Transformed wind chimes: Nature-Symphony 18

Nature-Symphony 18 (Legend of the night and the day in the deep forest) — Make of this what you will! — Here for the first time with a separately recorded and processed bamboo chime, we have a powerful and potentially dominating force to challenge the penetrating sound of the Gypsy chimes.

The original field recording for the metal chimes is https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/689806/ .

Chimes used:

Layer 1 (metal chimes)

1. Woodstock Chimes of Olympos (tuned to an ancient Greek scale)

2. Music of the Spheres Gypsy Chimes (Soprano and Mezzo) (tuned to different modes on an Eastern European Gypsy scale)

3. Woodstock Chimes of Polaris (high-pitched, pentatonic)

4. Woodstock Chimes of Mercury (very high-pitched, pentatonic)

5. Woodstock Chime of Mars (very high-pitched, on a scale I haven't identified)

Layers 2-4: solo bamboo chime, large (50cm longest tube), with some lateral spatial separation, and with increasingly distant perspective from layers 2 to 4.

I made the original metal chimes recording for Layer 1 on 15 April 2014 at my regular spot for chimes recording: in the bit of stunted open copse extending down the steep and rough valley slope from the Hunter's Path high up on the north side of the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK — just by (and below) Hunting Gate at the highest point on that path. I made the field recording for the bamboo chime on 15 November 2023 a little above the Hunter's Path just inside the top of the valley woods on Piddledown (Yes, I know, but that is the official name for that area of the hilltop!), with rather unfavourable wind conditions.

Recently I'd queued Layer 1 of this work for addition of a contrasting element — most likely bamboo chimes —, once the weather had allowed me some respites to go out to the Teign Gorge to record the new bamboo chimes I'd purchased for this purpose. Then on 15 November 2023 at last I got a dry day, and with notionally sufficient breeze, but not coming from the most suitable direction for where I wanted to record. In the event, at the spot on Piddledown, where I most wanted to record because of its usually lower background sound than other inviting recording spots, there was almost complete shelter there. So I had to move on, and did get some recordings a bit further along the Hunter's Path, which could be used for some things but would have too much background sound to be used in many of my intended mixes.

As the wind had picked up encouragingly by midday I returned to Piddledown to take a chance on it there. Frustratingly the wind remained just north of west (it needed to be anything from NW to NE to serve me well there, coming straight over the hilltop). So, although some gusts did come this way they were primarily in the treetops, and anywhere near ground level they were more like those off-putting limp handshakes that some people give. I discarded two of the three recordings I made at that spot, and even this one I had half-a-mind to discard too. However, it was longer than the others, at 44 minutes, and by cutting out the most quiescent sections I salvaged just over 18 minutes, still most of which was 'idling', with the striker alternately hitting just two of the six tubes, so there was just this quiet 'kee-ko-kee-ko' alternation sounding the interval of a fourth.

Before finally choosing whether to keep or discard it, I took a copy of it and reduced it to half-speed and gave it the back-of-cathedral acoustic that I'd used in most of my Nature-Symphonies so far. — Yes, that definitely sounded dramatically different and more meaningful, even purposeful! Next, then, I added that as a second layer to the most recently queued incipient Nature-Symphony that was awaiting a contrasting element. When I played that, initially I was dismayed! I was so habituated to bamboo chimes responding to the wind in sync with the metal chimes, as they did in all my recordings so far of metal plus bamboo chimes. I really thought then that this whole notion about using separately recorded bamboo chimes was a failure, and that I'd drop that whole idea forthwith.

The following day I got thinking that surely all I needed to do was to create multiple layers of that pretty deficient recording, and so it proved to be. — I really love the way it's worked out. Also, for once I had the opportunity to end on a dramatic exclamation mark (with just a little die-down before final fade-out). That was one of my quite rare 'cheating' moments, where I took a copy of Layer 2's dramatic opening and added that to the end of that track, where it fitted in a pleasingly musical manner.

Advisory
To get the best out of this, listen with high-grade headphones.

The original metal chimes recording taking place. The chime on the left is the Olympos, and the Gypsy chimes are the more distant ones with black tubes. They're more distant to balance their penetrating tone with the more delicate tone of the Woodstock chimes.

Techie stuff:

The recorder for the metal chimes (Layer 1) was Sony PCM-M10 with Røde DeadKitten furry windshield (the original, more effective, light grey version); it was on a Zipshot Mini tripod.

Recorder for the bamboo chime recording (Layers 2–4) was Sony PCM-D100 with two nested custom Windcut furry windshields, on an Aoka carbon-fibre mini tripod. Its mics were set at narrow angle (90°) for subsequent widening to give a zoomed-in effect, and for the first time ever I was recording at 96kHz sampling rate, to slightly improve quality of the sound in slowed-down versions of the recording.

Basic post-recording processing of the chimes recording was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield, with eventual stereo widening using the VST plugin A1 Stereo Control (160% widening for the M10 recording; 135% for the D100 recording).

To create this Nature-Symphony I processed the layers as follows:

All layers: 'extreme wind-cut' custom preset in TDR Nova GE VST plugin, and 6dB background noise reduction in Audacity; further 'extreme wind-cut' in TDR Nova after the acoustics had been applied.

Layer 1: reduced to half-speed and thus an octave lower — acoustic: back of cathedral

Layer 2: reduced to speed to reduce its pitch by an octave plus a fifth — acoustic: moderately back-of-cathedral

Layers 3 and 4: processed to same speed / pitch as Layer 2, but then lowered by another fifth without further speed change — acoustic: L3 relatively close in cathedral; L4 moderately back-of-cathedral

Layers 2 and 3 panned respectively 20% right and left.

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