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Some of the coolest techniques for making music and sound design exist in the world of horror. It's October as I'm filming this video, and it is getting cold, so there's tons of great games to play. And it just got me thinking, why
Tom Casey shows how to build an eerie horror soundscape in Ableton Live using Drift and a single MIDI note to create the 'Electra chord' stack, plus reverb, LFO and delay tricks.
Key Takeaways
- A single synth with polyphony from a chord effect, reverb, LFOs and delay can produce a rich horror atmosphere.
- Dissonant stacked-triad chords like the Electra chord are useful foundations for unsettling sound design.
- Pitch spread, filtering and modulation are key techniques for evolving, deep soundscapes.
What the video covers
- Introduces making atmospheric horror soundscapes in Ableton Live using just one synthesizer (Drift).
- Explains the 'Electra chord', two stacked triads (C major and A major) producing a clashing, unsettling sound, named after Richard Strauss's 1909 opera Elektra.
- Triggers the sound with a single MIDI note on C3 and uses the Chord MIDI effect with intervals 4, 7, 13, 17, 20 to build the chord.
- Adds a Large Factory reverb preset early to add dimension and stereo width before synthesis tweaks.
- Uses pitch spread across Drift's two oscillators (one up three octaves, one down two) and saturated wave shapes for an electric, factory-like buzz.
- Shapes timbre with a low-pass filter and resonance, mellowing and darkening the sound.
- Adds movement with LFOs mapped to oscillator pitch and other parameters for evolving, drifting textures.
- Applies a heavily delayed version of the sound and maps delay parameters to create unpredictable layers.
- Finishes by balancing mid and lower-mid frequencies to dial in the final atmosphere.
- Promotes the creator's Patreon for presets, tutorials and a chord construction reference guide.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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not make a video about making horror soundsscapes? You can make huge atmospheric evolving soundsscapes with just one synth. And in this video, we can do this while also trying a really cool chord that I'm almost positive you've never heard of. Now, this is the
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Electra Chord. And while the name sounds kind of random, it is actually a really influential chord in the world of music composition, music history. In 1909, a composer named Richard St wrote an opera called Electra. And in terms of music
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history, it really pushed the boundaries of what modern composers could do with dissonance because this was a very psychological drama and it did a lot of things that were different for the time.
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It features a really interesting idea. The chord is just two simple triads stacked onto each other. So you have a C major and an A major. So you have six total notes and that creates a really interesting clashing sound. on piano or
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strings or synth, you'll notice that regardless of how you stack, how you voice these six individual notes, you're going to get a very clashy, unsettling effect.
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Now, the cool thing is even though this chord has a very clashy sound, it's actually the foundation you can use to build an atmospheric effect with just one synthesizer. And by the end of this video, you will be surprised by how
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familiar and how useful this sound type is. If you're going to work on a video game soundtrack, this video could totally inspire you. And if you're a Patreon member, you can go in the link in the description below this video and
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download the preset that's featured in this video. If you're not a Patreon member yet, I highly recommend checking it out. It's a massive resource for music producers. You can get presets, exclusive tutorials, lots of great stuff, and we're going to be adding more
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templates along this similar style in the future. So, you definitely want to be signed up, get those updates. Check it out in the link down below. So, to get started, we're just going to trigger the sound using a MIDI clip. So, I'm
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going to highlight this area, hit control shiftm, and I'll just zoom in here. You can see I've created a MIDI clip for one measure. And I can just double click down here and add a note on C3 cuz I just need something to trigger
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the sound. And we're going to use Ableton Drift. So instruments drift. Drift you probably have if you're on a fairly newer version of Ableton intro standard suite. It basically came out Ableton 11. So if you're on Ableton 10
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or 9, you might not have this synth. But it's a very simple subtractive synth.
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You could do this with other synths as well. But what we're going to do is trigger just that one MIDI note using polifany. And to do that, you want to go to your MIDI effects. So MIDI effects, you'll have the chord effect, which you
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drag and drop before an instrument. Audio effects go after an instrument. MIDI effects go before. And this is going to take that 1C3 and add on up to six extra notes. So you can have seven notes of polifany. That's how we'll
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create this electric chord just from one triggered note. And so these shifter knobs that you see here, these are what create the new notes from that one MIDI note that we have. And to create an electric chord, we're just going to do
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four 7 13, 17, and 20. That's going to build the electric chord that we talked about in the beginning of the video. Now, down below, you can see an advanced chord construction guide. If you're watching on YouTube, it's listed below the video.
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If you're a Patreon member, it's linked down below this video. But you can get that if you want to support the channel.
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It's a really cool reference guide. It's got a lot of these different chord construction types, the electric chord, chords that you've probably never heard of, and it's got them in semmitone and scale degree values. So, really cool resource, really cool sounds that you'll
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get from these different chord construction types. But this is how we build the electric chord. Now, what's funny is that if we play this sound on its own, I won't slay our headphoneers, but bear with me.
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It definitely doesn't sound like something that atmospheric. And that's because you have to know what to do with a synthesizer to get the sound that you want. There's actually like three or four really great techniques that you can do with any synthesizer that you're
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going to pick up from this video. By the end of this video, you're going to understand so much more about soundsscapes and you'll be able to put your own spin twist take on it. It's really cool. So, probably the best place
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to get started is actually placing a reverb after the synth, which will inform our decisions with how we synthesize the sound as we go along. I'm going to go to audio effects, and I'm just going to type in large factory.
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That's going to give me an Ableton Live stock reverb preset. There's a lot of these. Large Space Chorus is a great one for synths. Uh, vocal hall is a great one for vocal chains. If you're not subscribed to the YouTube, definitely
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hit that subscribe button because there's these little presets that really go a long way if you're on Ableton standard. This is one of them. So, large factory is going to give us a little more dimension in the sound
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already. It's not as jarring and dry. It's also more stereoized. So, we've immediately changed the sound actually by a lot. And from here, we can change things on drift to get us even further along. Now, the first thing that we're
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going to do has to do with oscillators. It's doing a thing I like to call pitch spread. So, I have two oscillators.
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They're creating those six notes, but I want them to be far apart. I'm going to turn this one all the way up three octaves. Turn this one down -2. So, one is really low, one is really high.
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That's going to create a lot of depth to the sound. You can also change the shape on this upper oscillator. So, I'll turn the shape up here. And you can also change it from like a regular saw. We
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also have I think this is the shark tooth. This is saturated. I like saturated. They have really good tones to them. So, I'll change that. And I might also turn up the bass on the sine wave, which is very smooth tone. I'm
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going to turn this one up on our little mixer here. I'll turn this all the way up to about 2 and 1/2 dB. You can also d-tune this oscillator right here, the sine wave one, which is a smooth
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oscillator, but by d-tuning it, you notice how it changes that shape on the bottom. We want this sound to evolve over time, have an unevenness, depth, atmosphere. It evolves, right? You're going to see in these next couple steps
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how that starts to happen. But now you'll have a different sound with these oscillators set up.
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And you'll notice there's almost an electricity to it. That's primarily caused by this saturated uh oscillator here on the top in the yellow that's creating almost like it almost sounds like a like an electrical buzzing sound.
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It's still kind of musical sounding, but it kind of reminds me of that. It's almost sort of factory like. So now we can shape the sound even more. Now the filter is really important. That's the thing that changes the tambber of the
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sound. By taking those frequencies away, we can make it much more mellow and mysterious and dark, but you have to click in this little window pane area to change the way that display looks.
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That's kind of hidden in Drift to a lot of people that are new to Drift. And what we're going to do is pull this frequency down. You're going to see I'm going to pull this way down to like
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170ish. So, it's going to take away all those high frequencies. I'm also going to turn the resonance up. So, there's going to be a little more of a bump where it cuts off those frequencies. So, I'll put that up to about 6ish. And you
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want to make sure that frequency mod, this area down here, has nothing on it.
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If you're on the default mode of drift, these things might be up. You want to doubleclick them and turn them off. You might also want to reset drift in your default preset to not have them on because that can be really confusing,
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but you want those off. Okay, so now you have a darker sound, way more mellow sounding now, right? So now that we've picked our oscillators, we've got our notes and we've filtered down the sound, we want the sound to
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change and evolve and not be so static sounding like it is right now. So to do that, we have to use the LFO, which is right over here. The LFO provides movement and you have different types of LFOs. This drop down menu right here,
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you can see them. And basically the idea with this is you want it to move in a way that's not predictable. It's going to evolve and change like scary wind noises or something like that. So I'm going to do is go to wander. And this is
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kind of like a smoother sound, but it has a randomness to it. You can kind of keep the rate basically where it is.
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That's fine. But what you want to do is tag this to something else that's happening in the synth. A really easy one is to affect things like the oscillators. So the shape over here, notice if I go back to this knob and I
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start to move it, that graphic will change. I can actually just tag this to the LFO. So I go to this dropown menu, it's now referencing the LFO we just created. And I'm going to turn this all the way up. So now this oscillator is
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going to move around randomly and change the shape of that upper oscillator. That's going to create a lot of variety in the sound. I can also have the D-tune do a very similar thing. So, I can go over to this mod right here. This is
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another hidden little window. And right here, you can see different things that are on. I'm going to turn them off. The only thing I really want is I want that LFO to affect the D-Tune on oscillator 2. So, I just go I select LFO. That's
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the thing that's going to act on something else. And in this case, it's going to be on oscillator to D-Tune. So, I go to oscillator to D-Tune right there. So now it's going to d-tune things a little bit as that LFO moves.
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And you could play around with this as much as you want. Maybe I'll just go for like 8% in this video. Another useful mode is going to stereo mode instead of poly. Stereo is going to pan things left, right? That's going to also create
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more width to the sound, more atmospheric wideness to the sound. [Music] So now you notice the sound is moving a lot. There's things that are happening in the upper range and they're drifting and gliding and moaning in the
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background. And if I move this filter up, [Music] you hear a lot more of that electricity.
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You hear a lot more of that pitch moaning. It just sounds sort of like tortured moaning sounds when that uh sine wave is just moving around. It's almost like a like a demented chorus kind of sound, but then you just play
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around with the frequency like where you want your frequency at. If you make it very dark, it's going to make those things more understated, which is great for, you know, soundscapes because you're not trying to be too overt
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sometimes. But again, this is up to you. The filter is like a universe of possibilities right there, right? So now we have something really cool. But if we want to make a soundsscape even bigger and more organic sounding, you want to
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add on that extra layer. You want to obscure things, you want things to have sort of an unpredictability even more so more layers of unpredictability. One of the best ways to do that is with a delay. Just the simple old delay stock
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in Ableton. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to drag it after the synth but before the reverb. And what I'm going to do on this, maybe I'll go to a quicker amount. So, we'll go to one here. Let's
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turn the feedback up maybe to 80ish or something like that. And I'm going to go to the fade and ping pong. Fade is like a crossfading effect between the old and the new delay times. And pingpong is going to make things even more stereo.
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So, this is giving us way more dimension to the sound and it's delaying the signal. Now, what I can do is go 100% wet and I can click on this. I could click on any instrument, MIDI effect or
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uh audio effect in this case and hit CtrlG. That's going to create an audio effect rack around that sound. And then now I can have my delay signal. I can rightclick and hit create chain. And now I have my dry signal. So I'm adding in
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this heavily delayed version of the sound. But what I'm doing this because this delay is going to delay the signal.
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It's going to crossfade the delays and it's going to make the delays really wide just by clicking these simple parameters. But I can also have the filter of this delay move around like this really crazily. We're going to do
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that with an independent LFO. So just like we used an LFO over here when we were in the drift synth, we can have a standalone LFO doing the same exact stuff. All you have to do is go to
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modulators. So you got your drums, instruments, audio effects, MIDI effects, modulators. You'll see LFO. You can drag that over. This doesn't create any sound. This just creates movement just like on the synth. So we got to do is activate it to this delay. And it's
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really simple. You got the waveform styles right here, just like we had on the synth. So here we picked out wander from here. If we go over here, you're not going to see wander, but you're going to see glider. And glider is kind
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of like a similar thing. It's very smooth and it's random. It's moving around in different kinds of unpredictable ways. I'm just going to hit map and I can map this to different things on the delay. So, I'm going to
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hit map and just click on let's say the rate. I'm going to hit make sure you hit mod too because I can change it to remote so you can see it moving around.
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And if I hit this little square right here, I can map multiple things. Turn on remote. Maybe I'll hit time. Turn on remote. Maybe I will hit the filter.
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turn on remote and I will hit the width. And now this thing is just moving around really wildly. I can hit this little button to get out of this screen. And I might just turn the depth down a little
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bit so it's a little bit less crazy. Now it's going to move around a little bit more slowly and it's not going to be too radical and whipping sounding. Uh but you'll notice that at this point now you've created a lot of dimension to the
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sound. So, just with a simple C3 MIDI note, you've created this atmospheric sound with uh really not a whole lot. One synth, there's a little delay, there's a little reverb, and there you go.
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Now, you could play along with this further, like you can map your LFO to the filter on drift independently. So, if I go over here, I hit map, I can connect it to this filter, and now it's going to move around. I can control the
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amount, too. And you can see it moving around. Things can get really crazy when the filter opens up too much. So, you can actually control those values over here.
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If I decide I just want to add in a little more frequencies as it goes, I might go for a lower amount here and then turn up the minimum amount so it kind of hovers in a similar range. If
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these percentages are closer together, the variation will not be so extreme. So, let's say I go 33 and 39, it's just going to move around a little bit. If I want to just touch on a little more higher frequencies,
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I can push it up a little more. And you just play around with how much more of those mid-range frequencies or lower mid-range frequencies you want to bring into the atmosphere, but you can really dial it in however you want. Um, I hope
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you found this video useful for creating horror soundsscapes. It definitely is the way you can create something really unique and original. Take your own spin on it. Change the oscillators, change the synth, use different things with the delays, use different reverbs. You're
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going to get unique sounds from this technique. Thank you so much for watching. Check out the links down below if you want more content downloads or you want to join the Patreon. I'll see you all later. Have fun making scary,
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scary scary music. Heat. Heat.
Topics:Ableton Livehorror soundscapesound designDriftElectra chordatmospheric synthLFO modulationdelayreverbTom Casey
