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What does a creepy Halloween soundscape sound like when Alessandro Mastroianni sets the scene and is armed with Dehumaniser 2 and Concept 2?

In this video, he showcases how the vocal processor and soft synth work perfectly together to create terrifying sounds. The results will tingle your senses and make you want to hide under your bed…

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Video Transcript

Hi.

My name is Alessandro Mastroianni, and I’m a composer and sound designer. Welcome to my studio.

Halloween is getting really close, so we thought it would be really cool to show you how to create a horror creepy soundscape using the Dehumaniser and Concept. Really hope you enjoy it.

Right, here we are. You’ll see, I’ve done already most of the work and we’ll hear it in a second.

But just to picture a scene, what I had in mind when I scored this was a classic horror movie scene, lady sitting on a chair, doing something relaxing, like reading a book, and then all of a sudden she hears a noise and she’s terrified and needs to go and check. What’s happening here? How I interpreted all that.

Cool, as a massive horror movie fan, it was pretty cool. You’ll notice that it was pretty abstract. It’s mostly that kind of score where the line between sound design and music is really blurred.

I’ve used Concept for most of it, and then I created the beastly creature sounds with my own voice and the Dehumanizer, and we’ll get to that in a second. To create a horror score, you always need to start from a pulsing bass. That’s kind of the staple of horror film music.

And to do I didn’t have to go very far at all. I just went straight into Concept, loaded the first default patch and sounded amazing right off the bat.

There are a lot of really cool modulations happening on this one, didn’t change anything, and this comes straight off the box. Moving on. I used this other preset from Concept, which is called crossfader, so you can kind of crossfade between two different samples. And it’s really cool to create this kind of abstract atmosphere. Here’s how it sounds on its own.

And this one uses some really cool nature sounds and applies granular processing to it. What I’ve changed here is that I’ve assigned the module to the cut off of the second filter, and I kind of just view the Midi data in over here so I could open this filter very slowly.

That’s what contributes to this feeling of tension. And it kind of doesn’t open up up until the very end, and you can tell that it’s a natural recording, like some rain going on over there, but it’s like processed in a very cool way.

So you get this kind of thing in between sound design and music that I personally absolutely love, which is kind of the same thing for this other sound.

Over here, another very noisy sound, but that uses some granular processing again, mixed with some oscillators.

And, here there is this impulse response in the convolution reverb that really makes the sound.

It has like a very interesting resonance to it that I thought works really well in this context. Next, this is one of my favourite presets ever in Concept, both stringscape and this is another preset that I modified lightly.

All I’ve done here is that this one comes with a free trigger mode, and I kind of wanted to bit sync it a little bit. So to do that, I pressed on sync, and then I set up the trigger mode to note and set it up so that the division is four beats.

And again, this opens up at the very ending together with the filter of the rainforest track and ends up in that massive growl of the beast.

And that’s what we’re going to do next for this one, I’ve recorded myself through the Dehumaniser, which is always absolutely amazing. And here’s what I recorded.

Okay, as usual, I had way too much fun with that, and that was just my voice processed through the demon preset again. Right off the box, it didn’t change anything at all. The only thing that they’ve added was a reverb rather than as a sound straight into the track.

And I just used the convolution reverb that comes bundled in with Cubase, which is called reverence. I loaded up an impulse response with a reverse tail. So, it gives this kind of cool echo to it, which I thought worked particularly well for this track.

And here what I really wanted to do is that I kind of only wanted this in the beginning. So to do that, you just need to make sure that the W for automation is activated.

And while the track is going, you can just touch a parameter that you want to do. And then it appears in the automation lane, and then you can kind of write it down a little bit. And in particular, I didn’t want this effect on the very last bit. So again, this would be more similar to what I had in my end.

I’m still there and you’ll see that it goes to zero at the end.

Yeah, one is really in your face. So that’s cool. And let’s go to the next channel. So to do this, I literally just duplicated what I recorded on the previous track, and I doubled it up with this many ghosts preset this kind of add that kind of quality to it, which i thought worked really well when layered to the main one, this sound over here, and together they sound like that.

This was a lot of fun to make. I really hope you enjoyed it. Please do yourself a favour and head over krotosaudio.com and download the trial versions of Concept and Dehumaniser. They’re really awesome tools. And Happy Halloween!

I’ll see you next time.

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