Adapting a Nursery Rhyme

Adapting a Nursery Rhyme

   One of our ideas for the final piece, is to do a supernatural horror based around a child. So I thought that I would work with a version of a nursery rhyme, in which it would appear if the child was in the scene, to give it some tension.

  I decided to go with Ring O Roses.

  First, I chose the tempo in which I wanted the track to be like. I decided on 69 bpm, which is very slow, but I thought this would be suitable because I wanted it to be eerie sounding and rushed. 

I put in a pedal note, of 'A' to play throughout the piece to give it some bass. I decided to use a church choir plugin for this pedal note, as using a bass instrument didn't sound right and didn't fit the context.

  Then, I manually figured out the melody of the Ring O Roses melody, and I used a glockenspiel to input the sound, because I wanted it to sound like a music box playing. I then pitch shifted the glockenspiel to sound a bit out of tune, to give it a scary feeling, and to make the music box sound really old.

 For the vocals, I recorded myself singing the tune, and I recorded the same tune around 5 times with harmonies, so that it would overlay each other, creating an echo-like sound called overdub. 

 I then mixed the volume for each of the tracks, so that some parts were not too loud. I also adjusted the sound, so that some of the voices would come out of the left side speakers, and the others would come out the right side speakers for surround sound. 

 Finally I downloaded a sound effect of a creaky swing, which I added at the end for extra creepiness.

Here is the finished layered product.

And here is the finished sound.