musical sound effect
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — A Shot in the Dark
bimbim14 — 14 years ago(August 21, 2011 12:53 AM)
in the scenes where dreyfus is stalking clouseau with murderous intent, there is a discordant background bass sound consisting of low E/Eb tones beating together- anybody out there know what musical instrument produced these tones?
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warren_houghton — 13 years ago(June 27, 2012 01:22 PM)
Wow, I just noticed how old this question is. Well, I remembered the effect you are talking about after watching the movie again, and while I'm not an expert in electronic music I think I can answer this with some degree of confidence.
First, I assume we can agree that it's not an acoustical instrument, i.e. not winds, percussion, strings, etc. It seems pretty definitely electronically produced. All I can really say is it's a "synthesizer." At first I assumed that 1964 was too early to be what people typically consider "a synthesizer" and Robert Moog debuted his first version in 1967, but then I realized all he really did was use solid state components instead of vacuum tubes to make various types of electronic sounds. I remember playing around with the electronic organ in our church when I was growing up, say around 1970, but it was probably built at least 10 years before that. All it was, effectively, was a vacuum tube based "synthesizer" that was designed to reproduce fairly "normal" kinds of organ-y sounds. Not being a keyboardist of any sort, I can't tell you exactly what "stop" (the switch(es) one uses to control the sound of an organ) produced the sound you're referring to, all I know is it sounds a lot like when I used to play around with the pedal keyboard. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I remember stops labeled "Tuba" - that's sure where I'd start if I was trying to reproduce this sound.
What it comes down to sounds a bit wishy-washy I suppose. Only the sound effect or music people that worked on the movie could tell you exactly what was used to produce that sound, since it's just a matter of an electronic circuit made in the prehistoric stone-knives-and-bearskins era of electronic music, but the easiest way would probably be to use a good quality electronic organ of the period and play around with the stops until you found a tone that suited you.
I don't have perfect pitch, but the interval of the two notes certainly is a minor second, so I'm sure since you wrote E/Eb you know what you're talking about. Meaning this whole post may well tell you nothing you didn't already know. As well as being far too late to be of any interest. On second thought, why did I waste anyone's time reading this? But I doubt there's any way for anyone to tell by listening, "Oh, that's a Wurlitzer model." or anything like that. -
bimbim14 — 13 years ago(June 27, 2012 02:37 PM)
hiya Warren
- i at first thought it might be the lowest notes on an accordion [perhaps slowed down on the tape to get that bass register]- and at first i dismissed the thought that it was the bass pedals of a home organ because almost all of 'em had a multi-note lock-out so the player wouldn't accidently make a similar discordant sound if he or she misplanted a foot [IOW you can only play one bass pedal note at a time with almost all home organs].i have a gulbransen home organ and it also doesn't let me play bass chords down on the pedals, so i played a low E and tried to mentally extrapolate what it would sound like if i was beating that together with the low Eb, and what my mind "heard" didn't sound quite the same as what i heard in the movie. so i just don't know. but i appreciate your answer just the same. -
warren_houghton — 13 years ago(June 28, 2012 11:01 AM)
How silly of me to have not considered the possibility of an acoustical instrument slowed down? (Where does the accordion fall in my winds/percussion/strings spectrum? I guess winds) Especially since they obviously had an accordion around with a nice full bass register. The sound had a kind of harsh, brassy, blatty-ness to it that I don't see developing by slowing down the reed sound of the accordion, so I still would go with fully electronic. I don't remember not being allowed to play two notes simultaneously on the pedal keys, but it would be an understandable design so it's probably just my faulty memory. Anyway, they could just use your tape idea to record and playback an Eb then play an E on top of it. Fun to speculate anyway.