ABF Horror compilation album Released!! ITS OUT!!!

pbelgium

Just listened to the whole album and it sounds good - so many different scary vibes! Thanks, once again @sevenape for putting this together.

Notes: Ghost Trane was influenced by John Coltrane and Danny Elfman: a fast bluesy bebop riff with a harmonic emphasis on the Lydian Dominant. A scale often played in jazz and sometimes used by Elfman to create an eerie tension. It also contains the tritone, the Devil's interval. Everything was painstakingly midi-programmed except for the guitar (Chain: Strat -> Nembrini Faceman -> Delay3000). Mastered using MagicDeathEyeStereo, Impulsation (General Ambience), Barricade and Youlean.

Luxthor

Just listening, I’m shocked! 👁️👁️ Fantastic!
I need a few days to listen to all of them. It’s horrifically good! 🤩

Lady_App_titude

Ha! Great stuff guys! I didn't know about this project, but if I had contributed it would have been this (only Halloween track I've ever written). Happy Halloween!:

McD

Yes, thanks for putting this together @sevenape. I hope more people donate for the charity you are working with.

I hope you add that @Lady_App_titude joint if she supplies a wave file. It’s a gem. I like that a BandCamp album can be added to overtime and we’re headed for a box set. Maybe a yearly event where we keep adding themed projects.

How many hours of work are involved? Maybe someone should take on the next theme like the Winter Solstice or Festivus or that Jesus deal that the kids all love for the free stuff.

HotStrange

@JanKun said:

@HotStrange said:

@JanKun said:
To answer @HotStrange about the approach. When Dan suggested the idea of a Halloween project, I was immediately into it.
The first question was "what makes a music unsettling in an enigmatic or scary fashion". I came with the conclusion that there are probably 3 ways for this:
1- A drone where textures, space and judicious use of silence (brilliantly proved by some tracks here) blend to create a soundscape where the slightest little sound can become a big event.
2- a more western approach based on rhythm and diatonic harmony but where one "breaks" the rules to bring unsettling effect.
3- pure chaos and noise where there are so many tonalities played at the same time that the brain cannot comprehend, hence the unsettling effect.

Then I started to work on a track for each category.
I quickly left the chaos track for another time (though I like it a lot). Then left aside the drone track I started, knowing some of the fellow ABF members would get far better result than me (I was definitely right, there are some drone/ambient gems here)
So I was stuck with the approach #2

It seems that whatever the approach, having whatever kind of repetitive element is also a major key for spookiness, I am especially thinking of @sevenape track with the scary click that can be heard all along, or @rottencat brilliant vocal (by the way, what is this language and what does it say?), or Granada's "Waiting, Watching" (great build by the way, what's your forum name?)

In my case, I created repetition with many elements that I intentionally broke with either key, time signature or tempo changes:

• 99.9 % of the chords are minor chords
• basically everything is ternary in this track but rhythm perception is fooled using tempo or time signature (6/8 or 9/8) changes between each part to break the monotony and make it rhythmically unsettling
• extensive use of the ascending augmented fifth interval (same as major third descending interval) to constantly shift tonality, which creates unsettling and enigmatic chromatism effects when played only with minor chord (I think Danny Elfman is using this trick a lot on his soundtracks)

I quickly created the first 80% of the track, but got stuck for a few days because I absolutely wanted the track to end up on the same theme as in the beginning in the same tempo, key and time signature. I eventually managed (sorry @seventape for this delay !)

Eventually I didn't want this to be too scary. I know some members here are very good at this, so I went for the more Grotesque type of spookiness.
Sorry for the long breakdown !

No need to apologize, I love hearing how people came up with their tracks! Yours definitely reminded a bit of some of Danny Elfmans score work and was a great bookend to the album.

I saw in your other thread you used StaffPad. Did you master it elsewhere?

I am usually a LP4i user, but I was very late and finalised the track composition/ arrangement yesterday, just before the deadline, so I didn't have the time to mix all the stems (there are approximately 70 tracks on this project !!!)
So I had to master very quickly before submitting. I imported the Staffpad mix inside AUM. Minimal surgical EQ (FF pro-C3) on the main track, then an auxiliary (or parallel) 'send' track dedicated to reverb (Virsyn Audioreverb) and pro-C3 after the reverb to remove the muddy low end of the reverb.
Both "dry" and "wet" tracks were then mixed into an AUM master track with very gentle and transparent compression (pro-C2) and then into pro-L2 to match the -14 dB LUFS target. Not sure compression before the limiter was really useful but that became my routine 😉
If I had the time to mix the stems in LP4i, I could have improved the sound quality, instruments separation in the stereo field and improve the low end ( timpanis are hard to tame!), but I had to move fast this time. The result is not too bad though.

Fantastic. I could never click with LP4i but it sounded great regardless to me

HotStrange

@sevenape said:
We’ve made $100 so far.

No way! That’s awesome. Congrats everyone

HotStrange

@sevenape said:
I’ve been reading The Ritual, a not excellent horror novel in the end, but there are some amazing descriptions of sodden wet forest, and so I grabbed a sample of walking through mud from bbc, sampled a bunch of horror box stuff from the Venus theory Decent Sampler thing, got hainbach’s noises and lines running and added a touch of Ivcs3 and mixed it all up

Never read the book but the movie is one of my favorite recent horror films. Excellent stuff.

HotStrange

@Lady_App_titude said:
Ha! Great stuff guys! I didn't know about this project, but if I had contributed it would have been this (only Halloween track I've ever written). Happy Halloween!:

This is great! I hope it’ll get added as well. Love the video footage too.

HotStrange

@Svetlovska said:
First just want to say what a great compilation this is! So many talented people here, I think it’s a genuinely good listen. I bought it!

Too many to single out but I was especially creeped out by @rottencat’s devilish whispering horror, Credo.

Just like my taste in horror movies which has shifted over the years along with my own growing sense of mortality, the ones I am most drawn to these days are not the campy gore fests of my youth, (though I love them still, if ironically), nor the witless torture porns which just depict evils too credible in a world already full enough of them, but the genuinely outre, psychically unsettling ones like The Babadook, The Witch, Midsommar… and for me, @rottencat has nailed that adult sense of brooding wrongness. I want/don’t want to see the movie that piece soundtracks! (Wuss here who had nightmares after The Babadook.)

Patch notes for Final Girl:

The Final Girl: the one who survives. Since first seeing Jamie Lee Curtis, the definitive Final Girl, soundtracked by John Carpenter’s peerless, relentless electronic theme to his own movie masterpiece Halloween on its initial cinema release back in 1978, I have been fascinated by the trope of the Final Girl.

At first I was tempted to try some kind of pastiche of Carpenters’ classic death stomp, but I realised I just wasn’t that talented. And so I shifted focus to a moment in the archetypal slasher movie in my head that was more within my capabilities - the aftermath.

So I imagined this piece as a reprise of an earlier, unheard, more Carpenteresque and dynamic version of the same, coming at the end of the movie when the Final Girl has had her final showdown with The Shape, and is standing in the Lakeside cabin, clutching the axe, bloodied but unbowed…

I like a nice Doom Drum, so Alteza and Sidekick did the honours there. Some backward Speldosa because spooky. Lines for texture. The limit of my guitar playing ability on a very short little chug loop I recorded ages ago and never found a use for. Some Scaler-safed extemporisation using my absolute fave distorted guitar noise, the Sigur Boss patch on the D1. Screams and sighs from a couple of random Blocs waves. A sample of a drummers chimes set. Recorded as multiple AUM loops as per my S.O.P. and messed with on live mix down to AudioShare.. Et voila!

Thanks for breaking it down loved your track as well! Speldosa is a great all that I need to use a lot more.

MrStochastic

I just finished the album and I'm proud to be a part of this illustrious group! So much variety and craft.

sevenape

Added a couple of tracks

GeoTony

Boy there are some seriously talented people on this forum.
Just finished listening to the album (I spread it out over 4 days) and I’m amazed how varied and yet consistently top notch the music is. No favourites as they are all superb. Well done to everybody involved 🙏👍👌

sevenape

@GeoTony said:
Boy there are some seriously talented people on this forum.
Just finished listening to the album (I spread it out over 4 days) and I’m amazed how varied and yet consistently top notch the music is. No favourites as they are all superb. Well done to everybody involved 🙏👍👌

🙏

catherder

This was an "instabuy". I wanted to donate to MSF anyway. No it's time to listen to the great music!

sevenape

Thanks catherder!!!