It’s interesting how my view of Halloween has changed through the years. When I was a kid it was about dressing up and running around with a giant pillow case, trying to hit up as many houses as possible, in an attempt to grab a record breaking bag of loot. Too old for that, the excitement dropped off for a number of years, and it wasn’t until University that it began becoming of interest again. Of course at that time it was mostly fun because of the excuse to dress up and drink and party with friends before hitting a club and spending the next few days recovering. These days, Halloween seems to be even more of a treat. I spend a good few weeks planning the costume and figuring out what we’ll be doing on Halloween eve. I spend countless hours carving pumpkins, buying decorations and making legless zombies that crawl out of gravestones on the front lawn.
One small obsession that I’ve had over the last few years has been with the sound effects choice for the big night. I’ve spent previous years scouring the web for choice mixes – most containing the usual fare – dragging chains, witch cackles, horrific screams, other ghostly sounds… This year, however, I thought to approach things a little differently.
October 26th, just 5 days before Halloween, I decided I’d try and capitalize on the big night. Having been interested in electronic music creation quite some time and being familiar with some audio programs such as Audacity, Jeskola Buzz, Impulse Tracker and FastTracker and having acquired a fare share of sound samples over the years, I thought I’d try to put together my own Halloween sound effects mix and sell it online. I knew I had only a few days to pull it off, but decided that it would be a fun project. So I set the goal. Put together a half hour mix of Halloween sound effects, put up a website and figure out how to sell it online. Get it done by Halloween. Simple enough.
The next three days I spent most of my evenings creating or finding sound samples (many were public domain or under a free use kind of license – I didn’t spend a cent on samples). I had a fairly good mic and water dripping sounds or howling winds are incredibly simple to make. I also have an old Korg M1 and other musical devices that I’ve acquired through the years. Once I had a nice collection of sounds, I started arranging them with Audacity.
Audacity is an open source multi-track audio program. It has a number of built-in effects (reverb, chorus, flange, etc) and supports VST effects. Audacity also can output to a number of audio formats including mp3 and ogg. I also used Jeskola Buzz to create some loops. Buzz is a free modular “sound studio”. You can string synth machines, sound generators, or simple trackers and run them through a multitude of various effect modules (again like reverb or chorus), but allows for real-time effect mixing similar to Ableton (although no where near as complete). Fortunately when mixing Halloween sounds, very little musical effort is required. Recording a few seconds of a Spanish quote from my Spanish 101 university textbook, modifying the pitch, reversing the sample and then adding some chorus and reverb can produce a pretty trippy, messed up sample, perfect for a Halloween mix.
It was really fun to mix all the samples and within a couple of days I had a 27 minute track that was pretty spooky. In fact, Sonya told me that it was possibly too scary for really little kids and warned me that I should probably wait until the tiny ones were done trick or treating and the older kids were coming out, if we were going to use the mix during Halloween. Personally, I thought it was pretty much right on.
Unfortunately by the time I was 90% good with the mix, it was only two days before Halloween. Two days isn’t a very long time to get something out there, market it and get people to buy in.
On the evening of the 29th, I rendered the final mp3 file. It was then time to figure out how to sell it.
My first thought was to throw the mix up on Reverbnation. I created an account, but free accounts only allow 8MB audio file uploads. I then found Tradebit – a website that allows you to sell files online, be them audio files, pdf documents, photos, etc. Tradebit gives you a free account, unlimited file sizes and bandwidth. You upload the file, enter a description and other information about the file, upload an image to represent the file and then set a price. I chose $4.99.
Tradebit uses Paypal as the payment system, which is perfect. A customer clicks on the item, clicks purchase and gets redirected directly to Paypal where the transaction can be processed. After payment, the customer is redirected to the file download, which is available for some time after the payment has been completed. Tradebit also has a search feature allowing potential customers to search and fine items for sale on their site. The file was roughly 30MB so it had to be uploaded via FTP. I used trusty Filezilla to do that. The process was incredibly straight forward.
Ok- the file was up and officially for sale. At this point it was around 9pm on the Thursday. I had spent about 2.5 hours looking for an online shop to sell the mp3.
Next, I wanted a “CD cover” image. Although no physical CD’s were going to be distributed, I figured having a CD cover was necessary as most music, digital download or not, has one. It was getting late though and I needed to do something quickly. I remembered a neat trick I learned in a Photoshop course I took years ago that produced instantly creepy images. I powered up my scanner and proceeded to scan my face and hand (eyes tightly shut of course – those things can seriously blind you otherwise). I opened the resulting image in The Gimp, modified the contrast and played with the burn tool. I then used a creepy looking font and gave it a title and voila – the 10 minute CD cover was born.
I then logged on to my Dreamhost account and saw that I had a free .com domain registration available and after various combinations of words, found that www.wickedcreep.com was available. I registered it and hosted it on Dreamhost in a matter of minutes. I then uploaded the CD cover pic and wrote up a super quick description and sales pitch in an html file. I included a link provided by Tradebit in a couple of spots on the web page. At this point, it was nearly midnight, but for the most part it was up and available. All that was needed was some marketing. Otherwise nobody was ever going to find the page, let alone purchase the mp3 before Halloween and I knew that after the 31st I could expect 0 sales.
I decided at this point that I needed to make it highly visible. I figured I’d offer the track for free streaming on Youtube or something. I opened up Windows Movie Maker, dragged in the CD cover image and the audio file and 10 minutes later was uploading a .wmv video file to Vimeo (which allows larger files to be uploaded than Youtube). As part of the description I linked back to wickedcreep.com. Within minutes, view counts were increasing on the Vimeo page. I also decided to embed a video player on the wickedcreep.com website.
I then created a wickedcreep Twitter account and followed a few people. I also joined some Halloween ning.com social networks under the wickedcreep user id and made some postings, attempting to promote the track (the following day I’d find out that most of the moderators of these social networking sites were to delete my account as they didn’t take too kindly to people promoting things for sale).
But after trying to spread the word for a few hours, I eventually called it a night at 2am. I had more or less succeeded in creating a product and making it available online. Of course, it was just two days before the product would not see any interest, but it was fun regardless.
As the next 48 hours went by, I received about 6 sales. I had reduced the price to $1.99 per download so after Tradebit took their 25%, I was left with about $9 in sales. That’s all I saw from it. I had spent countless hours that week to make only $9. But having spent nothing besides my free time on the project, it was still profit. And despite the dismal profit that it was, I was super stoked.
I figure that while the Wicked Creep 2009 Halloween mix didn’t do incredibly well, with a bit more time and promotion, the 2010 remix is going to absolutely kill it.
Check out the wicked creep website here: www.wickedcreep.com.
