SO! I have a box of bells, actually 2, the first box has 40 bells, the second one has… about 60 (maybe less) they were loaned to me to record and do whatever with them and then we gotta give back as they seem to be fancy and will be sold
i need help on what to do with them
here’s the details.
final bell count: aprox 100
useable bell count: currently 56, might be less
the gold sets have repeated bells but they sound different in pitch
the random assortment had a bunch of useless ones that just sounded like random metal so they were discarded.
box #1 is an assortment of random bells with no apparent relation to each other, no discernible pitch on plenty of these and a toooon of overtones all over the place.
box #2 are all gold bells of all range of sizes all carved to look like maidens in big fluffy dresses, so far i cant find any pitch to them although the size of each does make a slight difference they are obviously not musical bells so no scale to be found.
what can i do with this? - its obviously gonna be turned into an instrument but… how to approach it? what kind of nonsense can i get out of this?
frequency range there’s nothing below 1k, and most of the rest live in the range of 2khz to 14khz
Hi Jay, maybe look back at Christian’s video and deconstruct some of those overtones and enter the rabbit hole! Some kind of bell harmonium on its way to Audio Inc/ Piano Book I guess!
How about an aleatoric bell library - long loops of unmeasured ringing and silence for each bell, with semi-randomised start points?
Maybe not terribly musical in itself, but could be a tool for inspiration. It would hopefully take effects well.
Possibly too much detail, but in DecentSampler, I think you could do this with multiple groups each playing the same sample from different start points, with a seqMode of either random or round_robin. I guess you’d need several groups to make it less obvious it was a single loop.
If this works, you could perhaps layer loops from multiple bells on a single key (or range of keys), maybe with some CC or velocity element to determine how many loops play?
That all sounds great, I don’t know about specific suggestions but if it was me maybe I’d just make sure they are all sampled to hell as much as possible with different mics and maybe spaces if you want, before you have to return them.
That way you can then sit back and take your time thinking what is to be done with them?
Also I’d take lots of pictures of some of the ornate details on them as that could look really lovely in a GUI.
Since bells fall under the category of Inharmonic Partials (as a piano would without conventional Stretch Tuning, as far as I understand), would you be able to capture that series as an optional effect? e.g., maybe for Sostenuto pedal?
For box 2:
Maybe each bell becomes its own virtual instrument but with range limited to 1 or 1.5 octave?
Regarding bells in general, I’ve started studying this only recently as an offshoot from music theory.
Key words for further searching:
Tintinnabulation (sometimes shortened to tintin)
Inharmonic Partials
Overtones of Bells
Inharmonic Series, which is incorrect terminology but tends to turn up a few things
Idiophones
If any of your bells happen to be designed as Carillon bells, there should be a distinct minor third in its overtone series.
Apologies for being two months late to this thread, but perhaps it might help others in future.
Please let us know when your library is up! I love all the ringing things. (I play cello and was pleasantly surprise while learning it that there is such rich ringing “under the ear” once you move beyond a student grade instrument.)
oh yeah i already returned them but got a good amount of interesting sounds from them, unfortunately they were not intended to be musical only decorative so sometimes a small bell sounds exactly the same as a larger one from the same set, in general they kinda sucked in that sense BUT there’s a lot of material to put something together i just dont have the time right now cause i got a project going on but yeah, will def share if the library comes out to be of any playability