Suspense Hit

How it's made

Source

an orchestral suspense hit is three things struck at once: a bass drum / timpani blow, a low string and brass section playing a dissonant cluster, and the air and hall noise that blooms after the blow.

Strike

a membrane thump, a sine falling from ~95 Hz to ~42 Hz in 120 ms (tension relaxing after the blow) plus a 6 ms low-passed noise burst for the beater; it is fully decayed in ~0.7 s.

Cluster

stacked semitone-spaced notes (root, +1, +2, +6, +7 semitones) each played by three slightly detuned saws (±6 cents, band-limited). The semitone intervals beat at 3-8 Hz, which is the dissonance. A low-pass opens briefly after the hit (bow bite) and then closes from ~3 kHz to ~350 Hz over the decay, so the cluster goes dark as it dies.

Envelope

cluster attack 12 ms, plateau of ~0.25 s, then exponential decay of ~1.9 s; a slow 5 Hz tremolo, deepening over time, adds nervous string motion to the tail.

Tail

a faint band-passed noise swell (1.5-4 kHz) peaking ~0.5 s after the hit stands for hall air and bow noise.

Variation

`rng` detunes every voice by up to a few cents and varies the beater noise; `dissonance` widens the cluster from a close second to a full tritone stack, `weight` balances strike against cluster.

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.