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I’m a total newbie, and would appreciate any help in choice of equipment/software etc Firstly, I need to replicate ricochet sounds, from different angles, coming towards, across and away from the listener etc (I believe I need a Doppler plugin to do this). All I have is a MAC laptop, a good condenser mic and no idea where to start! I think I may have a copy of audacity, cubeace and of course garage, and thats about all. Don’t know where to start. Found this GREAT site doing a search for “ricochets”.

Thank you.

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    Your money would almost certainly be better spend on a sound library that has what you want. You could take any decent ricochet sound and automate panning, level, and EQ to create the directionality and direction of motion that you're looking for. A good ricochet sample would almost certainly have the doppler as part of the sample, since that's what the mic would pick up, so you don't have to worry about that. You don't need a special plugin to do doppler, it's just automated pitch changes.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Commented Sep 13, 2015 at 7:22

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If you're looking specifically to create your own ricochets, you could try glancing coins off brick or stone using a hand held catapult. Obviously you should take the necessary precautions not to ping a coin through someone's window or head. We had some success using a stereo setup where one mic was aimed at the impact point and the second was aimed at the trajectory downrange to capture the departing buzz. You mention you only have one mic so perhaps panning and combining different mono recordings is your best solution.

We also found that once we compared our coin ricochets to recordings of actual bullet ricochets, they lacked some of the pitch and energy, particularly on impact so we layered in synth laser SFX on the intial attack to give it a bit more zing. We also added some stone debris for effect.

Here's what it sounded like: https://soundcloud.com/bxftys/madefire-treatment-ricochet?in=bxftys/sets/madefire-library-sfx#t=0:00

Maybe speeding up the recordings might help and you could also try reversing some of the recordings so you have a leading in element as well. Or you could just buy a library :D

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  • Try items other than just coins, like washers / nuts of varying size and dimension, marbles, small rocks. The different surfaces will all provide different signatures to the ricochet and pass by. For example, the center hole of the washer provides a bit more tonality to the doppler as it whistles past.
    – Steve Urban
    Commented Sep 19, 2015 at 19:48

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