River Teign with wind chimes - Pluto - excerpt

On 18th February 2013, past midday I had to retreat from my recording session on Hunter's Tor at the west end of the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK, because I was getting too cold in the brisk south-easterly wind. So I came down to the valley bottom and searched for a suitable place to hang some chimes by the River Teign, beside the Fisherman's Path.

In the event there was too little wind there - only the odd usable gust here and there - and as a last resort I went upstream to just outside the woods of the Teign Gorge, into the beginning of the open fields that lead to the road at Dogmarsh Bridge. Initially the wind was moving the tree branches quite nicely here, but I think Sod's Law was operating, for as soon as I got my first recording started, the wind eased off, and then it came generally only in the odd gentle breaths, with only a rare really useful gust, and those gusts indeed petered out altogether during the second of the three recordings I made here.

However, all was by no means lost, as this was a nice bit of serendipity. I'd wanted one thing and simply got another. It was logistically impossible for me to get the recorder and chimes in the right relative positions for the sort of recording I was after, and so the water sound is louder than I was really intending, and drowns out the quieter tones from the chimes, and also drowns out all but the closest bird sounds. This is the first in the series of three recordings made here, and it has the most chimes sound, though virtually no noticeable bird sound.

However, all three recordings make a very nice set of a gently turbulent river sound, with little bits of chimes sound and bird sounds (the latter in the other two recordings). I guess that people who are looking for sounds with which to go to sleep would really like these three recordings and prefer them to the 'friskier' type of wind chimes recording that I actually aim to produce.

My recording studio for this set of recordings, by the River Teign just entering the Teign Gorge. The recorder was actually rather closer to the chimes than it looks in this photo. The chimes are the Gypsy Mezzo and Soprano (black tubes) and the Pluto chimes (silvery tubes, here looking brassy because of the colours they are reflecting).

The chimes in this recording are the Woodstock Chimes of Pluto, tuned to a radiant and 'happy' sounding pentatonic scale.

This is a 5-minute excerpt from the 9+ minutes full recording.

Recording made with a Sony PCM-M10 on a Velbon mini-tripod, using the built-in microphones covered with a Rode Dead Kitten windshield. I have used Audacity to apply a custom EQ profile to correct for the high frequency muffling caused by the windshield.

Please note that only very good speakers / headphones with a very extended and flat frequency response will do this recording real justice. Please also note that the volume level of this recording has been carefully adjusted for listening purposes, and ALL my recordings so far are meant to be listened to with a volume setting that would give a realistic level for playback of CLASSICAL music (a large but not exceptional symphony orchestra). If you have the right volume setting, you should not need to change that setting from one recording of mine to another.

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