Anyone have any advice on getting good sound FX?

Currently I have a 3D artist hard at work on the art, a musician, and I'm the lead coder so basically we're left with that one element that really needs to be addressed soon...the sound effects.

I've seen lots of game mods that featured impressive collections of audio, which would be quite suitable use in a full game. I'm not sure where they get the source audio, and how they modify it to create distinct sound effects.

Take for example Ballistic Weapons for UT2004. It has sound effect easily worthy of a commercial release. But when I browse the free sound clip websites I mostly hear junk. Where do these people get this stuff?

Buy some pro commercial sound sample CD and edit from 44.1/48KHz sound, that ensures the quality.

It's hard but not impossible to amplify crappy sound to nice audio, but need a lot of work and a good package like SoundForge etc.

Well, most of the pro commercial sound cd's I've seen are way outside my budget range. I've almost spent all my budget on getting the other assets completed, so I need to be able to do this on the cheap...

I'll look around, maybe I can find some that are within my range. But most of the sound CD's I've seen are more catered to...well, anything but games. I want pyrotechnics, in other words. Not bird calls or crying babies.

Maybe I should ask on the Ballistic Weapons site where they got their sound effects...

You don't have to buy a CD with loads of sound effects that you'll never use. You can buy only those sounds that you want from some sites. One I use is www.sound-effects-library.com and I'm sure there must be others around.

If anyone knows of any others like that, I'd appreciate some links. I looked at sound-effects-library and to be honest all the firearm sounds were really weak...

Run weak sounds through some EQ processing to beef up the bass end, add slight reverb or time stretch portions of the sample.

From seemingly rubbish sounds, great things can be made.