Unmasking the beast – Here’s the surprising source behind the monster sound:

As mentioned, you sent in a huge number of ideas for what could be behind that strange sound, and it’s been a lot of fun reading through all those creative ideas. I’ll be sharing them all (anonymized) in an upcoming post for inspiration. But now’s time to reveal the winner.

The winner is… Linas Mak, who correctly guessed that it was indeed the elusive plunger behind those monster sounds. Congratulations to Linas, who receives all three libraries from Antisample – and a big thanks to all of you who took part in the fun! It was a pleasure reading your ideas :)

Hi Zdravko, how did you discover that the plunger was effective for creature sounds?

I don’t think I have discovered something new when I used the plunger to create the monster sounds.
The reason I recorded the plunger was that I needed some type of expressive sound for a game called Courier of the Crypt’s “tentacle” monster that could be controlled yet somewhat random. I tried voice acting but I am not really good at that and other libraries didn’t have watery type monsters.
I really didn’t think the plunger would solve my problem but I tried it anyway. Turns out that stretching and pitch shifting the samples would create a monster sound which sounded good right of the bat.

Where and how did you record it?

The plunger was recorded in my home and in the vine cellar. The whole process was quite simple. I had a bucket, a plunger and water.
The bucket full of water was used to create bubbles below the surface, hits and the expressive type sounds. Then I emptied the bucket so that I had small amount of water (so that the plunger didn’t get stuck all the time) and recorded those sounds. Depending on how you pressed the plunger it produced the different sound.

What are some of your ideas on how to process the plunger sounds for that monster / sea creature sound?

The obvious think would be to try stretching and pitch shifting the sound. This should give you immediate result. In the pack I have also provided the “dry” samples, which aren’t really dry but I have removed the room reverb so that you can layer these sounds with the core files. Using both will give you more bigger monster sound.
You should really try it and play with it as much as possible to see what you can do. One thing I like to do is use the chorus or flanger with all parameters turned all the way up (wet, 100% depth, 100% rate) and then side-chain it to the original non-processed sound.
The really quick way to create something interesting is to use some type of sampler like S-Layer from Twisted Tools, import 128 sounds and click the random button. Instant monster sound effects :)