The story
When I first heard the so called Koshi Wind Chimes, I immediately fell in love with the sound. On the one hand there’s the brilliant short attack from this little glasdisc on a string, which triggers the metal rods inside a bamboo cylinder moved by the wind. On the other hand there’s this following hovering warm tone.
There are eight rods which are tuned to a special scale or chord. So it doesn’t matter, which rods are triggered by the wind. It always sounds wonderful. For instance, my version of the windchimes is tuned a – d – f – g – a – d – f – a. So it’s basically a d-minor chord but with an added g in the middle. The Bamboo Chimes Piano is of course chromatic. So you can play whatever you want.
To trigger the rods in order to record them I was unfortunately unable to use the original glasdisk inside the cylinder. It is not really possible to move the string so that the glas beats only that rod you want. So instead I took a drinking straw made out of glas. I found, it sounds very similar.
The notes I recorded with a Rode Nt1a directly into my Focusrite Scarlett interface. I made five recordings of each note to get a round robin mode at the end. Additionally I panned each layer (group) slightly different to left and right. Only a little bit. I think it gives the instrument a more natural sound and openness.
Furthermore I gave the instrument some possibilities to change its character with the following features:
Chimes: This is simply the volume of the triggered rods
Beginning: This changes the attacktime from short or direct to smooth
Ending: This changes the releasetime
With Cave you can add some reverb to the sound
Wind adds clean reverse played notes
Rain: Here you can add reverse played notes manipulated by a slightly overdriven, fluttering tape-simulation, which gives the sound much more liveliness and first of all more texture .
By the way: The Chimes-knob doesn’t affect the Wind- and Rain-Level. So you can play only reverse-notes if you want, turning the Chimes-knob fully to the left.
Last but not least there’s a knob called Cloudy-Sunny: This is simply a lowpassfilter. Fully clockwise you can hear the direct and bright original sound. Counterclockwise the sound get’s darker, muddier just cloudy.
That’s it for my first instrument. Maybe you will enjoy it and have some fun.
Thank you
Wiesental
Bamboo Chimes Piano
Interface
Reviews for Bamboo Chimes Piano
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Please sample all the Koshi Wind Chimes <3
Realy fantastic to find your work Wiesental. I was hoping and almost mailing Spitfire Audio to sample all these Koshi Wind Chimes, would love to have them all ;-) How you did it sounds really good <3
Perfect
amazing sound with great bass..................................................................................................
Unexpected goodness!
At first I was expecting a much simpler instrument, but this is a fully fledged inspiration machine, with an amazing sound and some fantastic features, too!
The initial sound you get once you run the patch is a very warm and resonant mallet-like sound, similar to a kalimba and to a music-box. The "piano" plays very well, with very nice sampling quality and a fully fledged range.
The fun begins once you start exploring the fun-named settings offered in the moody GUI. The Beginning and Ending knobs act as Attack and Release respectively, and the Cave one is basically a lovely Reverb that really gives you the impression of everything happening in a dark cave. Wind and Rain introduce a reversed version of the notes, with the latter being more processed and textured. Finally, there is the Cloudy-Sunny setting that acts basically like a filter to everything, which I personally found pretty smart!
As a minor detail, the higher you go on the range, the more likely you will start hearing some white noise, which can be treated with some NR software. You might also find some sub-frequencies here and there which might mess with your mix, so check everything with an EQ just to be sure.
Nevertheless, this is a fantastic instrument offered compeltely for free, and it is kind of unbelievable that this is a first-try result!
Musicbox 2.0
This bamboo-chimes piano really sounds like a musicbox... and I love musicboxes! This is basically a musicbox with different fx which just sound really nice, I especially like the rain knob, sounds really cool in my opinion! The "Cave" reverb could be a bit better, maybe a bit deeper reverb, but except that really well done!
