'It stands out prominently as a spooky sound, if you didn’t know what it was you might not guess it as a banjo, but that’s what it is.' I thought, 'That's it! That’s the 'Walking Dead' zombie banjo sound!''

'Steve thought about it for a minute and he starts playing this thing on the banjo that was the scariest thing I’d ever heard. 'You’re not sentient anymore, but your muscles still remember those banjo licks, what would that sound like?' McCreary asked his partner. The composer said that what finally clicked and made the music work was asking composing partner Steve Bartek to imagine himself as a banjo-playing bluegrass musician who gets bitten in a zombie apocalypse. 'Of course, when you think of a banjo, you don’t think scary in the traditional sense, you think scary in the comedic sense - but I knew there was a way to make this work.'Īnd what it came down to was a matter of tuning, according to McCreary. 'We were trying to figure out 'What does this sound like?'' he continued.

'One of my favorite sounds we’ve discovered is the electric banjo.' 'One of the things you can listen for is that I tend to use the strings with the humans and the bluegrass instruments with the zombies,' said McCreary.

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