How To Design Dark and Scary Sounds (For Producers / Composers / Musicians)

This video is a basic tutorial on how to make dark and scary sounds- for ambience, sound design, composition, production, beats, whatever! It's scary audio, and it's surprisingly easy to make with just two techniques: reversing things, and slowing them down. Throughout this video, I demonstrate several concepts of how to combine these techniques and where you may have heard them before.

Here are my other "spooky" music videos:

Here is my video on the minor scale (includes the fake Tool song):

Here is my video on the Locrian scale (includes my song Pascal's Prison):

Like this video? Thank my Patreon subscribers for sponsoring these lessons! They're the reason you don't see ads or sponsorships in the middle of my videos. You can join them here:

00:00 The Red Room
00:48 Backmasking
02:29 Backwards Reverb
03:50 Better Backwards Reverb
06:34 Lynchian Backwards Talk
07:23 Slowing it Down
08:17 Slowdown + Reverse
09:55 Outro

[Fallub]

That “brush your teeth” sample sounds almost exactly like the Darkest Dungeon voice. Great explanation.

[xuxuang]

It's interesting how similar psychedelic and spooky are...

As a psychedelic musician, I use a lot of these techniques!

[woosix]

Bro, I was just marking a score for my short horror movie a week ago, this would have been useful. Your old video was quite useful as well

[ShredmasterScott]

Bro....this video made me poo my pants in terror! 👻

[Outside]

I've been doing stuff like backmasking and reverse reverb since my teenage years learning music. It's magical what effects you can create with just those few tricks.

[niclasnightflame]

You just gave me a ton of inspiration for the horror score I'm working on currently. I think it's amazing how some simple techniques can turn a normal recording into something frightening and unpredictable. Thank you for sharing these things with us!

[MythenEcke]

That backwards reverb is so simple yet so genius. Thank you so much for that tip

[sandersonstunes]

I've spent the last year making audio for Noir Nocturne, a VRchat Spookality world. It's got about an hour playtime so far and I've produced probably 90% of the world audio and music. I used every method in this video. For stretching the audio, I some times used Logic's "Flex time Telephone FX" on short transients like drums, clicks or pops. By stretching this short audio into maybe 10 sec I got this metallic, robotic kind of growl. Add some reverb and BOOM I had a sound for one of the enemies.

The one thing I would add to your list of tricks is about EQ. In a lot of my environmental ambience I added a low frequency rumble with maybe some slow stereo modulation, something almost below human hearing. This could be white noise or a sine wave. Really anything with low end information. Then I really boosted the lows on my EQ for an in your head binaural kind of feeling. Because this is a VR experience I knew everyone playing it would be wearing headphones so I could get away with some more radical stereo widths. This trick works better for games or film as having a low rumble through your whole song would just muddy everything up.

[yashwanthsagar]

This is really great. I watch all of your videos and my favorite is the video where you taught about the creepy chords. And now this.. amazing.. great job Jake.

[MalabarTheGreat]

Great artists, from Bach to Debussy, Stravinsky and beyond, would be nothing without their teachers. Thank you.

[liquidsolids]

This was a lot of fun! You have a real knack for simple and easy-to understand explanations. Thanks, Jake!

[jay_miah]

Discovering this channel is an amazing achievement for me🙌
You're certainly one of the best teachers I've come across.🙏

[SushVXDUBSTEP]

when you said "please like this video and subscribe" the subscribe button kept glowing every time i played that part

[estuardoarroyo]

I keep watching this video again and again. This information is gold, thank you so much!!

[marotteinc.]

I love how you make stuff accessible to everyone, that was a great video !

[mgmg]

I love the way the engineers did the voice of Black Philip in The VVitch (I guess the goat is supposed to be the devil), but basically it sounds like numerous layers slightly delayed behind and shifted ahead of the main vocal recording, and then possibly some very light reversed reverb.

You hear it especially in the line "wouldst thou like some butter"


It'd be very cool for us amateur engineers to apply that to some dialogue of our own and experiment with it

[Nicenigel]

I always appreciate more creative sound design ideas!!

[angellesambre]

Although only 42, my wife knows and loves "In My Life"... so I have gotten to hear it a few million times myself. I thought that was a spinet, to go with the Bach-esque melodies during the lead break.

[JonHarris]

Yay Jake is back! Congrats on the guitar chorus, will be checking that out soon.

[Euro.Patriot]

Augmented chord but change the 3rd for scary and change the 5th for James Bond.