1. Start with a Minor Key.

Happy and playful music tends to be in a Major Key, where as Minor Key’s tend to be on the sad and more emotional side. By selecting a minor key to write with, strait off the bat you’ve helped your track to be sadder and provoke more emotion. For Halloween however I would highly recommend the “Harmonic Minor Key” as it changes some notes in the minor key and makes it overall more suspenseful. Minor Keys work well, Harmonic Minor Keys work even better!

2. Use Dynamics to your Advantage

As fun as it is to sausage fatten everything, in order to create the essential ‘tension and release’ in your track add to the spooky feel, you need to work with dynamics and introduce quiet parts and loud parts to your track. This will help build suspense and catch the listener off guard.

3. Try a Vibrato or Tremelo on Your Leads

Theres a reason why Tremelo violins work really well in film scores, it’s unsettling to the ear. With your track, try adding Vibrato or Tremelo on your leads to bring in that pitch discomfort. (In serum you can do this by mapping an LFO to the fine pitch of an oscillator)

5. Arpeggiation & Repetition

You know the theme from Psycho those stabbing notes, or even the Jaws theme. Both have repetitive striking notes. Iv’e found repeating 1/8th notes sound particularly spooky. Try playing around with an Arp on the Harmonic minor scale and set it to 1/8th and see what you can come up with….

4. Leads & Organs

Many old scary movies heavily rely upon Organs and Glockenspiels to play the spooky themes. You can create a compelling organ by using stacked chords, a little detune and a lot of unison. Alternately for Pluck sounds, a sharp transient and a clean body will do the trick.

6. Extra Tips

Here are some extra little tips to help with creating the spooky tunes. Sub Drops – Sub Bass (usually a sine wave) decreasing in pitch is a classic one from film music. Pitch Automation – Adding pitch automation by +1 semitone or -1 semitone to ocassional lead notes. Big Impacts – Using big impact sounds sound larger than life and are good for transitions.