Saw
An ancient saw instrument passed down through the generations
ByHeikki Ketola
The story
Yes. Its a saw. You saw that right. A playable saw.
My great grandfather used to be a pretty good saw player, he even performed in the radio, and he left an ancient saw instrument in my family. It is a real existing instrument and there are even dedicated shops to buy them.
My dad learned to play the saw when he was a kid and we managed to dust of this beast and record some very basic samples with it.
The instrument is very difficult to play properly and the sound is just haunting not to mention how out-of tune it is.
I thought it would be awesome to record some haunting drones with it and well…here is the result. It is not perfect or your typical lead instrument, but definitely has its uses.
An instrument saw doesn’t have the spikes, its just a long metal blade. It is bowed with a regular violin bow, but you have to simultaneously bend the saw between your knees and vibrate it by shaking your legs.
Reviews
Haunting Indeed
I actually like this a lot and as sam said, i appreciate that the sound is very dry and no effects are baked in giving you total control. I think you need to be atleast a bit knowledgable with sound design to breathe mire life into this but thats not a downside for me, i enjoy adding third party effects. Of course reverb and delay on this will make it more ambient and enveloping. But i love the pitch wobble and i think it will add alot of interest to a track, particularity a sparce score. You could even add your own pitch bend to it to make it even more weird
An Interesting sound
This is an interesting sound, to be sure. It's fairly well recorded and laid out logically on the keyboard. I appreciate that it was recorded dry and not drenched with reverb. This isn't going to be your only sound in a track, but it can contribute an interesting and ghostly quality. Well done!
Some very interesting sfx!
This could be an amazing horror SFX library, bit you might need to work on it a little bit more in order to achieve that, because by default it is very barebones. The sound is very interesting though, although the samples could be cropped in a more proper way, as you might find noticeable noises and sudden crops that may be hard to deal with. The inclusion of ADSR settings would probably fix that. You will also need to get used to the small delay in the Massacre patch.