that sound

The BrutePest stand is assembled, and I’m pretty happy with it.

The XL stand legs aren’t a triangle but have an open side, which in the steep orientation like this, is on the bottom. That rack box is shallow and there’s very little margin for error — I don’t want the stand to slip off the front or back, so I’ll be looking for or cutting a shelf to extend the depth a little more for safety. But the stand itself is stable and sturdy, so that’s good.

Still waiting on an Oversynth overlay for the West Pest to cover up the cartoony graphics and make it a little more readable.

It didn’t occur to me until last night that this modular subsystem is all analog in its audio path (and most of the modulation, but not the sequencing). Certainly both the West Pest and the Minibrute 2 have a kind of common character — I hate to say “analog warmth” or the dreaded “phat” but there’s a kind of loose squishiness, roundness, something to it. I love my digital stuff of course, but this is a flavor that is also called for at times.


In the 90s, there was this “whoosh” sound effect I heard in all sorts of places. It was in the boss level of some shooter but I wasn’t sure exactly which (I was thinking Doom or Half-Life); it was a weapon sound in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and a few times in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and elsewhere. It was almost like the Wilhelm Scream, where I’d laugh when I recognized it but nobody else ever seemed to.

Well, finally I found it. DSBOSPIT.wav from Doom, the “spawn cube” sound for the final boss. Aka “Fire, Ball – Impact And Large Fire Burst, Rumble” from the Sound Ideas Series 6000 collection.

One source says the sound was originally created for Disney’s The Black Cauldron (1985), and another says it was for Twice Upon A Time (1983). But it just happened to reach peak overuse in the mid to late 90s.

This is one of those things that’s been driving me crazy for years, just like the thing with the Laser Attack board game that was a mystery for so long.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Discover more from STARTHIEF

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading