A Ghoulish Deadline

First of all, thanks to the O’Reilly Digital Blog Team for giving me this forum, and to David Battino in particular for helping me jump back into online writing. My previous venue was the CreativeSynth website, where I combined my love of music hardware and software with my desire to stimulate creativity in others (and myself).

One of the most popular articles on the site was my discussion about creating Halloween music; specifically, about creating music and designing sounds for haunted houses. Over the years I’ve done this for houses both large and small, and I have always enjoyed the experience.

Haunted houses provide a few special opportunities for the creative musician or sound designer. As with almost any type of composition, there are some obvious patterns to be followed:

• If you are writing for a scary graveyard scene, fade between several different low pitched drones. Almost anything will sound good over that.
• If you are writing for a vignette or set scene, you need to create a long format background; if your loop is less than 15 minutes long, any actors working in the vicinity will go insane due to the repetition.
• If you are writing for a scary skit, you have to pick some “hit points” that you bang hard, but you also have to leave the in-between spaces open and non-specific. This way, as the actors evolve the scene, they have some space for personal interpretation.
• Absolutely and completely steer clear of cliches. You may be aching to slap in Track 36 of the Werewolf Howls effects CD, but you can't. You just can't.

Beyond these patterns, though, there is very little required of haunted house music - other than the need to be (in some way) scary. What a great opportunity! However, as with any wide-open opportunity, there is the daunting task of actually creating something. Luckily, Halloween music comes with one of the most valuable creative tools in the world: an absolute deadline. Halloween is October 31, whether you are ready or not. The haunted houses often start earlier in the month, and will open with or without your music. Luckily, this deadline can also push you into creating tons of music and sound - perhaps more completed compositional work than you would expect to complete in a year of “creative time”.

Last year, for example, I did sound design for a haunted house at a local school. The school would shut down for a few hours and completely reconfigure the building into a “Trick-or-Treat Street”, complete with mazes, scary vignettes and scripted skits. However, for some reason the planning had gone awry, and they came asking for help just 10 days before the big date.

We quickly sketched out plans for the physical layout, and assigned a group of volunteers the task of making mazes and sets. A local high school drama class volunteered to fill in most of the acting roles, and many parents jumped in as combination decorators/security guards. But it was clear (to me) that the whole thing needed a shot in the arm from some creative sound design, custom music and background audio for the skits. By the time all of the planning was done, we only had five days left.

A quick overview revealed the size of the task: I would have to produce about 4 hours of music, skit material and ambient sound to properly set the mood. In five days. With no wiggle room.

YIKES! Time to reach into my bag of tricks…

Trick 1: Surround yourself with familiar tools that you know intimately.

Having a computer full of sounds doesn’t do you much good if you don’t know how to detune the second and third layers in the sampler (an oft-done function in scary music). In order to make the most of my time, I decided to use several computers running my favorite DAW packages - allowing me to review one composition while preparing samples for another. I fired up one computer with Logic Pro, another with Ableton Live, a Windows laptop with Acid and my MPC-2000XL with a bunch of ambient sound I’d collected. Thus equipped, I now had to find a way to get creative.

Trick 2: Turn off your internal editor.

Having Mr. (or Ms.) Editor constantly whispering in your ear is never helpful when you have to produce at this level. You have to start by producing quantity, and leave the quality decisions for later. I personally find this difficult to do, but the next trick set me right…

Trick 3: Start with the simplest task and complete it.

In this instance, I picked the longest, least detailed piece of work to quickly make something. Anything. For me, this piece was an outdoor set piece containing a graveyard and some roaming zombies. I needed big, low sounds, occasional moans and other assorted tidbits. I grabbed a bunch of random sounds, pulled them into an EXS-24 instrument then started laying down tracks for a 5 minute piece.

5 minutes? Didn’t you just say…?

Yeah, I did - but hear me out. I laid down five minutes of almost every sound I thought I might use, creating little music figures with some of them and broad ambient spaces with others. Once I’d laid down 10 tracks (in about an hour - remember, no editing!), I zoomed out as far as I could and started stretching, moving, layering and looping the sounds into a much less dense, but much more appropriate, soundscape. After about an hour of editing and stretching, I’d completed a 30-minute ambience that could work perfectly for the graveyard.

And I’d also put myself in the position to start producing rapidly.

With each step, I would choose the least detailed job remaining and bang it out. A three-track ambience for a blacked-out maze. Some march music for the ghoul parade. Wacky pub music for the pirate skeleton corner, followed by bubbling cauldron music for the witches’ cave. After three days, I’d accumulated most of the four hours of music and sound I needed. But I still had two detailed skits to sketch out. Time to bring out the big guns!

Trick 4: For detailed work, start at the end and work toward the beginning.

One skit was a quasi-jungle theme, where scary apparitions would jump out at a hit point. End theme: 30 seconds of heavy metal madness. Strap on a guitar and wail. Transition into end theme: an enormous boom, courtesy of a Sound Effects CD, combined with a thunder crack. Perfecto. Transition into the Big Boom: four-on-the-floor minimalist techno with a drone over the top. Finally the intro: Sound FX jungle sounds, squeaky rat noises, drones and rain/wind sounds. Once I had all the sections, I just time-sequenced them for the performance.

The second skit was similar, but with a preordained amount of time for “speechifying” (think Apple's 1984 advertisement), followed by a zombie awakening that chased away the crowd. Starting again from the end, I created a 60-second hardcore industrial “chase-away” track. The “wake up” for the zombies was a generic air raid siren, lasting about 7 seconds. The background to the speech would be mechanical sounds and a low drone - easy enough. But since the speaker would have to be prepared for the upcoming siren transition, I started a peculiar machine loop about 10 seconds before the alarm. The actor simply had to listen for the sound of this machine for a cue on wrapping up the speech. Worked like a charm.

In the end, I had hit the mark, greatly amped up the scariness of the haunted house, and helped the school generate a tidy sum of money from the entry fees. I was also in awe of the way the actors and decorators took my music and sound design and worked it into the visual feel of the location. At this point, I let my internal editor switch back on and walked around the site with an ear to my work. Were there things I would have changed? Sure - the timing on some of the pieces could have been tweaked, and the march music should have been less monotonous. But I also found something else: a delight in the things that I’d created but had already forgotten. By not allowing my internal editor to get in the way of production, I’d created things that were outside my normal, comfortable style and had created compositions that were delightful (in a creepy way).

On the surface, this has been a story about making Halloween music. But the deeper message is the amazing power of a deadline, and using your wits to meet that deadline. Hopefully you can use some of these tricks to meet your goals, and treat yourself with work you never thought you would create.