Drones & eerie textures.
Atmosphere is the tone or mood of a place, and as composers we can completely make or break it. Put different music over the same dark woodland and it becomes a different place.
So it's never just a case of trucking a drone on. What type of drone? What is it doing? Space matters as much as the sound itself. Sometimes I use a reverb more like an instrument than an effect.
The tools here are for building that space: drones, textures, field recordings, ambiences, and the processors that turn one sound into a whole world.
By Richard Pryn · Go deeper: How to build horror atmosphere with reverb, echo and portamento
A library of dark sounds from The Newton Brothers, built from solo instruments recorded in their studio, orchestral sessions, field recordings and their synth collection (ARP 2600, Moog Matriarch, DFAM, Eurorack), arranged into over 130 presets.
A hybrid scoring instrument with over 2,200 sound sources and 1,200+ presets, including 780+ pads, 390+ stings, riser and hit menus, plus hit and riser 'Designers' and a Motion page for volume, pitch and pan patterns.
An orchestral library in three parts: The Solstice Orchestra (10 ensembles and a soloist, 235 articulations across strings, brass, woodwinds, choir, percussion, whistles, synths and guitars), The Cassette Orchestra (150 presets from 750 sources processed through tape, pedals and modular gear) and a Drone Grid of evolving textures.
A free Kontakt Player library of cinematic sounds drawn from ProjectSAM's catalogue, recorded in a concert hall: string staccatos, horns, brass clusters, choirs, percussion and drones.
A granular effect plugin that cuts incoming audio into grains and rebuilds it, so any source can be turned into new textures.
A granular effect plugin with Classic, Rhythmic and Texture modes, pitch quantisation to 15 scales, a spatialiser, two FX slots and a modulation section (envelope follower, three function generators, step sequencer).
A tape machine effect plugin, subtitled 'The Tape Abomination', that the developer describes as 'the little tape machine that couldn't'.
A free app and plugin for extreme time stretching, based on the PaulStretch algorithm, made for radical transformation rather than subtle correction.
Thirty night-time forest ambiences (over 154 minutes, 24-bit/96 kHz WAV, stereo and surround) recorded in dense forests in Transylvania and Moldova, Romania, in 2017.
A collection of 120 ambient drone loops (24-bit/96 kHz WAV, 3 GB), 60 by SoundMorph's Jason Cushing from field recordings and subtle tonal design and 60 by electronic musician Arovane using synthetic textures.
A collection of more than 375 dark drones, textures, ambiences, pulses and stingers (24-bit/96 kHz WAV, 7.6 GB) by Charles Maynes and Jason Payne.
Nine horror ambience construction kits with split stems (46 files, 24-bit/96 kHz, 4.4 GB, about 136 minutes), themed as a haunted factory, forest, house, neighbourhood, sewers and swamp, plus nightmare, zombie apocalypse and torture chamber.
An analogue synthesiser by Vlad Kreimer with eight voice generators grouped in four pairs, playable in organ or FM mode, plus a two-signal 'Hyper LFO', a cross-feedback modulated delay and a distortion stage at the end of the chain.
A boxed electroacoustic workstation for building sound from motors, sensors, contact microphones and radio signals.
A pocket-sized, battery-powered wide-band receiver (SOMA calls it an 'anti-radio') that makes the electromagnetic fields around electrical devices audible.
A touch-controlled analogue instrument whose audio signals pass through the player's body via touch-sensitive metal pots.
A free, open-source virtual Eurorack modular synthesiser that runs as a standalone application, with VCV's free modules included and access to the VCV Library of third-party modules.
A spectral-warping wavetable synthesiser.
A free, open-source hybrid subtractive synthesiser with multiple oscillator types, filters, modulation and built-in effects, available as a plugin and a standalone application.
A free, collaborative online library of user-uploaded sounds (738,114 at the time of checking) run from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, searchable by tag, with downloads requiring a free account.
An online archive of over 30,000 BBC sound effects that can be searched, auditioned, mixed in a browser mixer and downloaded as MP3 or WAV.
A cosmic-horror sound library of synthetic, textural sounds that feel almost recognisable: atmospheres, textures, braaams, horns, transitions, warped vocal beds and pings, as designed sounds and construction-kit layers.
A Kontakt Player instrument (Kontakt 7.10.9 or later, NKS) of post-apocalyptic sound design: pads, fractured pulses, industrial textures, alarms, stings, risers and reverses.
A set of mangled, glitched percussive hits, stingers, risers, drones and dark ambiences designed by Spencer Nunamaker (Juno VHS).
A collection with the electronic duo Darkstar of processed analogue synth textures, sub-basses, icy processed vocals, London found sound and lo-fi drum loops.
An atmospheric instrument built on 178 field recordings by Chris Watson and 240 Soniccouture sample sets, with around 560 preset snapshots, a vector Cube controller, arpeggiator, insert effects and convolution spaces; you can also load your own samples.
A Kontakt Player performance instrument for atmospheres and tone clusters, built from 1,038 orchestral and hybrid sound sources (ambiences, voices, pitched metal, synthesised drones).
A choral performance instrument for Kontakt Player, drawn from over 800 sound sources recorded with a symphonic choir, a chamber choir and a new-music vocal quartet.
A Kontakt Player sound-design anthology made with ten designers, covering booms, braams, downers, drones, hits, pads, pulses, reverses, risers, soundscapes and whooshes (over 14 GB).
A horror sound-design library for full Kontakt (1.31 GB) built from 15 dark compositions, with impacts, sub hits, risers, low and high drones, and tempo-synced rhythms, tick-tocks and phrases.
Contemporary string textures and effects for SINE, recorded at Teldex with a 14/12/10/10/6 string orchestra: long aleatoric and extended-technique performances plus a second set of processed sound-design patches (79 patches in 11 groups).
A SINE collection of playable drones designed with Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten), made from guitars, celli, basses, trombones, a basso profundo choir, hurdy-gurdy, tanpura, didgeridoo and EBow piano.
A low-cost Originals library of the titanium euphone, a glass-rod instrument played with wet fingertips, offered as the raw recording (close, room and ribbon mics) and as processed 'Warps' that range from shimmering to horror-like (20 presets, 3.5 GB).
A granular-synthesis instrument for Kontakt Player 6.2.2 or later, built partly from violin, electric violin, tenor violin and ciola recordings by Michael Levine.
Three pianos recorded at the MGM Scoring Stage and Hollywood Scoring, played with extended and prepared techniques by session pianist Randy Kerber.
Over 100 sounds sampled from eight metal acoustic sculptures by Bulgarian sculptor Martian Tabakov, played with mallets, sticks, brushes and bows and recorded with close, Decca and hall mics.
A Kontakt construction-kit library built from waterharp recordings, with over 1,000 chromatically mapped sample presets (3 GB, 44.1 kHz/24-bit).
An atmosphere-design instrument for full Kontakt 6.6 or later.
A free voice changer combining delay, pitch shift, reverb and a noise generator, with controls named Echoes, Crypt Size, Howl, Tombverb, Ghoul and Wail.
A free sampler with a built-in reverb engine (70 presets from the developer's Abyss FX) and four macros: Space, Dark, Dirt and Haunt.
Six sample libraries made with Glitchedtones (788 samples, 300 presets), including Paranormal and Scare Tactics, that play inside FrozenPlain's free Floe plugin with three layers, granular, arpeggiators and an effects rack.
An instrument bank of 10 multi-octave patches made by bowing springs and metal objects, then resampled and layered with physical-modelling emulations.
No tools match those filters.
