New: Mechanical Destruction Sounds in “Death of a Cash Register”

Sound designer and field recordist Brandon Seyboth has released his second sound effects library: Death of a Cash Register (246 sounds, 5.17 gigabytes, $50.00).

Seyboth found the broken cash register while at a junk shop, and immediately saw its potential for sound design. What followed was the creation of almost 2.5 hours of focused recordings of the device, such as mechanical sounds, springs, slides, and button presses:

I started by recording everything I could with it still intact. This includes the key being inserted and taken out, keypad buttons, the lid for changing the receipt paper, hitting it with bare hands and a crowbar, scraping it with a crowbar and a wire brush, and short-distance drops onto both carpet and hard flooring.

After capturing everything sound with the cash register intact, Seyboth began recording destruction sounds: hits, impacts, and drops:

Once I had everything I wanted of the register intact, destruction began… It was dropped from shoulder height numerous times, then dropped from 20ft numerous times as well. I could not believe how well it held up to this. Even after THREE 20ft drops onto asphalt, it still took several hits from a heavy-duty pry bar to break the shell away from the main system. Once the main mechanism was separated from the outer shell, it was dropped from 20ft twice onto the outer shell components, and STILL it remained almost entirely intact.