Just yesterday, my music theory teacher helped me make some suspenseful music for a video of our family’s cat Darci as requested by my mom. I think I learned quite a few useful things, so here’s what we did.
We first took a look at a few samples of suspenseful music that was interesting and identified some elements that were common throughout different pieces. The things that we found were a slow build up, a continuous droning sound, various string ostinatos, and some percussion.
Then, we watched the video we would be putting our music over and laid out when we wanted certain elements of our music to come in since part of suspenseful music was the slow build up. After choosing our sounds from the GarageBand music library we started with our continuous drone and worked our way on from there. We introduced a new element of music as new things happened in the video to layer onto what we already had to make our music more suspenseful.
There was a slight problem when we reached our percussion stage though because we couldn’t find a drum hit that we thought would fit. Therefore, we had to sound design some of the sounds that were already in GarageBand by changing the EQ and adding some other effects. In the end, I still couldn’t figure out how to make a good sound, so my teacher did it for me.
Overall, the final project was only about thirty seconds and most of the ostinatos weren’t consistent since GarageBand’s quantizing system wasn’t really working for us. To me, it doesn’t sound that good, but we managed to create something in one hour that sounds more suspenseful than what I could probably make on my own.