The Best Royalty Free Sound Effects for Instagram - SFX that will Make Your Content Stand Out
Jourdan Aldredge
Apr 24, 2024
While most social media platforms follow a similar path of rising from obscurity to hyper-popularity to being uncool, Instagram has seemingly found a way to consistently grow its audience and remain popular with all age groups and demographics.
Despite being owned by Meta (aka Facebook), Instagram has also been able to retain much of its original identity and curate a user base that prioritizes creating quality content over re-sharing memes and works from others.
Because of this, if you’re looking to stand out with your Instagram content, you’ll need to produce something of quality and value for the communities you’re a part of. One way to do this is by using sound effects to increase the production value of your videos.
And no, sound effects are more than just fart noises, dog sounds, police siren sounds and Wilhelm screams. Strategically using sound effects in your videos, whether they be Stories, Reels, or even Live, can be a great way to give your videos that extra sheen of production quality.
Let’s explore not just how to use sound effects in Instagram videos but also provide you with a curated list of the best royalty free sound effects for Instagram videos, including some additional tips and playlists as well.
10 top royalty free sound effects for Instagram
Now, before we go through more tips and tricks for adding royalty free sound effects to your Instagram videos (and, you know, explore what royalty-free music means, too), let’s start by giving what you want right away.
Here are some of our top picks for the best individual sound effects for your Instagram videos. We’ll provide some more curated playlists below, of course, but here are some of our best recommendations. (You can also browse tons more royalty free sound effects in our library here at Soundstripe.)
Description: Typing on a quiet, soft keyboard.
Description: Slowed down gun shot, outdoors, with echo.
Description: Busy traffic intersection that contains multiple passbys and a police siren.
Description: Hover car passing by. High speed.
Description: Low, rumbling impact with long airy decay. Reverberant.
Description: Noisy wind and water atmosphere.
Description: Fast, energizing hit.
Description: Designed comic jump. Long cloth swoosh.
Description: Body falling into deep water.
Description: Sci-fi telemetry whooshes in, a high-chiming drone in the middle with some mechanical clicking, and then whooshes out.
These are just some of our top choices, though. If you’d like to review thousands more, visit our full sound effects library. Later in this article, we’ll also provide some more tips and playlists.
How do sound effects work on Instagram?
Now that we’ve shared some of our top picks, let’s look a bit deeper into how sound effects can be used in your Instagram videos. Like using sound effects for YouTube videos and other social media platforms like TikTok, sound effects in your Instagram videos can be very loud and obvious or subtle.
Truthfully, many sound effects are best served when they’re barely noticed. That’s because sound effects can be a great way to bring your videos to life with a more substantive and immersive feeling.
When shooting content organically on Instagram, it can be tricky to add sound effects, especially if you’re streaming live. However, if you’re looking to create more professional content that you’re already planning to edit in an app outside of Instagram, sound effects (and royalty free music, for that matter) can be a great addition.
What are royalty free sound effects?
Speaking of “royalty free”, we should probably take a minute to explain this term in case you’re not familiar with it. While you probably understand this at least a bit, reviewing just how copyrights work is important. For sound effects, just as with music or any other creative assets, copyrights always exist, and unless you’re creating the sound yourself, you can’t use other people’s music or sound effects without getting permission from them.
Luckily, to make things easier than trying to track down and negotiate with each artist who composes and records any music or sound effects directly, there are music and sound effect licensing platforms like Soundstripe that offer these tracks for you to use.
They’ve already been licensed and the artists have been compensated for their work, which makes the music and sound effects available to users when they sign up for an account. If you’d like to read more about royalty free music and sound effects, here’s a great primer on what royalty free music is (and is not).
Our top sound effects playlists for Instagram
Now that we’ve explained all of those royalty free and copyright details, let’s give you more playlists to browse through that will give you even more sound effect options to add to your Instagram videos.
Description: Relax. Unwind. Take your content to a peaceful place with these calming SFX.
Description: Human sounds like humming, cheering, coughing, etc. Welcome to the human condition.
Description: Background elements of urban and rural life to bring life to a scene.
Description: Cinematic sound effects, pre-arranged into powerful sequences that you can cut your footage to
Description: Soundscapes, transitions, and hits designed for epic films and TV.
Description: Movement of various textures to add an extra layer of believability to your project.
Description: Electrical hums, buzzes, and sparks signal a device's turning on.
If you’d like to explore sound effects further, here are some additional royalty free sound effect playlists that would be great for your Instagram videos.
Tips for using royalty free sound effects in Instagram videos
Finally, to wrap things up, let’s review some tips and tricks for using sound effects in your Instagram videos. These tips are mostly for more professional videos that might be best used as Reels or on your Instagram profile, but you can also use them for Stories and Live videos.
The best advice for working with sound effects in your Instagram videos is to add production value and give your videos that extra level of immersion. Here are some tips:
- Cover your poor audio with better sound effects for specific activities (whooshes, car horn sounds, doorbell sounds, clapping sounds etc…)
- Liven up boring transitions from shot to shot
- Give life and feeling to your environments
- Make motion more dynamic and fun
- Safely sell your stunts with realistic-sounding punches or gun sounds
It also should go without saying, but the best content on Instagram will be videos and images that feel real, authentic, and empathetic to your brand and audience messaging. Instagram is full of people faking their lives, so the more genuine you can be in presenting, shooting, editing, and adding sound effects to your videos, the better.
Those are just some quick tips, though. The real fun begins when you start browsing sound effects and exploring fun ways to use them in videos of your own. So dive on in! And if you are also creating content for other platforms, here are some of our favorite TikTok sound effects.