Spoopy Modular Drone Sketch #1

I’ve been playing around with some basic modular concepts, and was trying to put together something warm and pleasant, just a quick drone-y patch with some nice overtones fading in and out. The more I worked on it though, the more jarring it sounded. After fighting with it for a good twenty minutes or so, I finally decided to lean into the harshness. The result sounds… pretty damn creepy, to my ears; harmonics wail in and out as the highly resonant filter slowly modulates, smeared into ghostly screams by the spring reverb. It ALMOST repeats, but the slight variations give a supernatural, organic feel to the LFO’s slowly meandering cycle.

This being the time of COVID, we had been planning an in-home haunted house for our five year old son. This patch was the icing on the cake. With all the lights off but a few strategically placed strobes, paper cut-out “ghosts” filling the halls, and this blaring from a cheap Bluetooth speaker, it was almost too much for our little one, but between his one year old sister charging fearlessly forward and his dad there to “help him be brave”, he managed to slay the spookies and get to his candy treasure.