The wooden bannister rail on the upstairs landing creaks. It always has, and one day it might get fixed. In the meantime, it is an interesting creaky sound source. But sound effects for creaky doors and floorboards are boring, and there are too many of them. So what’s a better way of using the sound source and making something useful out of it?

I tried granular, but it sounded…’granular’. I tired slowing it down and it sounded…percussive and boring. I tried applying Paulstretch and it sounded…like it had been processed by Paulstretch. Duh!

So I went old school. I took each of the sets of recorded sawtooth-like creaks and separated them out onto parallel tracks. Then I time aligned them. I was expecting them to be all very similar timing (like the On/Off switch I did some time ago), but they weren’t. In fact, they worked nicely as an ensemble. So I did a few more layers, did some spectral processing to emphasize the dominant formants, and realised that I had failed again. I had done all this processing on a wooden creak sound, and it sounded like some sort of scary alien choir.

Oh! Maybe that’s not so bad after all.

So here’s a scary alien choir made from many wooden creaky sounds, played in parallel. It isn’t your warm, ethereal angelic voices… Actually it is the exact opposite: cold, dark and rather unsettling. Not the sort of pad you hear very often, because it has very little immediate appeal to those shallow people who want bright, bouncy, modern sounds wallowing in reverb. Oh, except for the reverb – there’s lots of that. If you remove the reverb, then the sound becomes even more brittle, and it starts to sound like someone has put a choir through my free MaxForLive.com ‘Synthesizerwriter M4L Tape (etc.) Suite’, which Christian has never reviewed, despite featuring tape emulations several times. Maybe the Suite is too good, or too affordable?

Anyways, I would say enjoy, but it really isn’t that kind of sound.