BG3 Lightning Bolt Sound Redesign

BG3 Lightning Bolt Sound Redesign

Hey there!

Wanted to share my redesign of the Lightning Bolt spell from Baldur's Gate 3.

When I started this redesign, I tried to figure out what the feeling should be when the player would cast this spell. Being one of my favourite lightning spells from BG3 and DnD 5e, I wanted to bring a sense of power and devastation to the design.

Lightning is very fun to design in my opinion, for the sound sources I used chip bags, crumpled paper, duct tape (ripping it from the roll and off of a window, which creates some nice and deep resonances to play around with), cellophane and styrofoam. These source recordings were used across the whole spell redesign. The spell consists of a pre-cast, loop, cast and impact. The most important effects (in regards to the character of the sound) in all the chains are - Ableton's multidynamic’s OTT, Chorus, Decapitator, Pitch Shifter, Frequency Shifter, Flanger, Disperser and Delay (Not in order). There’s also a lot of dynamic filtering happening in the main spell loop (FilterFreak2 and automated Auto Filter). To create both the first and second impact, I automated ableton's tempo (from fast to slow, 200bpm to 60bpm), set the duct tape recording to repitch, and automated alot of filters, flangers and distortion. I repeated this process several times and layered the best and most appropriate bits together (And of course, lots of transient shaping).

Throughout the redesign there's alot of sweeteners, which mainly consist of a modulated, frequency shifted reese basses and high passed duct tape tearing recordings which went through a similar chain as mentioned before, to create a crackly and intense sound.

The background ambience is pretty straightforward for this redesign, it has two layers of filtered and modulated white noise for the wind sound. The bird sounds are a combo of bird call recordings from a nearby forest (also capturing some of that forest ambience with the Zoom H6) and two bird calls made by frequency modulating a sinewave oscillator, of course, a lot of effects and post processing.

Thanks for reading my blog post!

Recording Equipment - Zoom H6, Sennheiser ME 66 shotgun mic, Samsung A56.

Gameplay footage captured by me.
All game visuals, characters and intellectual property are the property of the right’s holder:
Baldur’s Gate 3 © Larian Studios.