Jewel Dirks

Goats are large animals to bury.  I fortunately have a neighbor who owns a backhoe, and so now several of my friends are buried in the rocky hills where I take the goats to play and get in shape for our mountain trips.

The drum sounds are all developed from the tree sounds that my friend Mark sent me that I used in “The Trees Sing for Mark.”  This time I constructed them in the Equator2 program so I could easily control the sounds on the Seaboard Rise keyboard.  I then added Eventide’s Mangleverb, which adds a nice soft distortion, set at ½ triplet delay for the “breathing” rhythm.  Finally, the ocarina sound brings in the bird instrument again from “The Evening Visitor,” now with Eventide’s Blackhole reverb, set also to ½ triplet.  It was during this piece that the Rise keyboard began to develop severe gain problems internally, and I had to deal with note-on sticking issues throughout.  Interestingly, the stuck note created a neat little trill at one point, so I added that a couple more times.