Pack: Eggshells

Recordings of egg shells being crushed. You may not think you have a need for egg shell sounds, but these are just a way to get a good crunch. You can down-sample them to get interesting sounds, as a couple of example illustrate in this pack.

I collected a variety of egg-shell halves by rinsing them out after use, letting them dry on the window sill over the kitchen sink. They sat in a little bowl for a long time. Finally I recorded their final demise by putting a excess tile on the carpet in my mix room, setting up a Marshall MXL 603 (cheapy small-diaphragm condenser) through my Sytek mic pre, and running that output into my Zoom H4n. After that, I dumped the shell pieces into the garden to feed the tomato plants, and took the recordings to my old XP laptop that still has my favorite DAW software on it (Cool Edit Pro).

Like an idiot, I didn't think to remove a cajon that was sitting near the tile on the floor, so I got some reflections that I didn't want. But I cleaned up the sounds as best I could and extracted just the interesting bits to post here. The room itself is extremely quiet, so the noise floor was near or even below the 16-bit limit. I recorded in 24 bit, but after all the processing I wanted to do (in 32-bit floating point format), I converted the final forms to 16 bit for the masses. But I kept it as 48KHz. If you need 44.1KHz, most digital audio utilities now-a-days can handle the conversion for you.

The main thing I had to do across all the recordings was to eliminate the proximity effect -- the close-miking is a microscopic look at the crush event, so in practice I think most folks would want to eliminate nearly all of the low frequencies. I didn't totally throw it away, but left it pretty low. If you don't like what I did, you can get the raw source material recording, which I've put here in FLAC format.

For a few of the sounds, I also used a dynamic high-pass filter to allow an artificial effect of reducing the volume (as in "space") around the thing being crushed. This gives more of what you would normally think of as a squish sound. Even the word "squish" does it. But most of the sounds do not have this done.

I may add more such sounds here in the future, but for now, this is all I've got based on egg-shells. See also my old "VegetableEffects" pack for snapping celery, cutting frozen lettuce, etc.