Slow-building unease.
Right, dread and tension. They're cousins, but they're not the same thing. Dread is the slow stuff: a low drone, the rumbling of doom, the sense that something bad is going to happen and we don't know when. Tension is notes fighting each other and wanting to return home, and in horror the trick is that we never let them.
The tools here cover both. Drones and textures for the bed, strings that can do clusters and slides, and anything you can make move. A drone on its own is just a mood. Give it movement, in pitch or in the quality of the sound, and it becomes tension.
By Richard Pryn · Go deeper: How to create tension in horror music with drones, risers, clusters and clocks
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 Kontakt Player instrument for thriller and horror scoring with 720 sources (including 324 jumpscares and stings, 144 tempo-synced atonal rhythms, 120 sustains and textures) and 332 presets across two engines, Psychosis Designer and Psychosis Menu.
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.
A cinematic percussion library with 41,395 samples from 1,596 sources and 208 presets, split across three engines: Ensemble Designer (700+ sources, five mic positions), Kit Designer (16-voice kits, 50+ kits) and Loop Designer (864 tempo-synced loops).
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 multi-effect plugin that chains up to ten effects from 54 modules (filters, distortion, spectral, modulation, delay and reverb), with envelopes, a 32-step sequencer that switches modules on and off, and eight macros.
A distortion plugin that Output calls an 'Interactive Distortion Engine'.
A movement-based effect plugin with five modules (Filter, Noise, Drive, Volume, Pan), a 16-step Beat Repeat, a motion envelope editor, an envelope follower, two FX slots, macros and three modulation generators.
A tape machine effect plugin, subtitled 'The Tape Abomination', that the developer describes as 'the little tape machine that couldn't'.
A five-knob effect plugin that the developer calls a 'Nightmare Shifter' ('The Shifting Nightmare').
A free app and plugin for extreme time stretching, based on the PaulStretch algorithm, made for radical transformation rather than subtle correction.
A free buffer effect for robotic artefacts and glitches, combining a buffer stage, a multimode filter, a delay and three LFOs, with a menu to reorder the effect chain.
A construction kit of 400 zombie crowd sounds (401 files, 24-bit/192 kHz, 12.4 GB, about 208 minutes) performed by eight vocal stunt performers.
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 touch-controlled analogue instrument whose audio signals pass through the player's body via touch-sensitive metal pots.
A semi-modular analogue drum machine made of 23 modules, with four drum channels (bass drum, bass/percussion, snare, cymbals/hi-hat), four envelope generators that can sustain into noise or drone, four trigger-event loop recorders, a shift-register random generator, an FX processor and distortion.
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.
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 handmade acoustic instrument built to order in Ontario, Canada.
A collection of acoustic horror sounds made with composer Mark Korven, recorded at Revolution Recording, Toronto: 622 playable instruments and patches, including 49 layered instruments, 83 processed patches and sounds from the Apprehension Engine, hurdy-gurdy, oktav harpa and symphonae.
A string-based horror sound library performed on home-made "nightmare instruments": ghostly bowing, harmonics, scrapes and warped resonances, plus breaths, metallic textures, whooshes and impacts.
A jump-scare library of stingers, impacts and sharp bursts, with ready-made designed scares and a construction kit of the individual stems behind them so you can rebuild each one.
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 solo violin library of extended techniques recorded dry: pizzicato swarms, ponticello sustains, ricochets and tremolos, plus 40 pads and drones and 20 FX presets.
A set of mangled, glitched percussive hits, stingers, risers, drones and dark ambiences designed by Spencer Nunamaker (Juno VHS).
A sampled old, untuned upright piano with sticky keys and broken strings, in tuned and untuned versions, with separate string and key release samples, pedal noise, sound effects and 20 ambient pads.
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 sampled waterphone in two instruments: Waterphone Phrases (366 recorded performance gestures) and Waterphone Unwrapped (playable notes with up to five harmonic layers, six articulations and water modulation), each around 3 GB with stereo and contact-mic channels.
Horror sound design made from live woodwind recordings (growls, chuffs, airy screeches, clicks), in three Kontakt instruments: a 16-step rhythm sequencer with over 700 samples, a four-layer hit and whoosh designer, and a three-layer riser designer.
A horror and thriller trailer sound design pack of 174 sounds, each with a dry version (348 WAV files, 24-bit/48 kHz): 37 hits, 25 risers, 48 signature sounds, 26 whoosh hits and 38 whooshes.
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 full-orchestra ensemble library for Kontakt Player recorded in a concert hall, with pre-orchestrated string, brass, woodwind and full-orchestra patches alongside dissonant clusters, risers and orchestral effects.
A tension and horror string library recorded at Budapest Scoring with 10 violins, 4 violas, 4 cellos and 3 basses, recorded as separate sections.
A phrase-based aleatoric orchestral library for Kontakt Player, with recorded atonal and dissonant performances by strings (60 players), woodwinds (19), brass (22) and percussion (3).
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.
Experimental vocal techniques from Lea Bertucci, Audrey Chen, Cansu Tanrikulu and Phil Minton (throat singing, whispers, shrieks, clicks, multiphonics), processed with tape, outboard and digital effects into 49 presets in Spitfire's own plugin (about 2.5 GB).
Drums and percussion created with composer Charlie Clouser and recorded in a concrete-and-glass Brutalist space: 58 drums across bass drums, surdos, toms, roto-toms, darbukas, frame drums, scrap metals and snares, with over 400 performance loops at five tempos and processed 'warp' signals.
A prepared and extended-technique piano library for full Kontakt, sampled from a 1926 Steinway Model L: mallet strikes, finger mutes, plucks, steel-slide bends, string scrapes, harmonics, metal-hammer hits and glisses (4,127 samples, 9.53 GB), plus 77 ambience patches and 20 processed presets.
A small free instrument of bowed psaltery effects, played in Cinesamples' Musio plugin.
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.
A free Musio instrument of three unusual traditional wind instruments: a femur trumpet, a trident shell and a death whistle.
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 bundle of three user-guided aleatoric brass libraries designed by Casey Edwards: Low Brass (two tenor trombones, two bass trombones, tuba), French Horns (six horns) and Trumpets (three).
A Kontakt construction-kit library built from waterharp recordings, with over 1,000 chromatically mapped sample presets (3 GB, 44.1 kHz/24-bit).
A cinematic sound-design library made with BOOM Library: 1,775 WAV samples at 96 kHz/24-bit (9 GB) in 47 Kontakt construction-kit instruments.
An atmosphere-design instrument for full Kontakt 6.6 or later.
The fourth Symphobia volume: very large orchestral ensembles (10 celli and 6 basses in octaves, a 30-player low ensemble) playing risers, falls, crescendos and effects that lock to your project tempo with ProjectSAM's Adaptive Sync.
A standalone application that layers up to 12 effects (convolution, procedural and synthesis processes) over a microphone, up to three audio files or a virtual instrument to build creature and robot voices.
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.
A free sample-player with over 100 horror sounds mapped one per key (screams, jump scares, creature growls, risers, horror strings and impacts), with built-in reverb, delay, chorus, distortion, high-pass filter and modulation.
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.
