Spine-tingling tunes: Create a spooky Halloween CD
Incorporate scary songs and sound effects into your fright night festivities
By Katherine Murray for Windows Marketplace
The jack-o’-lanterns are carved, the candy bowl is filled, and your costume is ready. You only need one more thing to set the mood for your trick-or-treaters or Halloween party: scary music and sound effects.
With digital music and sound effects, you can easily brew your own playlists to put a chill in the night air. Burning these playlist potions to a CD to play at your party or at the front door to greet trick-or-treaters will definitely make the night come alive with the sounds of Halloween.
Collect spooky music and sounds
First, you need to collect the ingredients for these frightening mixes. Many online music sites and stores carry Halloween-related music and sound effects. There are even some CD compilations made specifically for children, which are perfect for a party of young princesses and goblins.
You can also create your own list of songs and download them individually from your favourite online music service.
After doing a quick search online, we easily found the following CD collections.
- Halloween culture classics: All ages will recognize the Addams Family theme, “Monster Mash” and “Ghostbusters.”
- Spooky favourites recorded just for children: Who knew that there were Halloween songs such as “If You’re Scary” and “You Know It” and “5 Little Pumpkins”?
- Classic Halloween sound effects: The standards include screaming people, ghoulish greetings, UFOs and other eerie alien sounds.
- Scary sounds of horror: These compilations include groaning, fearful animal noises and extreme sound effects meant to really scare party goers and trick-or-treaters. You’re likely to find some with a few spine-chilling background sounds such as wind, heartbeats and thunder claps.
Do your own search and find the songs and sound effects that are right for your ghoulish plans. Then get to work building your playlists and customizing your CD.
Put together a haunting Halloween playlist
Storing music digitally on your computer allows you to create customized playlists to fit your personal interests.
Many sound-effect clips are short, so try putting the same clip into your playlist repeatedly to create a sustained sound.
Add interesting transitional effects between sustained sounds to make more creative mixes. For example, add a thunder clap between a sustained wind effect, and you’ve got a stormy night.
- To compile your Halloween soundtrack, open Windows Media Player and, under Playlists, click Create Playlist. Name your collection.
- To move music files into your new playlist, click the song title in the Library (left-hand side) and drag it into the Playlist window on the right-hand side. When you’re finished, click Save Playlist.
Click here to learn how to burn your playlist to CD.
Article adapted from an original piece from Windows Marketplace
