Woodstock Chimes of Mars on Firebeacon Hill, near Boscastle

Up here in this exhilarating location the shrill high tones of the Woodstock Chimes of Mars, in a very light breeze, make striking, imposing and indeed monolithic pronouncements, against a backdrop of sea sound way down below, with some distant seabirds (mostly on / around Short Island). Somehow, in this particular hilltop context it chimes in (sic) beautifully with the surroundings. The lightness of the breeze means relatively few notes sounding, sparing the ears from too much of this shrill sound. It gives me the feeling that it deserves a bell-tower to pronounce from — sadly I haven't funds for one of those!

I recorded this on 25 June 2013 on the branch of Firebeacon Hill just to south-west of the branch of the same hill, better known for its natural arch, the Ladies' Window, near Boscastle, Cornwall, UK. It was the only chimes recording I kept from this day's series of recordings.

I was thinking of having the recorder in about the same position as in the second photo below, but that was too sheltered from the very gentle westerly breeze, so I had to take it just a little up the remainder of the gentle slope to the actual hilltop to get sufficient wind to move the tubes sufficiently. Also, I wanted to reduce the sea sound a bit, and so had the recorder facing up the remainder of the hill slope so that the sea was behind the recorder. However, at that point I'd run into a problem. Because of the unevenness of the ground there, although I could set up the recorder okay (on a Zipshot tripod, the length of whose legs is non-adjustable), I couldn't find sufficiently even / level ground for the chimes as well. What was I to do?

Not seriously expecting it to work out, I decided to try hanging the chime from the very tripod the recorder was sitting on. Surely this wouldn't work well, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say! — I have to say, I'm most pleased and impressed by the result here.

Advisory

Because of the processing to widen and sharpen the originally atrocious stereo imaging, the sea may sound rather phasey when listened to from certain speaker systems. Therefore high-grade headphones are the best solution.

Later photo (29 August 2021), showing recorder location (arrow point) on the more south-westerly spur of Firebeacon Hill, from by the Ladies' Window (mid-foreground).

Later photo (1 July 2013) of recording of two chimes being made from almost the same spot as this recording. The difference is that for this recording the recorder was just behind the camera position for this photo, and it was facing completely the other way — that is, away from what you see here, up the tiny remainder of gentle slope before the actual hilltop. See text further above for the reason for that.

Techie stuff

The recorder was Sony PCM-M10, with Røde DeadKitten furry windshield (original, more effective, version). It was set up on a full-size Zipshot tripod, with the chimes hanging from the very same tripod, as explained further above.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield — and then more recently stereo widening / sharpening-up using the VST plugin A1 Stereo Control (160% widening).

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