Strange Tales - musings of a sound monkey

The good ole boys at GNG have been on the phone again! I thought I’d escaped this latest attraction, but a fairly panicked phone call last week somehow had me standing a couple of days later in what claims to be York’s most haunted house.

“What’s the brief?”
“It wants to be as f&*%ing creepy as hell”
Looking around me in the wooden clad walls of the Seance Room, leaning on grand old leather backed dining chairs round a massive circular oak table adorned with a scattering of ouija boards and a central crystal ball illuminated by a dim single overhead light - which was the only light in the room, I felt forced to ask…
“So what do you want me to do about it - have you seen this place?!?” 
“Creepier…. mad sh@t everywhere….”
This was admittedly one of the briefer briefs I’d had recently from Gaz, but I played along…
“How long have I got?”
“Install’s Tuesday, press night Thursday” - it was already Friday.
A quick count of the rooms totted up 7 separate and very distinct areas that would need soundscapes.  As usual, all of the rooms would have very different characters and feels and so there needed to be real reflection of that in the different pieces. Like Killers in Whitby, it would be a long attraction run (4hrs) and so there was the issue of actor sanity to consider, long loops, constantly evolving and changing.

35 Stonegate in York has a reputation as the most haunted house in the city (and it has stiff competition - pardon the pun). Certainly as just a building it is a remarkable place to walk round, you can genuinely feel heritage and history oozing from the walls and beams. It’s full of rat-runs and little staircases and tiny corridors - no wall is straight and the ceiling height changes constantly from room-to-room. It’s a lovely house, built in its current form in the 15thC and most recently remembered as the old Psychic Museum owned by Jonathan Cainer and one Uri Gellar!
Due to the timescale, unlike most of the other events I’ve done with the boys, I wasn’t treated to the very comprehensive story brief for the attraction that I would normally get and so the sound creation would have to be much more evocative than narrative this time.

And so Friday afternoon after returning from York I sat down with 7 very blank Digital Performer files in front of me, a stack of old FX libraries, my trusty foley recorder (Edirol R09hr), a keyboard and the soon to be melting newest version of Omnisphere.
I’ve mentioned before that one of the greatest things I like about working with GNG is the sheer trust that they place in you and the confidence they fill you with that you’ll just ‘get on and do it’. It’s a blessing and a curse, and with barely 48 available work hours (given other client commitments and jobs), it felt much more like the latter this time.

The sum total of the brief this time was:
Stained Glass room - low ambient sounds (it has many of those already!)
Stairs - low spooky music
Summoning room - louder spooky music/chanting
Mask room - chaotic spooky sh%t
Mirror room - freaky sh%t
Dining room - guttural sounds, odd sounds
Seance room - chaos! 

And that’s what I worked to.  72hrs later and clutching data discs, the last of my wakefulness, ipod shuffles, allocation charts, and a sack trolley full of amps, speakers, cables and adapters (parking in york is nowhere near anywhere!), I found myself walking up to the doors of 35 Stonegate with my good friend Jess ready to install.

Which was also fun.  Haunted Live & Extreme (for so it is called) would be running from 7pm till 11pm for 4 nights, but during the day, Haunted would still be running their own carefully timed and triggered full light and sound controlled attraction in the house.  Nothing that we installed should be seen by members of the public before 7, and we couldn’t tap into any of their impressive built-in system otherwise it could (and undoubtedly would) upset the balance of their entire system. Guided by the superstar Steady (in-house tech at Haunted) we set about doing the most subtle, careful and ingenious install i’ve done in a while. Speakers were hidden in fire places, behind anti-macassars, behind suits of armour, masks, in cupboards, under tables, anywhere a JBL Control 1 would fit, we’d stick one.  When we ran out of those (did I mention it was very short notice?!?) Steady would run off and find a nice amp and speaker combo they’d got spare from their install.  It was huge fun - hard and quick work (we only had 2hrs a night!) and at times downright creepy - the venue has little or no working light, which was a real joy when it came to the Seance room where we would all find excuses to go and fetch bits of kit together rather than be left to work alone in there.

And so for the next 3 nights you will still be able to hear my humble attempts to make an already massively creepy but groovy house, even creepier.  Live actors, live FX, deeply unnerving soundscapes and spooky lighting all combine to make a great evening out.  Treat yourself to a little scare - I did even before anything was powered up!

Scare ya later…   what was that noise????????