Now that we’re officially in Spooktober, the topic of making a scary music seems in order. By scary music, we mean spooky background music that you can play to create that bone-chilling atmosphere.
Before we go and make the music, we need to gather the ingredients first. The ingredients for a good horror music is aplenty, but we’ll focus on a small subset of it so we won’t get overwhelmed and end up with nothing.
How to Make Scary Music
Add Piano
A scary soundtrack needs a scary piano playing in the background. It’s a classic. Try to listen to various classical music pieces. The first and second movement of Bartok’s piano sonata is quite unpredictable and can sound scary to the common population.
Other recommended pieces are Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky, Sycek Neodletel by Leos Janacek, Totentanz by Liszt, and Scriabin’s 6th sonata. There are many more creepy melodies, of course, but those five should be enough for a start.
By the way, you don’t have to fit the whole piece into your music. You can grab just the scary parts and spread them out throughout your music.
Add repetition
In music, a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm is called ostinato. A repetitive melody, even a subtle one, can add a haunting effect when played in a music piece end to end. Try listening to Basso Ostinato by Shchedrin to understand how it’s played.
Add screams of horror
Creepy scream is the cherry on top for spooky music. You can also add its variations like wailing or shrieking. Different kinds of screams can depict different emotions. You can imbue fear, pain, and terror into your music using the right kind of scream.
“Ugh, this sounds complicated”
Well, it can take quite a good chunk of your time to look for scary sound effects and combine them. To make this as painless as possible, just head over to ambient-mixer.com and browse the Halloween ambient mixes.
Check out the Halloween ambient mixes and pick one as your starting point. Load different sounds to any channel and see what you can come up with.
Don’t be shy to mix things up. As an example, if you use the Halloween nightmare mix as your starting point and load the beach with kids sound on the first channel, you end up with an even scarier atmosphere.
Listen to the new mix and an image pops in your head with kids happily playing on the beach, while screams coming from a desolate beach house. You can be sure something terrible is going to happen to those kids. It’s creepy.
OK, that’s all for our short article on how to make your own spooky music. Once you’re done, you can make a scary video with the music you’ve just made as the soundtrack, use it as a scary background music for your Halloween party, and the likes.
Enjoy the terror!
