Halloween Experiences or Benztown Horror 2014

Soon your city will be ruled by candy grabbing zombies, witches and gremlins – Halloween is coming! Here at benztown our Halloween production already runs at full speed since a few weeks.
Check out this year’s Halloween coverage, get some sfx recording experiences and learn how to increase panic by using some psychoacustic tricks.

Benztown Halloween 2014 Demo

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/169439046″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]

 
SFX 

As you heard, Max created some brand new Halloween SFX this year. All from Scratch. This is what I am proud of most these days, as it is a luxury only a few companies in our indutry have – an inhouse Sound Designer / Foley Specialist and Recording Engineer. When I thought about frightening sound effects, the first thing came to my mind was: HORROR movies,  Zombies, blood squirtiung all over the place, Impacts, Hits and and and….So many great things out there.
As it is forbidden to cut real arms and legs of imaging guys being too late on prod deadlines, Max went to the super market and bought some really serious, dangerous looking and healthy stuff! Veggies and Fruits. He used celery, parsnips, lettuce, paprica and spaghetti for crunchy sounds, melons and oranges for more awesome stuff.
Before you start destroying all these body parts, make sure you cover important studio stuff properly or record in a room, which can get muddy, wet and reallly really dirty. Now have fun, start slicing, dicing, chopping, bashing, hitting, dropping, twisting, breaking, snaping and attack all the Zombies in front of you!

Finally Max edited and layered the recordings in the studio to create bad ass bonebreaks. Just check the track above.

In the second sessions Max  recorded screams, zombies, whips, metal rattling, water drips and of course a splatter movie classic: A CHAINSAW. NICE ONE!

The Sinewave Of Fear

Beside layering and pitch shifting stuff, you can simply increase  fear by adding a high pitched sinewave to your mix. (These trick is used in movies all the time, as well as metal scraping and white noise, which is layered consequently and all the time.)
Make sure it stays in the background, so that the signal doesn’t incurs your listener’s attention (and does not hurt their ears either). To make it more subtle, add some reverb. In order to maximize the creepyness mess around, fade, layer, crush, do everything to make the effect sound as ugly and unpleasant as possible.

 
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/169423133″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]

 
As you can hear, the sinewave adds a feeling of suspense to the heartbeat. In this example we used the signal generator of Omnisphere, but it’s certainly possible to do it with Pro Tools one.
Mark an area and open the Audio Suite Signal Generator. Choose a suitable Frequency and render it – with different frequencies you can achieve various results. Use Pro Tools VariFi to speed up your rendered sine wave to create an uplifting sweep. If you want, you can now start to tweak this sine wave with different effects to create another one. 

 
… and now get your stuff together and frighten some people!