Jewel Dirks

The goats are much more aggressive than sheep, and so Nook was always leery around them.  As a youngster, as in this photo, he didn't mind a good bit of play.  But my later, more dominant, aggressive goats wouldn’t put up with him being too near, and would chase him away or bash into him mercilessly.  In his prime, Nook weighed 355 pounds, which was about 125 pounds more than the largest goat, but not having horns coupled with his docile personality put him down at the bottom of the order.  Regardless, he loved going on the walks with us, but always maintaining his distance in the rear.  One particularly wintry day as we started out, we cut across the yard and over a snow drift.   Nook’s legs post-holed in it and he sank down and got high centered.  He couldn’t move backwards nor forwards.  It was a trick to run back and help him out without the other goats realizing he was stuck and vulnerable.  

The sound of Nook's call is processed through the program Phase Plant.  Obviously, I used the arpeggiator.  I tried to sharpen the bass punches through Steinberg’s Envelope Shaper.  The opening and closing “mmwwwaaaaahhhhhhh” comes from a neat Soundtoys effect, which allowed me to open the filter (low to high) and volume with an abrupt gate, then enhanced with reverb.  

The higher, frenetic sharp sounds were given space by using Steinberg’s Imager, which allowed me to split the frequencies and have some move to the left and others move to the right.  Strangely, the LUFTS volume on this is way down to 10.5, which is much “louder” than the other pieces in the set, but it doesn’t sound loud–I think because it is so dense and muddy, particularly with all the bass.