Unsettling sounds for darker stories.
Sample libraries built for fear: haunted strings, decayed pianos, processed voices and experimental textures, chosen for composers writing horror for trailers, TV, film and games.
A horror library is less about beautiful legato and more about what happens at the edges of an instrument: scrapes, clusters, extended techniques, unstable tuning and sound design that sits between music and noise. The best ones give you playable sources of tension, not just pre-made scares.
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 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.
Strings are a horror staple for a reason, but what you want from an orchestral library here isn't the pretty legato. It's the edges: clusters, scrapes, glissandos that slide somewhere they shouldn't. Modern horror is a melting pot, so you'll still want the big Jerry Goldsmith moments too. Pick one that does the nasty stuff as well as the big stuff.
Start with: Symphobia 4: Pandora · Albion Solstice
See all 8 tools →Drones paint the picture. They're the wash that says there's a mood here, we're just not sure what it is yet. Listen for life: some libraries give you a living drone straight off the bat, shimmering and ever so slightly pulsing, and others you'll have to work with automation. A still drone is a mood. A moving one is tension.
Start with: Haunted Spaces 2 · Drones by Alexander Hacke
See all 7 tools →The voice is still the scariest instrument. I've polled my audience on it. A disembodied voice in a dark corridor is full-on brown trousers time. Choirs give you the cathedral-and-curse end of things; breaths, whispers and extended techniques give you the someone's-right-behind-you end. And don't forget your own voice. Nobody else has that sample.
Start with: Mysteria · Lea Bertucci — Xtended Vox
See all 2 tools →The piano is an obvious staple, but in horror the more broken it is, the better. Detuned, decayed and prepared pianos have that shouldn't-be-here feeling, especially playing something simple and childlike over a dark drone. And a short cluster on a piano is a musical question mark.
Start with: Old Busted Granny Piano · Randy's Prepared Piano
See all 3 tools →Impact comes from a few things at once: loud against quiet, something big and low, a tail, and a broad spectrum. Something subby, something punchy, something clicky, something smashy, all together. A good hits library does a huge amount of that legwork. The catch is that everyone buys the same ones. I listen to trailers and go, "oh, that's from Damage." Layer and process them until they're yours.
Start with: Damage 2 · Hammers
See all 3 tools →This is where I get excited. Real acoustic sources played in ways they were never meant to be played sound like nothing else in your template. Found sounds are the sounds of the unseen, and these libraries are basically that, recorded properly and made playable.
Start with: Korven · Waterphone
See all 5 tools →The everything-in-one-box horror toolkits: hits, risers, drones, textures and stingers. Brilliant for speed when a deadline's breathing down your neck. Just watch out for option overwhelm, where there's so much to choose from that you never actually choose. Pick one, learn it properly, and give yourself a limitation.
Start with: Tenebra by The Newton Brothers · Psychosis
See all 8 tools →You don't need to spend money to start. Honestly, the effects in your DAW plus the microphone on your phone will get you most of the way. These free libraries are a good way to find out what you like before you buy anything bigger.
Start with: The Free Orchestra · Ancient Bones
See all 3 tools →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.
Notes fighting each other and wanting to return home. In horror, we never quite let them.
All about contrast. Against quiet, something loud seems even louder, so the silence before matters as much as the hit.
Unsettling isn't the same as tense. Two things that don't get on: notes, instruments or vibes that shouldn't be together.
Things that shouldn't be there: pure sine tones with glide and vibrato, whispers, and sounds with no visible source.
Organic, wet and close. Sounds the listener feels in the body, not just hears.
Atmosphere is the mood of a place. What type of drone, and what is it doing? Even a drone can change how a scene feels.
Ritual and religion. The organ comes with churches, funerals and graveyards built in, and chant-like voices do the rest.
Metal, machinery and noise. Found sounds and distortion that turn pipes and factories into something hostile.
Too big to understand. Vast spaces and music with no tonal home, so the listener has nothing to hold on to.
Candlelit and old-world: organs, strings, and the odd waltz for vampires dancing.
Old, rural and wrong: acoustic instruments, voices and simple melodies taken out of context.
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 small free instrument of bowed psaltery effects, played in Cinesamples' Musio plugin.
A free Musio instrument of three unusual traditional wind instruments: a femur trumpet, a trident shell and a death whistle.
Check whether a library needs the full version of Kontakt, runs in the free Kontakt Player, or uses its own free player such as SINE or the Spitfire plugin.
Construction kits and one-shot hits are fast; playable textures and extended techniques last longer because you can shape them to picture.
Libraries recorded from real acoustic sources, like Korven, age better than libraries built only from presets.
Confirm the licence covers commercial music use, especially for trailer and production-music work.
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 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 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.
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).
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.
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