Krotos Audio

There’s a reason Hollow Knight sounds the way it does, and it’s not a Hollywood foley stage. It’s one guy, in a home studio, with a shirt, some paper, and a leather couch.

The Foley Teacher’s unpacks exactly how Christopher Larkin pulled it off — and how you can apply the same DIY thinking to your own game sound effects, with the help of a tool like Reformer Pro.

If you’ve been searching for how to create game sound effects at home on a budget, this one’s for you.

The Hollow Knight setup was already a “budget” job

Hollow Knight was made by Team Cherry, a three-person indie studio based in Adelaide, Australia, with development partially funded through a Kickstarter campaign that raised over A$57,000 by the end of 2014. Three people. Kickstarter money. A metroidvania about bugs.

The audio? Almost entirely the work of one person — Christopher Larkin — handling both music and sound design. As Larkin himself put it, “there was no huge budget, so we had to work with what we got.”

The Foley Teacher, who has worked on AAA titles like Avatar and Assassin’s Creed, is upfront about why this matters. On a AAA game you have an audio director, an audio team, an in-house foley artist, and the budget to cover huge amounts of locomotion, surface types, armour, utilities — the works. On Hollow Knight, Larkin had himself, his home studio, and whatever was in the room.

“There was no huge budget, so we had to work with what we got.” — Christopher Larkin, sole sound designer and composer on Hollow Knight

Watch the video The DIY techniques Larkin actually used The shirt

Larkin used the cloth movement of his own shirt — recorded live, on his body — for jump and land sounds across many NPCs and the main character. The Foley Teacher demonstrates a version of it on camera. It’s one of those techniques that sounds absurd until you hear it sit perfectly in the mix.

Paper for wing flaps

Insect enemy wings? Paper, recorded in front of the mic, then shaped and altered. Cheap, immediate, and once you process it, unmistakably insect.

The leather couch

Used for creaks, resonance, and impacts. As The Foley Teacher puts it: “Be creative. Use your space. Record as much as you can.”

The point Larkin keeps making, and The Foley Teacher amplifies, is about the human touch. Pulling sounds from a library gets you to point A. Recording your own performance — even with a shirt and a piece of paper — is what gets you past it. Sample libraries are everyone’s sample libraries. Your shirt is only yours.

“Pulling from libraries brings you to point A. But if you want to reach another level, you need the unique recordings that go beyond field recording.”

Where Reformer Pro fits in

The Foley Teacher introduces Reformer Pro at the point in the video where library samples and raw recordings stop being enough — when you need a stylised texture that doesn’t exist anywhere, and you don’t have a full-fledged foley stage to record it.

His exact framing: “We can record the paper and then alter the sound with a tool I also like to use and which is really helpful if you don’t have a full-fledged Foley stage. It’s from Krotos and it’s called Reformer Pro.”

The clearest demonstration comes during the Hollow Knight whoosh. He’d already recorded an in-sync foley pass that gave him the initial impact — the punch that drives the movement forward. But he wanted something more: a bubbly textural tail to sit underneath it. So:

He recorded a few loops of bubble-like textures.

He imported them into Reformer Pro as the sound source.

He used his voice as the live input to trigger and shape those textures in real time.

He layered the result back against the original impact and added a touch of Renaissance Vox and Manny Marroquin reverb to taste.

The output is a stylised whoosh with character — soft, organic, specific to the project, and impossible to find in a stock library. As he says: “I like this way of thinking out of the box and using tools like Reformer Pro.”

That’s the workflow in a nutshell. Record your own raw textures. Load them into Reformer Pro. Perform them with your voice. Mix back against your in-sync foley. Done.

“Reformer Pro is really helpful if you don’t have a full-fledged Foley stage.” — The Foley Teacher

Why this matters if you’re making game sound effects on a budget

The connection here is direct. If you’re an indie sound designer recreating the feel of a game like Hollow Knight — small impacts, organic textures, dozens of stylised cues, no realism crutch to fall back on — you’re staring at three options:

Hire a foley stage. Great results, expensive, often not available on indie timelines.

Buy your way out with sample libraries. Fast, but everything ends up sounding like the same five libraries every other indie is using.

Record your own foley at home and use Reformer Pro to stylise, texture, and layer it.

Option three is what’s actually happening in this video. Your shirt, your paper, your garden foliage handle the performance. Reformer Pro handles the texture and variation when you need to push past realism into something stylised — exactly the territory Hollow Knight lives in.

The time-saving angle is real too. Instead of editing, chopping, and automating sample layers to shape a texture, you perform it with your voice in one pass. It’s the difference between assembling a sound and playing it.

Worth being straight about this: Reformer Pro isn’t a magic wand, and The Foley Teacher doesn’t pitch it as one. You still need decent source material going in, and you still need ears. What it does is close the gap between “I have an idea for a sound” and “I have that sound in my session” — fast.

It’s the difference between assembling a sound and playing it.

A loose workflow to try yourself

If you want to apply what’s in the video to your own project:

• Watch the scene with the sound off. Decide what the action feels like — sharp, soft, wet, granular, bubbly.
• Find something in your house with roughly that character. Clothing for cloth movement. Paper for wings. Couch leather for creaks. Garden foliage for footsteps on plants. The Foley Teacher’s “secret weapon” is literally a piece of artificial plant he found on a street in Düsseldorf.
• Record raw textures with whatever decent mic you have.
• Load the textures into Reformer Pro.
• Perform them with your voice. Match the rhythm, energy, and dynamics of the on-screen action.
• Layer the Reformer Pro result back against any in-sync foley you recorded for impact.
• Sweeten with EQ and reverb to taste.

Variation matters. As The Foley Teacher notes: “The sounds have to sound similar, but they have to have variation.” Reformer Pro helps with that too — every voice performance is slightly different, so you get organic variation for free across multiple takes.

The point

Hollow Knight is proof that distinctive, atmospheric game audio can come out of a single home studio. The Foley Teacher’s video is proof that the same DIY philosophy is still the smartest way to work if you’re an indie sound designer in 2026.

You don’t need a foley stage. You need ears, a few household objects, and a tool that lets you turn raw recordings into stylised textures by performing them with your voice. That tool is Reformer Pro.

Pair the two and you’ve got the same setup that built Hollownest — just with a faster route to the finish.

The post Hollow Knight Sound Effects: Foley Teacher Recreation with Reformer Pro appeared first on Krotos.

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The Stop Waiting Sale: Up to 70% Off Plugins, Libraries and Bundles If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to invest in your sound design toolkit, this is it. The Stop Waiting Sale is on. Plugins, libraries, bundles, and upgrades across the entire Krotos catalogue are discounted by up to 70%. It’s the deepest spring discount slate we’ve offered, and it includes Sound Design Bundle 3 — the full plugin suite plus our flagship sound libraries in a single bundle. This post is the plain version: what’s on sale, what each tool actually does, who each is for, and how to think about value across the different ways into the Krotos ecosystem. What’s in the Sale

• Sound Design Bundle 3 and its upgrade paths — 70% off
• Krotos Everything Bundle 6 and its upgrade paths — 50% off
• Individual plugins (Dehumaniser 2, Weaponiser, Reformer Pro, Igniter, Dehumaniser Simple Monsters) — 50% off
• All Krotos sound libraries — 50% off
• Third-party libraries (SoundBits, SoundMorph and more) — 50% off

Shop the Sale The Plugins This is the catalogue most working sound designers know us for. Each plugin solves a specific category of problem at speed — the kind of speed that matters when you’re staring down a delivery deadline. Dehumaniser 2

Dehumaniser 2 is the industry-standard vocal processor. Modular, node-based, with 100+ ready-to-go presets and 130+ animal recordings (including a Bengal tiger and a black leopard recorded on location in Thailand). It’s been used to build the voice of Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron, the Demogorgon in Stranger Things, dragons in Game of Thrones, demons in The Conjuring, and creatures across Far Cry 4, The Jungle Book, and dozens of other features and series.

The shortcut Dehumaniser 2 gives you: every creature voice, robot voice, demonic whisper, processed dialogue, and alien language in one workflow. No daisy-chaining six plugins. No re-patching for the next character. Build the node graph once, recall it for the rest of the project.

At 50% off, Dehumaniser 2 is the easiest single purchase to justify in this sale if you do any vocal-driven sound design at all.

Get Dehumaniser 2 Weaponiser

Weaponiser is a layered sound design instrument built for combat — but most users find it’s the fastest way to design any layered, performable sound effect. Build a kick from four layers. Design a sword swing with whoosh, impact, and tail in one performance. Randomise across hundreds of variations from a single preset for game audio.

Two versions in the sale: Weaponiser Basic (the core engine) and Weaponiser Fully Loaded (the engine plus the full sound library expansion, including the Cinematic Shock library which dropped last year).

The shortcut Weaponiser gives you: layered, varied, randomisable sounds without bouncing 12 takes manually. If you work in games or you score action, this is where the time savings come from.

Get Weaponiser Reformer Pro

Reformer Pro is real-time Foley. Record any sound through your microphone — your voice, your hands, gravel in a tray — and Reformer Pro transforms it in real time into footsteps, cloth, water, mech, or whatever library you’ve loaded.

This is the plugin that lets you hit a Foley deadline without booking a stage. Performance is the workflow: you perform the sound’s rhythm and energy with your input source, and Reformer Pro maps it onto the loaded library content. Watch a take, perform along with it, done.

The shortcut Reformer Pro gives you: Foley that matches picture in one pass, without re-tracking and without dragging individual hits onto a timeline.

Get Reformer Pro Bundles Bundles are where the value compounds. If you’d be buying more than one or two of the above plugins, the maths is hard to argue with. Sound Design Bundle 3 — 70% off

The flagship. Sound Design Bundle 3 is the entire plugin suite — Dehumaniser 2, Weaponiser Fully Loaded, Reformer Pro, Igniter Full Tank, Dehumaniser Simple Monsters — plus a year of Krotos Studio Pro, plus 1,377 presets and 367GB of sample content.

This is the bundle the working sound designers actually buy. Ben Jacquier, who’s redesigned audio for everything from feature trailers to indie games, uses it in his everyday workflow. At 70% off, it’s the deepest discount we offer on a flagship bundle outside Black Friday.

Get Sound Design Bundle 3 Krotos Everything Bundle 6 — 50% off

Krotos Everything Bundle 6 is the full Krotos ecosystem. Every plugin, every Krotos-designed sound library, Krotos Studio Pro included. 60,000+ individual sounds. Updated with the Krotos Foundations Library (29GB of everyday SFX across hundreds of categories) and the Cinematic Shock Library (28 new Weaponiser presets plus a standalone WAV asset pack).

KEB 6 is for the studio or sound designer who wants the whole catalogue, full stop. No worrying about which library will fit the next project. It’s all here.

Get Everything Bundle 6 Sound Design Bundle (the original) — 50% off

The core bundle: Dehumaniser 2, Weaponiser Fully Loaded, Reformer Pro. The three plugins that built the Krotos reputation. At 50% off, this is the entry point for someone who wants the plugin trio without the library expansion that SDB3 includes.

Get Sound Design Bundle Upgrade paths 50% off most, 70% if you’re going to SDB3

If you already own a Krotos product, you don’t re-buy it when you upgrade to a bigger bundle. Every plugin you own counts toward the price of the bundle it’s included in. Upgrade pricing is automatically applied at checkout — we have upgrade paths from every major Krotos product into Sound Design Bundle 3 and Krotos Everything Bundle 6.

See Upgrade Options The libraries

Every Krotos-designed sound library is 50% off. So is every third-party library we carry — SoundBits, SoundMorph, and others.

What separates a Krotos library from the freesound or stock-pack alternative isn’t just the recording quality (though that matters). It’s the metadata. Tagged, organised, Pro Tools-ready, and consistently levelled. You drop them into your session and they’re usable — no re-tagging, no normalising, no spending the first hour of a session sorting WAVs into folders.

A few of the most-asked-about libraries:

• Krotos Foundations Library — 29GB of everyday SFX across hundreds of categories. Designed to be the workhorse library that covers the 80% of sounds you reach for every session.
• Cinematic Shock Library — built for tension, trailer impacts, and hard-hitting cinematic moments. 28 Weaponiser presets included.
• Battle Sound Effects Library — combat, swords, armour, melee impacts. Used widely in fantasy and historical post-pro.
• Krotos Animals Library — recorded on location, includes the source recordings behind some of the Dehumaniser 2 presets.

The full library catalogue is in the shop. If you’re not sure which library matches your work, the shop’s category filters are the fastest way to find what’s relevant.

Shop All Libraries How Krotos tools fit into different workflows

Specific use cases, because abstract product descriptions only land so far.

Film and broadcast TV post-production

Dehumaniser 2 for creature and processed dialogue work. Reformer Pro for Foley you can’t book a stage for. The Krotos libraries for fill content and texture beds. Sound Design Bundle 3 is the typical post-pro setup — the plugin suite plus enough library content to cover most show requirements without leaving the Krotos ecosystem.

Game audio (AAA and indie)

Weaponiser for combat, Igniter for vehicles, Reformer Pro for Foley variation, Dehumaniser 2 for character VO and creatures. The variation workflow is where Krotos really earns its place in a game pipeline — performable randomisation lets you generate dozens of variants from a single preset, ready to export and pipe into Wwise, FMOD, or your engine’s native audio system.

Trailer houses and high-end advertising

Cinematic impact, weight, tension. The Cinematic Shock library, Weaponiser, and Dehumaniser 2 are the core trio for trailer work. Igniter handles the vehicle sweeps. SDB3 covers all of this in one bundle at the deepest discount in the sale.

Independent sound designers and freelancers

If you’re working solo or running a small studio, the case for Sound Design Bundle 3 over individual plugins is straightforward: at the sale price, the bundle is cheaper than buying two of the included plugins separately. Volume discount, basically.

Why we called it the Stop Waiting Sale

Honest answer: because the most common reason sound designers don’t upgrade their toolkit isn’t price. It’s the assumption that the right moment is coming later.

Black Friday is six months away. The next project is going to need sound. The session you’ve been promising yourself you’d handle better next time — it’s the next session, not “someday.”

Sound design tools are infrastructure. They either accelerate the work or they don’t, and the compound effect plays out across a year of sessions, not across a single delivery.

If you’ve been waiting, this is the sign.

Frequently asked questions What’s the difference between Sound Design Bundle 3 and Krotos Everything Bundle 6?

Sound Design Bundle 3 is the plugin suite plus Krotos Studio Pro plus a curated set of flagship libraries (1,377 presets, 367GB of content). Krotos Everything Bundle 6 is the entire Krotos ecosystem — every plugin and every Krotos-designed library, totalling over 60,000 sounds. KEB6 is the comprehensive option; SDB3 is the working sound designer’s bundle.

Do upgrade paths apply during the sale?

Yes. If you already own a Krotos product, you don’t pay full bundle price — you only pay the difference between what you own and the bundle you’re upgrading to, at sale pricing. Upgrade options are visible automatically when you’re logged into your Krotos account.

Is Krotos Studio included in any of these bundles?

Yes — Sound Design Bundle 3 and Krotos Everything Bundle 6 both include a year of Krotos Studio Pro. If you want Krotos Studio as a standalone subscription, you can subscribe directly on krotos.studio, which is also discounted during the Stop Waiting Sale.

Are the plugins perpetual licences or subscriptions?

The Iconics plugins (Dehumaniser 2, Weaponiser, Reformer Pro, Igniter, Simple Monsters) are perpetual licences. You own them. Krotos Studio is a subscription. Bundles that include Krotos Studio Pro include one year of subscription as part of the bundle.

Can I use Krotos products commercially?

Yes. All Krotos plugins and libraries are licensed for commercial use, including film, broadcast, games, advertising, podcasts, and YouTube. The licence agreement is included on each product page.

What platforms do the plugins work on?

Mac (Intel and Apple Silicon, macOS 11+) and Windows (10+). VST, VST3, AU, AAX formats supported across all major DAWs including Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Reaper, Cubase, Nuendo, and Studio One.

Do the libraries work in any DAW or only Krotos plugins?

Both. Krotos libraries integrate with the plugins (especially Reformer Pro, which loads libraries as its source content), but they’re also delivered as standard WAV files. Drop them into any DAW or sample manager.

What if I’m not sure which bundle is right for me?

The shop has filtering by use case. If you’d rather ask a human, our sales team is monitored Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm GMT — they’ll walk you through the options.

Are the sale prices locked in?

Sale pricing applies during the sale window. Perpetual licences purchased during the sale are yours forever at the price you paid. Subscriptions (Krotos Studio Pro included in bundles) renew at standard pricing in year two.

Start Shopping The full sale catalogue is in the shop, sorted by category and discount tier. Upgrade pricing is automatically applied to logged-in accounts. Shop the Stop Waiting Sale

The post Krotos Sale 2026 — Up to 70% Off Plugins, Libraries & Bundles appeared first on Krotos.

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What’s New from Krotos this Black Friday

We’ve been busy since last Black Friday.

Krotos Studio is most powerful than ever, with countless updates and upgrades (including Stem Drag and Drop, Instant Render, Drivable Vehicles and over 200 new presets).

To celebrate the launch of the sale, we’re excited to announce new additions to our catalogue that you can claim at our best-ever prices.

Krotos Everything Bundle 6

NEW! 70% off during Black Friday

The Krotos Everything Bundle 6 combines the full suite of Krotos sound design software and libraries — now updated with two major new additions:

• Krotos Foundations Library – over 29GB of essential, everyday sound effects across hundreds of categories.

• Cinematic Shock Library – Featuring 28 new Weaponiser presets plus a standalone WAV asset pack, it gives sound designers everything they need to design hard-hitting, tension-filled cinematic moments.

With Everything Bundle 6, users get the full power of Krotos’ flagship tools — including

• Dehumaniser 2
• Weaponiser Fully Loaded
• Igniter Full Tank
• Reformer Pro
• Krotos Studio Pro (1 year)
• Every single we’ve created library to date

This new update delivers an additional 11,501 new assets, 31.21GB of new material, and 28 new presets, bringing the total to over 60,000 individual sounds in one complete package.

It’s the definitive upgrade for anyone who wants the full Krotos ecosystem — from the creative tools to the premium content that powers them.

Add Everything Bundle 6 to Cart Krotos Studio Max

50% off your first year during Black Friday

5000 new high quality sounds (6.4GB) have now been added to Max. This is part of our on-going commitment to expanding our flagship subscription, and helping you design anything you can imagine.

Use our plugins or our sounds within your favourite library management tool.

This Includes a mixture of cinematic and foley Animals, Monsters, Cinematic Transitions, Risers and Impacts, Vehicle and Spaceship Passbys, Beeps, Timers and Appliances, Rocks and Ceramics, Banned Extreme Cinematic and Foley Sounds, Object Foley and handling on multiple surfaces and Birdsong Ambiences.

All this is immediately accessible to existing Max subscribers and Included in your first year, sign up now for a 50% discount!

• Dehumaniser 2
• Weaponiser Fully Loaded
• Igniter Full Tank
• Reformer Pro
• Krotos Studio Pro (1 year)
• Every single we’ve created library to date

This new update delivers an additional 11,501 new assets, 31.21GB of new material, and 28 new presets, bringing the total to over 60,000 individual sounds in one complete package.

It’s the definitive upgrade for anyone who wants the full Krotos ecosystem — from the creative tools to the premium content that powers them.

Buy Krotos Studio Max Explore our biggest sale of the year

As well as these new additions, we are offering up to 80% off across plugins bundles and libraries throughout the black friday period. Explore the sale and start creating your best sound effects yet.

The post Black Friday – What’s New? appeared first on Krotos.

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From classic monsters to modern nightmares – how the human voice became the ultimate horror instrument with Dehumaniser 2. The Sound of Fear

Close your eyes. The lights flicker. A low growl cuts through the silence… familiar, but not quite human. Before the creature even appears, your heartbeat quickens.
Sound is often the first storyteller in horror. Long before we see what’s coming, we hear it. And that’s exactly why sound design is one of the most powerful tools in cinematic fear.
As Halloween approaches, we’re looking at why scary sounds work on us, how horror audio has evolved over the decades, and how Dehumaniser 2 gives today’s creators the same terrifying power once reserved for big studios.

Why Sound Scares Us More Than Sight

Our brains are wired to respond to certain sounds; sudden volume shifts, distorted human tones, sub-bass vibrations. These frequencies trigger primal instincts tied to survival: danger, threat, the unknown.

Classic monster movies relied on this psychology long before sophisticated software existed. Filmmakers would pitch-shift growls from lions or tigers, layer them with distorted human screams, and loop them until the sound became something unrecognisable, and something that felt alive.

That uncanny, half-human quality is key to why certain sounds are terrifying. When something almost sounds human, but not quite, our brains panic. And this is where Dehumaniser 2 comes in.

From Tape to Tech: The Evolution of Horror Sound

In the early days, creating monster voices was a time-consuming art. Designers cut tape, slowed reels, and layered multiple recordings manually. As digital tools emerged, the process became faster but still relied on complex plugin chains.

Then came Dehumaniser 2, a breakthrough in real-time creature and vocal processing.

Built by sound designers for sound designers, Dehumaniser 2 offers an intuitive, modular workflow that lets you transform any voice into something otherworldly in real time. Whether you’re making a cinematic demon, alien overlord, or supernatural whisper, the results are instant, believable, and deeply unsettling.

Inside the Monster Machine: How Dehumaniser 2 Works

Dehumaniser 2’s power lies in its modular, node-based design. Instead of stacking endless effects, you connect modules like puzzle pieces, each shaping the voice in unique ways.

• Pitch Shifter: Create low, booming giants or deep demonic tones.

• Granular Synthesis: Add dense or gritty, fragmented textures.

• Scrubbing Convolution: Blend live vocals with animal growls or ambient textures to make them feel organic.

• Vocoder: Metallic resonance for robotic or spectral voices.

• Spectral Shifting: Generate eerie, shimmering harmonics for ghostly presence.

You can trigger real animal recordings – tiger, leopard, pig, and more – by amplitude or pitch, creating layered vocal hybrids that feel alive.

Every adjustment happens in real time, meaning performers can act their creatures live. What once took hours of layering and rendering now takes minutes.

When Humans Become Monsters

The most frightening creature sounds often begin with something deeply human. Take a whisper, a scream, or a breath, then distort, layer, and stretch it until it sits somewhere between familiar and alien.

That’s exactly what Dehumaniser 2 does best. Start with a simple vocal. Drop in an “Angry Beast” or “Spectral Demon” preset. Add pitch-shifting and convolution layers, and suddenly your voice carries the weight of something unholy.

You’re not editing fear. You’re performing it.

Dehumaniser 2 in the Wild

The power of Dehumaniser 2 has already shaped some of the biggest universes in film, TV, and games – from Avengers: Age of Ultron and The Jungle Book, to Far Cry 4, The Conjuring, and Stranger Things.

When sound teams need something fast, flexible, and believable, they turn to Krotos. What used to take 20 layers of samples and hours and hours of work can now be done live in a single voice pass.

Create Your Own Horror Tonight

Here’s a quick Halloween experiment you can try in your home studio or DAW:

Record your voice saying something simple, e.g., “Help me,” or “Don’t go.”

Load it into Dehumaniser 2.

Choose the Demon preset from the ‘Dialogue’ section of the preset list.

Drop the pitch two octaves with a pitch shifter, and add a tiger growl using Scrubbing Convolution.

Boost the “Stereo Spread” control on the Output node to subtly expand the sound.

Blend with a layer of forest ambience with Krotos Studio for atmosphere – if you’ve not used it, grab our free 10 day trial right now.

Press play.

Now you’ve got a fully cinematic, spine-chilling sound in minutes, ready for a short film, game, or Halloween post.

The Future of Fear

As AI and real-time audio evolve, horror sound design will only grow more immersive. We’ll see dynamic creature voices that respond to player movement, and vocal morphing that adapts live in film or VR.

But even with all that innovation, the essence stays the same: we’re still playing with what the human ear almost recognises. That’s why Dehumaniser 2 is so powerful – it bridges human and inhuman in one tool.

Krotos continues to lead that frontier, helping creators turn sound into storytelling.

In horror, silence may build tension, but sound delivers the fear. From 1930s monsters to modern AI-powered creatures, the tools have changed, but the goal remains the same: to make us believe in the things we can’t see.

This Halloween, explore that line yourself. Twist your voice. Break the silence.

Start your free 10-day trial of Dehumaniser 2 and bring your monsters to life.

The post Why Scary Sounds Scare Us: Horror Audio Through the Ages appeared first on Krotos.

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As the world gets ready for Stranger Things season five, we explore the sound design of the iconic Netflix series

The fifth and final season of Stranger Things will be released on Netflix in three parts: two volumes on November 26 and December 25, 2025, and the finale on December 31, 2025.

With build up to the the show being one of the most anticipated Netflix releases of the year, what better time to look back at it’s retro-nostalgic, yet modern and cinematic, sound design.

Drawing from our interviews with Angelo Palazzo, who worked on Stranger Things 3, we unpack the magic behind these iconic sound effects, and offer some exclusive tips for you to know when making your own iconic sci fi sound effects.

What makes Stranger Things sound design so distinctive?

From the start, Stranger Things has stood out not just for its visual homage to the 1980s, but for a soundscape that blends retro sonic textures with horror/fantasy tension. As seasons progressed, the show pushed harder into immersive creature design, atmospheric ambiences, and visceral audio moments.

By Season 3, the Stranger Things team decided early on that we weren’t going to use any of the SFX or backgrounds from the first two seasons and instead built Season 3 entirely from the ground up.

Moreover, for Season 4 the sound-design crew intentionally went “more aggressive, more greedy, abrasive, and disturbing” to match the darker tone of the story. The result: a show that sounds cinematic, expansive, and uniquely its own.

How the Stranger Things sound was crafted

One of the reasons Stranger Things’ sound design is so memorable is the team’s inventive use of everyday materials, creatively processed to build its eerie atmosphere.

For the creature vocals, like those heard from the Demogorgon and other monsters— Dehumaniser and Reformer Pro come in handy for transform human voices into otherworldly textures:

With Dehumaniser, I can process my voice and get much closer to a final result.”

To capture the unsettling movements of Vecna, season four’s sinewy nightmare of a villain, the team recorded fibrous vegetables including carrots, celery, and cabbages to create a “wet, slimy” sense of twisting vines and tendons.

Palazzo noted that he prefers to “start with the most organic sounds” before tweaking, pitching, and layering them into something unrecognisable. Even household items found their place in the Upside Down: sliding closet doors, squeaky hinges, bending wood, and scraping cardboard were all reimagined into aggressive, creature-like sounds.

The result proves that true sonic creativity begins with the familiar—then stretches, distorts, and layers it into something entirely new.

“Reformer Pro is my go-to-tool for quickly creating new fx layers … Dehumaniser allows me to create very usable tracks that will typically end up in my final build.”

Seven Tips for crafting your own Stranger Things soundscape

Capture real-world source material
Don’t rely on sound effect libraries alone! Record the world around you for uniqueness and authenticity.

Build a custom library
Once you have recordings, organise them. Label them. Think of them as your palette. Angelo Palazzo spent a whole day recording sounds to build libraries in Reformer Pro

Use tools that support creative morphing and processing
Software like Dehumaniser and Reformer let you turn source material into something unrecognisable yet grounded.

Layer intensively
Many memorable sounds are the result of combining multiple layers — organic + synthetic, near + far, high frequency + low rumble.

Embrace silence and contrast
One of the most effective tools in the Stranger Things toolbox was strategic silence: dropping sound to lull the viewer and then zooming in with an unexpected sonic punch.

Consider the storytelling role of sound
Sound doesn’t just accompany the visuals; it amplifies the world, the emotion, the tension. In the series, sound supports transitions, character beats, reveals.

Workflow discipline
Palazzo describes a production-level workflow: editorial timelines, sound design phases, mix-prep. If you’re doing your own projects, try to replicate stages: source → design → editorial → final mix.

Want to experiment with cinematic sound?

Explore Dehumaniser 2, our creature-design tool used in Stranger Things, and many more Iconic projects.

Buy Now

Dehumaniser 2

Dehumaniser 2 is a powerful vocal processing tool perfect for a range of vocal effects, from monsters to robots and... €391.51

The post How Stranger Things Creates Its Iconic Sound Design (and How You Can Too) appeared first on Krotos.

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