I just finished my pacman clone, and used 1 whole sound effect I found on the net. I could have done with a lot more, but I couldn't find any that were suitable. What I'd really like to do, is make my own, but I don't have much idea how it's done. I have a couple of tools like Cakewalk (admittedly v7 and v8, getting quite long in the tooth though (I'm a guitar guy)). The only real familiarity I have is playing with SFX on the Commodore 64 a long, long, long time ago in a galaxy far far far far away, using ARSD, but I'm pretty sure that's probably long out of date. I've heard sound effects guys say the only thing you need is a coffee cup and a spoon, but obviously that's not entirely true, you need something to record it and then add effects to it. Just wonder what the normal tool for that is.

What about Audacity for general preprocessing, then Reaper for (VST based) effects and composition. (Get a lot of VSTs at KVR Audio). It's a affordable setup, with Audacity being free and the non-commercial version of Reaper being 60$

Thanks. I'll take a look.

You want to create synthetic sounds from scratch I see. Buy any cheap VST sequencer (for your purpose it doesn't need any thrills). Reaper or maybe Fruity Loops.

Then you can pretty much use any VST synth you find relevant, I am playing around with Future Audio Workshop - Circle right now, it's frign awesome. Especially if you are new to synthesis like me, it's laid out really intuitively and the included reverbs etc sound great. There are some fx presets you can use as a starting point to help your knowledge also. Pretty sure there is a "c64" preset actually which would give you an idea of the waveforms used. It's not free, I think it is aprox $200, but it is very good.

So yeah, just sequence a note in the pitch of the sound you want, say "middle C" into the VST host (Fruityloops or what not) then play around with synthesis! Play around with those oscillators, envelopes, filters & effects. Alot of those old commodore effects used to have a few sounds almost like a little 3 or 4 part quick "tune" so you could try programming that in your VST host instead of one host

Export that little pattern & normalise if required. Sometimes I do further editing to that little sound in Soundforge, Audacity will work fine also.

I've got recording foley & editing "real world" sounds down pat so now I am working on creating sfx with synthesis also, it's alot of fun :D

There is sfxr that can generate sounds if all else fails :)

Thanks guys, I haven't had a chance to look at any of these yet (been building a cubby house for the kids) but I thank you very much for the input :)