Naval Depth Charge

The naval depth charge. A warhead dropped by US ships during World War 2. Containing 200 hundred pounds of Torpex explosives, when released, the depth charge kept a straight trajectory through the ocean water where it would detonate with a powerful explosion. Check out this video of a test detonation to see the power of this warhead.

I have seen numerous films where these are detonated, and today we will attempt to recreate the sound of the detonation underwater. To start we need to record the flushing of a toilet. I recorded the sounds of two different toilet flushes from multiple angles and locations ranging from directly over the bowl, off to the side, and underneath near where the water rushes out. Here is the recording we are going to work with.

Now we need to edit this to make it sound convincing. First we need to stretch out the clip twice its length, slowing the playback down by half. This will bring the pitch down tremendously while keeping the wet feel to the sound. Next we want to apply ample amounts of reverb and pitch shifting to really give this effect depth. I also copied the sound to a new channel, kept it the same length but pitch shifted it up and used it to create the sound of water coming to rest. Even though our effect exists underwater, we still need to think of the audience and end the effect with the high end. 

Finally, we can add some low end rumble to really push the sound through the mix, and recreate the intensity of the real warhead. We need the effect to start with a low thud, and move towards our high end finish. This will give us a full range explosion sound. Using pink noise with a sharp envelop with a low pass filter along with more pink noise with a much smoother attack and longer envelop and a low pass filter help us to achieve our desired effect. We also need to apply distortion to all of our pink noise tracks.Sounds simple enough, but a heavy amount of editing went into this effect which will soon be evident. 

This is the type of sound that you could spend hours trying to mix to perfection. I tried numerous amounts of reverb, eqing, distortion, pitch shifring, and automation before I finally settled on an effect that I felt would be convincing played with an image. Even though this turned out to be more complicated than I first intended, the ability to recreate the sound of such a deadly weapon with a single flush of the toilet was very entertaining.