Outlandish wind chimes trio! — Pluto, Debussy Bells, bamboo

Outlandishly other-worldly — and sure to be detested by some!

An outlandish trio, recorded on 2 March 2017 at my usual wind chimes recording spot, by Hunting Gate, at the highest point on the Hunter's Path, high up on the north side of the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK — as always, with a backdrop of the quiet rushing sound of the River Teign far below in the bottom of the valley. What I'm presenting here is part of a 1h 33' recording.

The combination of a minor scale incorporating a minor major seventh chord (Pluto) and the whole-tone scale with the odd additional (dissonant) notes (Debussy Bells) brings a surprise, because out of all the tonal and harmonic conflicts we can hear most of the time a clear major chord, which has almost the persistence of a bagpipes' drone — though in this context that major chord has quite a tough and steely-severe feel to it. — Weird, utterly weird and wonderful!

Chimes used:

1. Davis Blanchard Pluto (left)

2. Davis Blanchard Debussy Bells (right)

3. Bamboo chimes — cheap ones bought from a local store. These are a large and a small set, which I always used together as though they were one instrument.

This is one of the many fruits of my Wind Chimes in the Wild project. Perhaps perversely, I'm uploading my recordings in reverse chronological order — most recent first —, so the most 'advanced' sounds are tending to come earlier rather than later.

Detailed information about the Davis Blanchard chimes

Birds don't figure strongly in this particular day's recordings.

Recording two Davis Blanchard chimes plus a large and small set of cheap bamboo chimes in an earlier session at the same spot (no photos for this session). The arrow points to the recorder, with its black furry windshield.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested furry windshields — the inner being a Movo one of rectangular box shape*, and the outer a custom Windcut one —, and it was placed on a mini Zipshot tripod.

* Note that I WARN AGAINST use of windshields that are of any sort of box shape, for I soon found that they were inherently unsuitable for any decent-quality recording. While no doubt non-box-shaped windshields from Movo would be okay, the presence of relatively flat surfaces, edges and corners creates internal narrow resonance peaks in the treble, which give the latter an abrasive and rather 'screamy' quality, no matter who's made the particular windshields.  When I realized why my recordings had developed that nasty treble quality I had to go back through all recordings made with that dratted box-shaped windshield, and use Voxengo CurveEQ to enable me to precisely neutralize two narrow treble peaks and thus enable the recordings to sound wonderfully natural rather than bafflingly stressful.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields and correction for the D100's weakness in very low bass — and then, later on, the aforementioned remedial EQ measure using Voxengo CurveEQ to remove the two narrow treble peaks kindly added by that rogue model of furry windshield.

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!