For all the new hands out there -

If you're anything like me, when you're firing a gun in Halo (or any game for that matter), the first thing that draws your attention is the unique sound. When using headsets in online games, you can immediately identify the gun someone's firing simply by the sound that it makes. Have you ever wondered how big-ticket AAA franchises pulled off these things? In some cases, they've used real gun sounds. They'll use weapons like the FAMAS, the Desert Eagle and even mounted machine guns for recording in their games. It's understandable that you may not have access to a gun and may not want to fire it once or twice, but there are ways to get around it. If you have an air-soft weapon of any kind, you can pull off the same effect using the gun-tunnel method. Basically, get a room with a decent amount of re-verb (or echo) like a basement or an outdoor area and one or two studio-grade microphones which you can get for around 50-100 a pop nowadays. Next thing is to have them set up, surrounding the weapon or item of choice and make sure that they're wired to a computer to record it (Audacity works well in my experience.) Next thing is to test it out. Take note that you don't always need a weapon because if you have access to an airsoft gun or a drum, you can pull off the same effect. After you've got a few decent sounds, you can play around with some of the features in audacity such as noise removal and maybe some of the effects (reversing it works well if it's an alien weapon and maybe a "WahWah" effect to emphasize that it's not human. By the way, that's the actual name of the effect so don't hate U.U) Anyways, after you're done with that and pitched it well, you should be set to save it in a format that can be opened later on.
Anyways, that's how you pull off studio-grade weapon/sound effects. I encourage you all to you around with it to get some of your own effects. I'll prepare a little demo to show you all some of the cool effects that you can get within it.

Edited by AllySuzumiya on Apr 26, 2013 at 12:13 PM

lol wut?

Dud please fix your post!
Edited by jackrabbit on Apr 26, 2013 at 12:07 PM

Too dumb and too lazy to do that one. Sorry.

A++ post

Or you can take existing sound recordings and edit them.

Can I substitute a weapon with a nerf gun?

I clearly specified using an airsoft weapon. If you're dumb enough to go into your basement with an actual weapon, it's noone's fault but your own. Next thing is that if you're planning on being a sound engineer in the future, you'll always have need for those microphones. In my case, I'm a musician and have need for microphones to record my work, anyways. Next thing, Airsoft guns are dirt cheap, honestly. You can get a decent one for about 10 dollars.

Depends on what kind of dart you use.

A gas-powered airsoft gun is sufficient. With a bit of pitch-correction, you could have something that sounds similar to an actual weapon. A nerf gun isn't as loud as an Airsoft gun so It wouldn't be as efficient when it comes to the recording process.

Me3!

To each their own, I guess. I just like having the leisure of being able to make my own weapon sounds for projects. That way, when people ask me where I got my sounds from, I can proudly say that it was my creation.
It was always interesting to me how they'd get these unique sounds for movies back in the day without access to weapons or certain things. Like, the dinosaur sounds in Jurassic park were literally just mating sounds of turtles and such and the "horse gallop" sounds were recorded with coconuts.

There are no trust issues. I trust and have full confidence that that no matter what is posted for whatever reason that you will find a way to be a dick about it. You and your predictability haven't let me down yet.

Alternative to airsoft: Going to an outdoor range, firing off a few rounds with a good mic recording it, cleaning up after

Alternative to all that: TO GOOGLE!