Credit: KELLEPICS
Do you feel it? The chill in the air? The ghouls haunting the night? Or, scariest of all, the Christmas music ready to leap into action the second it strikes midnight?
In honor of the spooky season, I’d like to take a quick look at a VST that I’ve gotten good use out of throughout the years: ProjectSAM’s “The Free Orchestra”. That’s right, free! You heard that right folks! Or, well, you didn’t hear that at all…
For a free VST, it’s very comprehensive, including multiple effects that are useful for scary or horror music. I’d like to deep dive into some of them today and show you how I use them to add some spook to my music.
(As a side note, if you’d like to download The Free Orchestra, click below):
Credit: Clarence Alford
Into the Theater: Ghostly Clusters
Let's start with the Ghostly Clusters patch. This patch contains a lot of patches with small intervals and/or swirling effects stacked on top of each other. These types of effects are really good at creating tension and unease. I used a few string effects from this patch in my piece “Into the Theater”, here they are in isolation:
I wanted the mix of swirling strings and tremolos to create a feeling of anticipation for what comes next, and the effects in the Ghostly Clusters patch are really good at doing that. I was also able to use the pitch wheel to pitch them up towards the end.
In game, the music plays under a cutscene where the player is transported to a distorted theater. The antagonist hangs from above like a marionette, before her eyes glow teal and the cutscene cuts to black. The Free Orchestra really helps make the music more eerie and dynamic. Here are the effects in context with the rest of the music:
They’re not the star of the show, but the strings act as a nice chaotic blanket that wraps the church organ and lets the voice shine. These specific sounds are nice because they add a level of disorientation to the music, which can be really useful in a horror track where disorientation and off-putting is the name of the game.
Credit: jplenio
Shadows: Wild Winds
Let’s next talk about the Wild Winds patch, which is probably my most used patch in the VST. The Wild Winds patch has a lot of, well, wild sound effects played on woodwinds. The effects range from quick, disorienting passages to extended, eerie held notes. I use multiple of the patches from Wild Winds in my piece “Shadows”. The first one is a bassoon effect that sounds like this:
After extensive research, I really have no idea how the hell a bassoon makes this sound (if any bassoon/woodwind players are reading this PLEASE let me know). My best guess is that it’s a mix of multiphonics and a growl effect, but I’m kind of shooting in the dark. That said, the effect is really off-putting, which is nice for the purpose of this track.
In game, this track plays when the player meets a mage in the forest, enveloped in shadow. It’s meant to be creepy and hair-raising, even if ultimately the mage is friendly. You can hear the bassoon sound in context at the beginning of the piece here:
I think the reason it works is because of how unnatural it sounds. It’s a weird growling whistling sound, which falls into a sonic uncanny valley because it is made by an acoustic instrument. However, even natural sounding sounds can be creepy and stressing. Another effect from Wild Winds that I like is a collection of frantic flute runs, which increases the energy in a panicky way. Here it is in isolation:
The flutes are absolutely zooming all over the place, so quick that you almost can’t keep track. In my mind, the flutes sound like the main character’s thoughts racing. The chaotic flight pattern physically makes the listener stressed out, which is the epitome of what I tried to capture in the piece. Here’s the flute sounds in context:
With the slow rise of the background, the flutes really pop out as the focus while everything around it slowly creeps into view (aurally, of course). Overall, they really support the rising tension of the piece excellently. I think of all the patches in The Free Orchestra, this one is my favorite. If I had to choose a second, however, it would be…
Credit: sananthropis
House of Sin: Dystopian Drones
… the Dystopian Drones patch! My segues might be bumpy, but the effects in Dystopian Drones are buttery smooth. They are great at adding substance and low end to a piece of music without taking up the spotlight. In essence, it’s almost felt rather than heard. Here’s how it sounds (in isolation) on my piece “House of Sin”:
Not as exciting as the other sounds I’ve mentioned, but definitely a great base for a lot of great tracks. It feels like an almost inevitable sense of creeping dread, as if nothing you can do will alter your destiny… or something like that. I don’t know, I write music not words.
Anyways, here’s the drone in context with the rest of the piece (you may need some headphones to hear it clearly):
Do you feel how the drone adds a rumble that fills in the low end of the piece? This track was going to play when the player was in the main character’s house. It was actually meant to be for a game called “Apostle”, but sadly the game never got released, and therefore the music never got shared to the world…
UNTIL NOW!!!!!!!!1!!!1!!!11!!!
That’s right folks! This shameless self promo is here to announce that the day after publishing this blog post (that would be 10/31/2026, or October 31, 2026 for my European friends) at 10:30 AM PST, I will be releasing a new video that I hope to turn into a little mini-series: Score Revival.
I’ll be taking old tracks that I never got to release for one reason or another, and I’ll play them over notes about my compositional thought process, behind the scenes stuff, and/or really anything I think would be interesting to mention. The upcoming episode is for the game “Apostle” that I just mentioned, and I used quite a few of The Free Orchestra patches in those tracks, so I’d definitely recommend giving it a listen. You can click the button below to check the video out:
Credit: monicore
Anyways, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I want to reiterate that this entire VST is free, all it requires is the Kontakt player (and before someone mentions it, Kontakt has a free version and it works on that too). I’ve gotten a lot of use out of it throughout the years, and I really, really recommend it to anyone who wants to start writing horror tracks, as a lot of the effects can be either really challenging or flat out impossible to create with standard orchestra VSTs.
But, with all that said, I thank you for taking the time to read my blog post. Remember to check out The Free Orchestra, I’ve linked it below:
If you like what I write, have any questions, or just want to say hi, feel free to reach out with the form below! Otherwise, I’ll see you on the last Friday of next month.
All photos are from Pixabay and linked/credited appropriately. No AI (Artificial Intelligence) was used in the writing of both the blog and the music, nor are any of the images AI generated. However, this blog was created using copious amounts of AI (Andrew Intelligence).