Jewel Dirks

The melody is taken from just a segment of the winnow.  I had difficulty making a loop without a connecting click sound, so I ended up using just short, hesitant little notes.  These were modulated by a tiny bit of LFO, giving it a bit of a vibrato, or warble, when I pressed down on the key (using the Rise keyboard).  It was so tricky to play, however, that I was reminded of trying to throw a pot on the wheel with very wet porcelain clay….  

The bubbly stuff was a result of playing a variety of improvised notes somewhat within my chord scheme, then quantizing it all, resulting in occasional overlapping notes.  Then I sped that all up from the original 120 to 170.  This was taken from the winnowing and processed through the Equator2, with the winnowed tones doubled quietly an octave down.

The clickie sounds that coordinate with the bubbly background are created from a tiny bit of white noise with a cutoff filter going up and down the spectrum, controlled by a random setting in a fast LFO.  These are set to trigger with the bubbly notes, so they happen precisely together.  I then simply muted and unmuted their volume to have them come in when I needed that filler.

The louder, little chirpie, twangie parts are actually the same sounds as the woodpecker like sounds in “The Long Chandelle”--the winnow modulated by a fast sawtooth wave.  In that piece I controlled it by slowly sliding my finger up the key on the Rise keyboard, but in this piece I just rapidly flicked it up on very high notes.  

It ends with the original winnowing sound, (used throughout “The Long Chandelle”) with the Comet reverb.  This time I panned it rapidly from one side to the other to give the feeling of space I get when I actually hear the winnowing in the sky as the bird swoops across the sky.