Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Cheap, Halloween Entertainment

Here's the Halloween display that's outside of our house.




It's modest, but fun. I found the Disney characters at a thrift store, and the lights are from Target.

To add a little originality to our celebration, I went shopping at Goodwill. I already owned the old PC speakers, but can you find a pair for less than five bucks at most thrift stores. The portable JVC CD player was two dollars.


I picked up this Disney CD for 79 cents.


Last year I hid the speakers and the CD player behind the decorations and hit "repeat". It was a cheap and safe way to bump our display up a notch. You could hear the music as you approached our house, but it wasn't going to disturb the neighbors. I put a copy of the Disney CD in the player, so if a naughty kid trashed my stereo setup, I'd be mad, but I'd out less money than what the big bag of Mars candy costs.

This year I thought I'd personalize the recording with Audacity. According to their website, "Audacity® is free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds." I have used it for years to help me convert records, 8-tracks, and cassettes into mp3s. Since I'd already ripped the Disney CD into separate tracks last year, I thought it would be fun to make some vocal recordings to slip into the mix on a new CD. Here is a terribly uninformative video of how I did this.


This year trick-or-treaters will be "treated" with my bad imitations of the Crypt Keeper and Peter Lorre.


But if you don't want to go to all the trouble of making your own disc, the Dollar Store is full of sound effect CDs.

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