It is important before composing to choose the tools that will suit the scene you are tracking and the sounds you want to create. When it comes to the horror genre there are certain sounds, instruments, and effects I feel are very effective in evoking emotions such as tension, unease, and fear.
Synthesisers (Hardware)
- Make Noise Strega – Good for making soundscapes, ranging from deep, rich and melodic sounds to dissonant, distorted and noisy soundscapes. Also good for creating unusual sounds such as atonal synthesiser lines and harsh feedback.
- Moog Mother 32 – Can create bass lines, similar to 80’s slasher soundtracks (e.g. John Carpenter’s Halloween). Also good for synth lines and experimental soundscapes.
Noise Boxes and Effects Boxes (Hardware)
- Koma Field Kit FX – Effective for harsh noise and power electronics. Noise can be used to build more tension or to help build the climax of a movie/scene.
- Drone Box (get the name from home) – Can be used for lingering low drones, the box has three oscillators built in that can be tuned via a knob so you can have three drones going at once in different tones creating microtonality and dissonance in the piece.
Effects (Digital)
- Valhalla Supermassive (Delay & Reverb) – Perfect for giving space and atmosphere to a sound, but important to use sparingly otherwise too much reverb can muddy a piece and make it sound too spacy.
- Wires (Soviet Wire Recorder Emulator) – Wires are good for recording vocals, spoken word and specific sounds as it can make voices sound ominous and creepy, and can add a retro sound to synthesisers.
- MISHBY (Broken Tape Machine) – MISHBY can be used for glitching or completely morphing and distorting a sound.
Field Recordings
Ableton Live 11 (Built-in effects and sounds) – Ableton is my main DAW and was used for this pr0ject. I also used sounds, instruments and effects that are included in Ableton.
I used Ableton as my DAW of choice, which worked well as I had under 10 tracks for this piece. In future projects, I would like to move on to working with Pro-Tools. All the synthesisers I used for this piece were digital. I would typically use a mixture of both hardware and digital, but for this project, I set myself a goal to only use digital synths as a challenge. I found this helpful as it forced me to use the tools I had to hand and work around the problems and challenges this technique gave me. For synthesisers, I used low drone pads that add a sinister atmosphere. I played one of the pads throughout the second half of the piece, slowly fading in until it swallows the entire track.
The feeling of tension in this track is created from 2 field recordings, one of a tumble dryer (recorded by me) and one of a train (from Ableton Drone Lab pack). The first thing you hear in the track is the field recording of the tumble dryer, reversed and transposed down. The reversed sound gives the piece a tense and surreal aspect to it which I feel works with the found-footage style of the scene.
The audio effects I used for this piece were MISHBY and Valhalla Supermassive. MISHBY was used to add some dissonance and slightly morph sounds. Valhalla Supermassive was used as a basic reverb to add some space to make more atmosphere for the piece.