A useful yet underrated sound effect is the “distant city” sound clip. It’s the sound of far away traffic, sort of like a soft hush, with perhaps a bit of detail poking through. These clips are used for TV episode establishing shots, or to add thickness to a general urban track.
It’s not easy to capture a distant city field recording with the proper balance between detail and distance.
Field recordist Stephan Marche of Web shop Detunized has released a new sound fx collection that captures precisely that sound: Distant City Ambiences (20 sounds, 700 megabytes, €15.00).
The clips in the collection provide a steady urban bed while including evocative details such as bells, boat horns, leaves, crickets, and water to fill out the tracks. They were captured using the exceptionally clean Sennheiser MKH8020 and MKH8040 microphones.
Listen to a sample of the 48 kHz/24-bit samples, here:
Visit the Distant City Ambiences Web page. You can also find links to a 3-channel version of the library on that page as well.
View all of Detunized’s sound fx collections.
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