So you need to make some weird sounds.

Good call coming to this board.

I noticed that as far as a lot of sounds go, whenever ambient or floaty kinds of sounds are made here, they tend to stick to a few general samples (looking at you Opaqity, using the record needle in every track). There's exceptions, but something that's lacking here is use of foley sounds and sound design around organic sounds warped into something new.

Suggestion 1: Use Audacity

Audacity is really one of your best friends in the world of free sound, and you should use it a lot. It can record desktop audio, through microphones, both if set up properly, and it has its own built-in effects suite that is quite nice.

Some of the most interesting sounds you can make come from recording something and then mangling it through Audacity, whether that's repeated pitch bending to destroy the original data, or to paulstretch it and create a new pad sound, or digitally stretch it and make an entirely new sound to work with.

Suggestion 2: Record 30 seconds of anything

When it comes to getting new sounds, it can be hard to wait for "that one sound", so pick up your phone, or whatever you use, and record anything for 30 seconds, then bring it onto your computer for more editing, or to pluck something out and use that raw.

Suggestion 3: Skip intelligent sound design

What I mean here is that while having some knowledge of how to make some sounds is good, you can (read: I specifically can and have) get caught up in worrying about this or that and what's supposed to be "right" in the sound. In this situation, it's sometimes better to just throw yourself at a synth and twist and change things at random, make tweaks until something you like comes out of it.

So now what?

Now, let's make some change to the sample library of AT. I will be creating and uploading various risers, ambiance, and foley samples for the next few months or so, simply because I don't think there's enough of them. I'll be tagging them with "NextAmb", so they can be found all in one tag, contribute if you like. Let's make the record needle sample a literal thing of the past.