WIP Wednesday #2 - Designing a lighthouse for your ear (and a .wav gift!)

Jacob Wolf Lefton

17 Dec 2025 — 2 min read

a DAW

This week I want to share a fun little sound I made for Episode 13 of The Witches of Wederra Keep! In this episode there's a lighthouse, and I wanted to make a mysterious tone that would capture some of the sound of a rotating lighthouse lamp and a feeling that it was passing over you.

I found some base components - squeaky gates from Soundly and another set of Squeaks and Moans from a royalty free sound pack somewhere deep in the internet.

Screenshot of the DAW Reaper showing two audio tracks, one is long and one is short. The long one is called 'Doors, Gate, Wire...' and the short one is called 'Squeaks and Moan...' — The "before" pieces

Each one alone maybe had characteristics of what I wanted, but wasn't quite right. I started playing with fading in and out, spiking the volume and layering them in different places to get a kind of shifting tone that, to me, almost mimics a doppler effect. To enhance this, I later added a pan - a bit deeper on the trailing part of the sound. I normally let Julian who does mixing and mastering take care of the depth (in this case, how much right and left it is), but because it's such a repetitive element I wanted to do a first pass on it.

screenshot of the DAW Reaper showing the two audio tracks, volume fading in and spiking and then trailing off, the longer sound is trimmed slightly, and the shorter sound comes in at the halfway part, and is also trimmed. — the "after" version

I know it's a lot of work for a simple background effect, but I think this attention to detail helps me achieve my vision of what this show can be and how I can help paint an audio picture for an audience. I like to think it's this intention and effort that earned me a Best Sound Design nomination from NJ Webfest this year!

Below, for paid subscribers, you can have a .wav of the sound itself for your own use, and a preview clip of how it sounds in an unmastered work in progress of The Witches of Wederra Keep Episode 13 😊

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