Review: Foley Collection – Total Pack by Zach McNees

Over the past few years, my engineering work has become a hybrid between music recording and post-production for TV and film. Often times, the projects I work on are independent, self-financed films and documentaries with modest budgets, which inevitably means that all post production audio requirements fall squarely on my shoulders alone.

It’s precisely because of the all-in-one nature of my recent work that I’ve come to rely on software like Foley Collection to achieve realistic foley sounds for my films.

Let’s take a look at their flagship “Total Foley Collection Pack” and how it works wonders for foley artists and sound designers.

TECH SPECS: Foley Collection packs work with Native Instruments Kontakt which supports Mac and PC in VST, AU, RTAS, ASIO, CoreAudio, WASAPI, AAX Native and AAX 64 formats. Packs run from 9.99 euro ($14 USD) for individual packs to 549 euro ($756 USD) for the Total Foley Collection pack.

WHAT IT DOES: Foley Collection packs are tools for sound designers, foley artists and sound editors to create realistic foley sounds within your DAW. Each module is designed for triggering via MIDI within Kontakt allowing the user to “play” each footstep along with picture.

IN USE: The “Total Pack” from Foley Collection includes 32 different combinations of footwear and surfaces such as “Concrete / Man Shoe” and “Hardwood / Woman Heels”. These core footstep sounds can also be combined with different add-ons such as the sounds of leaves, water or various types of clothing like jeans, cotton, a parka or even keys and hand bag noises.

First, open up a stereo Kontakt instrument in your DAW. At present, Foley Collection packs work by navigating to the folder from the finder and dragging the .NKI instrument you wish to work with into Kontakt.

MIDI Zones (click to enlarge)

Foley Collection software works in three distinct MIDI zones when controlled by a MIDI keyboard. Depending on how light or hard you press the key, the footsteps being triggered will either be SLOW (quiet footsteps), NORMAL, or FAST (running). This allows the sound designer to focus on the precise movements of the character on screen. Along with the left and right foot, there’s also a stop gesture key for each module.

Most importantly, Foley Collection sounds are designed to sound completely natural and human. Each individual step, even inside the same dynamic zone sounds different each time you step back and forth. This creates an incredibly natural and human sounding performance which makes for a very powerful tool when combined with a velocity sensitive MIDI controller.

Where things get really interesting is with the ADD modules.

Different modules can be added into your KONTAKT session to supplement your core foley footsteps. For example, I could add JEANS CLOTHING and PLASTIC BAG modules by dragging each into my KONTAKT session.

The unique thing about many of the ADD modules, especially clothing, is that the instruments have been created with NOTE OFF versions. What this means is, if I add the sound of jeans, wool, leather etc. to my session using the NOTE OFF version, that particular clothing sound will trigger when I pull off on each key on my controller. The resulting sound when combined with the footsteps module ends up being very natural to a footstep followed by a cloth swish of the legs brushing next to each other and then repeating. Sound designers can utilize this to really tailor their foley recording sessions to each individual character on screen.

Foley Modules

Once I’ve recorded a track for a character on screen, I can continue designing for additional characters in the same scene within the single instance of KONTAKT I have open thanks to the Octave feature in Foley Collections modules. By adding a module to my KONTAKT session and moving the Octave knob up or down one click, I’m able to record a separate lane of MIDI sounds within one single MIDI track. Note that I am not altering the pitch of the samples but rather telling KONTAKT to record my MIDI data to a lower or higher Octave on my MIDI track. This allows me to build as many modules as I choose for each character as long as each set of modules exists within a certain octave range.

THE SOUNDS: Each module created for Foley Collection sounds remarkably realistic. A wide variety of shoes and surfaces are available which allows the sound designer to create a realistic replication of the on-screen action.

Each of these examples were recorded using identical MIDI which starts off at a slow place and increases to the NORMAL zone and then the FAST zone ending with the STOP key. Notice the subtle difference with the ASPHALT Man’s shoe with and without Jeans. I’ve included the Jeans sound as a separate clip for reference.

Asphalt Man’s Shoe
Asphalt Man’s Shoe

Asphalt Man’s Shoe JEANS
Asphalt Man’s Shoe JEANS

Jeans Only
Jeans Only

Carpet Bare Feet
Carpet Bare Feet

Gravel and Jeans
Gravel and Jeans

Gravel Mountain Boots
Gravel Mountain Boots

Linoleum
Linoleum

As you can hear, it really is remarkable how natural these collections sound via MIDI triggering. Combined with other elements in your project such as room tone and ambience, these foley samples drop in completely naturally saving me an enormous amount of editing time versus cutting up individual footsteps from audio samples.

TO BE CRITICAL: The logistics of finding and auditioning sounds for Foley Collection tends to be a fairly laborious process of selecting files within folders through the finder and dragging them into Kontakt. Foley Collection is a perfect candidate for a more traditional Kontakt instrument where all the packs and add-ons are part of the accessible file list within the instrument pack in Kontakt.

While the sounds are on the whole very decent, there is a huge lack of diversity in the women’s shoes! Over the three main packs, the only women’s shoe is some version of a heel, which really is not realistic at all to the footwear most typically worn by women. I found myself using men’s shoes and footsteps combined with pitch when creating foley for female characters. More women’s shoe variations please!

WRAPPING UP: Foley Collection fills a huge void in my sound design catalog providing me with a quick, easy and natural sounding way to do true foley at home in my studio at a very reasonable price. I’m very impressed overall with the sound quality and ease of use. I look forward to seeing future updates and packs!

Click for more info on Foley Collection, and to purchase. There’s a special deal during June 2014 where the Total Foley Collection Pack is available at a special price of $742.59 US. Individual packs are available as well. 

Zach McNees is a Brooklyn-based producer/engineer/mixer and live recordist who’s worked with Björk, Rob Thomas, Julia Nunes, The Gregory Brothers, Pixies, Liars and Alice Cooper. Get in touch with Zach via http://www.zachmcnees.com. 

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