How to create tension in horror music with drones, risers, clusters and clocks

Right, tension. When we think of tension, we think of something stretched tight and put under strain. In music, that strain comes from our ears wanting the music to resolve. Most of the time we use it to drive chord progressions and melodies: build it up, let it go, everyone’s happy.

Horror is different. We build the tension, make the listener think we’re about to resolve it, and then (joke’s on them) we never do. I call this unresolved tension, and it’s where you can have a lot of fun.

There are loads of ways to get there, from unresolved harmony and polytonality to a children’s song over a dark drone. Here I want to get practical with the tools I use all the time: beating sine waves, drones, rising pitch, clusters and ticking clocks.

Start nerdy: two sine waves

Before the fun stuff, I want you to hear what tension actually is. Load up a sine wave, one of the purest sounds there is. Put a second sine on another track, play the same note on both, and slowly bend the pitch of one while the other holds.

Listen. You get pulses, a beating that speeds up and slows down as you bend. That’s the two waves competing and phase cancelling each other. It’s the micro version of tension, and horror leans on it far more than on traditional harmony: notes fighting each other and wanting to return home.

Try it today:

1. Two sine waves, same note.
2. Bend one slowly away and back again.
3. Notice what the beating does to you. Resolve it and you relax. Don’t resolve it, and it’s torturous.

I once made a whole piece for a contemporary dance choreographer out of nothing but sine waves doing this. Every string drone, pad and “horror interval” below is doing the same thing on a bigger scale.

Drones: movement is tension

Drones paint the picture. They’re the wash that says there’s a mood here, we’re just not sure what it is yet. Register is your first choice:

• High drones give a sense of waiting. Possibility, good or bad. Hmm, what’s going to happen here?
• Low drones are the low rumbling of doom.

But a drone on its own is just a mood. Tension comes from movement, whether that’s movement in pitch or in the quality of the sound. Here’s how I build one:

1. Automate the EQ. Put the track in latch, grab an EQ band and ride it while the drone plays. Done slowly, it’s like a beast breathing.
2. Add pitch movement on a second layer. Nudge the pitch wheel only slightly. Quarter-tone bends are ideal: they barely move, but they’ve got life in them. That’s the sine wave experiment again.
3. Add a bit of filth underneath for weight.
4. Split and vary. Put layers on separate channels, make some quieter, change the velocities.
5. Bounce in place and arrange. I like working with audio because you can see how the layers blend. Don’t have every drone playing all the time. Bring them in and out.

As anyone who loves drone music will tell you, the beauty is in the subtlety. A well-crafted drone should make the listener think “eh, drone”, without noticing there are four layers moving underneath.

If you’d rather start from a ready-made bed, a pack like Doom Drones gives you loops built from field recordings and synthetic textures, or you can stretch your own audio into a long texture with PaulXStretch. Then add the movement yourself. Most of the time the drone is the bed, and the piano or a weird signature sound goes on top.

Rising pitch: something is about to happen

A drone says, “something bad’s going to happen, guys, but we don’t know when.” A rising pitch says something is about to happen. It adds progression and urgency, and it gives your tension an end point.

Classic horror trick: play something simple, jolly and sweet, then put string risers underneath it. Instantly wrong.

When you write risers, think about:

• Length. A long rise says something’s coming soon. A short one says it’s happening right now. Vary them.
• Distance. I’m a big fan of small movements, between a root and a fifth. Go up to an octave and it starts to sound like someone’s being transported into space.
• What happens at the top. In trailers we use quick rips and rises to signal the end of an act or a stop-down. In horror, the top of a riser doesn’t have to release. Sometimes I get there and go somewhere else instead: move everything up a step and add more risers to push the urgency further.

A pad that bends and comes back has no urgency. It’s the rise that gives you the end point. And in horror we don’t really want to release the tension until the end of the track. Even then, we don’t want to.

Clusters: the weird face in the mirror

You probably already use close intervals like a minor second over a drone. Clusters go further. They’re groups of notes very close in pitch, like B, C, D flat and D all at once. Basically slamming your hand down on the keyboard. Ligeti made them famous (his music was used in 2001: A Space Odyssey), and they’re eerie and beautiful all at once.

Layer a cluster over your drone and it starts telling the listener something is coming. It’s the musical equivalent of somebody’s shadow, or the weird face in the mirror. You can almost see the face appearing from the shadows behind the main character.

Three ways I use them:

1. As extra tension on a drone. Add a B and a D flat over a C drone, then spread it out with D, E flat, E and F.
2. As a pre-hit. Swell a cluster into something meaty. It’s the harmonic equivalent of a swish into a hit, and the tension ramps up more than you’d think it should. Very 70s horror, and it still works.
3. As punctuation. On a piano or anything with a decay, a short cluster is a musical question mark or exclamation mark. “Oh. It’s fine. Everything’s okay.” Just odd.

Strings, piano and synths all sound amazing with clusters. They can feel a bit cliched, but they’re so effective.

Ticking clocks: time running out

It still surprises me how good a ticking clock is. Time running away from us feels tense: that rushing feeling, the constant reminder of death. And it gives you urgency without ramping up the tempo or adding drive.

A few rules:

• Keep it at clock speed. 60 BPM, or 30 BPM. At 120 BPM it just feels odd.
• Think in hands. Second hand, minute hand, hour hand. I’ll have a bigger, clunkier clock sounding less often and a cleaner tick every second. Layer them and it becomes a more believable picture of time.
• Watch the balance. Swap the volumes the wrong way round and it sounds weird, and not in a good way.
• Put it in a space. Send one of the clocks to a reverb or delay. A plain tick says “something’s going to happen”. In a space it becomes the creepy clock of death in the other room of the haunted mansion.

You don’t need anything fancy. Sample your own watch. If you’ve got a bit of money, a dedicated clock library is worth it: I’ve used mine endlessly. And it doesn’t have to build to a crescendo (that’s the trailer composer in me). It can just tick.

Putting it together

Here’s a quick recipe to try in your DAW:

1. Two or three low drone layers, one with slow EQ automation and one with quarter-tone bends.
2. A cluster on top that swells in every few bars.
3. A 60 BPM clock in a long reverb, with a clunkier tick every few seconds.
4. A short root-to-fifth riser to push towards the scare. Then step everything up instead of resolving.

Tension in horror isn’t really about the shocks and the brown trousers moments. It’s the subtle stuff: notes competing, drones that breathe, risers that point at something and clocks that won’t stop. Build it, promise the listener a resolution, and never quite pay it off.

Happy composing! Rich