Cinematic Boom

How it's made

Source

a trailer boom is a huge low-frequency hit, built from three layers: a pitched sub drop, a distorted noise transient (the "slam"), and a long rumbling tail of low-passed noise.

Sub drop

a sine falls from ≈ 85 Hz to ≈ 32 Hz over 0.7 s (pitch envelope, curve exponent 2) while its level decays over ≈ 2.4 s; a quiet octave-up sine adds weight on small speakers.

Transient

a 20–140 ms broadband burst band-limited to 80 Hz–4 kHz and driven through tanh saturation; it adds the clipped, distorted crack that cuts through the sub.

Body and tail

brown noise through a low-pass that sweeps from ≈ 600 Hz to ≈ 60 Hz over 1.2–2.6 s, so the rumble darkens as it dies away; a 140 Hz band of noise adds the chest thump of the first 150 ms.

Envelope

attack in under 5 ms, bulk of the energy in the first 0.5 s, level fading to silence by ≈ 3.3 s.

Variation

`rng` jitters the sub tuning (±2 %) and the noise layers; presets move weight, drive and tail.

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.