap now it's worth investing in one if you do this kind of work regularly.

One technique you could try with your sound is to make a copy, reverse it and then crossfade that together with your original. This is sometimes more forgiving if the timbre is noisy but you will get the pitch characteristics reversed which can be noticeable or unwanted depending on what you're trying to sync with. Eq can also help to join stuff.

Here's a rough example:

enter image description here

The bottom track is reversed and the second sound on the top track has a slight pitch bend on it so the pitch is a bit different from the first.

And the resulting sound:

Drawing

Whether it works or not will depend on the footage. Matching changes in the sound to the motion of the pen you are following helps a lot too. If there are changes in direction you want to match the sound to that and it makes the task much easier

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  • I like the result you got with that technique. At the moment, I'm experimenting with recording from my Android tablet with headset.
    – feklee
    Nov 9, 2014 at 12:32
  • The result is on Vine #Oi7AxVz7qXK. For recording the sounds, I went into the bathroom, the most quiet place in my apartment, taped a piece of paper to a wooden chair, and drew with a mechanical pencil. As a recorder I used my Android tablet with the Field Recorder app, holding the headset microphone above where the pencil was drawing. I didn't bother to remove the hiss, but it's trash anyhow. ;-)
    – feklee
    Nov 10, 2014 at 13:46

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