EDINBURGH, UK: The Crow Hill Company is proud to introduce its latest innovations in sampling with GONG PIANO — embracing entirely new concepts (including so-called Shepherd Mapping polyphony, as well as recording Partials), engine, GUI (Graphical User Interface), and an environment to work in that is firmly pegged and duly designed to deliver for music-makers wanting cinematic results in an instant as a drone-making, super-chromatic gong machine, to paraphrase the driving force behind its ear-opening creation — as of February 26…
As an undertaking that saw The Crow Hill Company co-founder and professional composer Christian Henson bravely binning his entire sound collection and starting from scratch, the road to GONG PIANO was a long and winding one — hilly, too, with many marches up and down the nearby Crow Hill (from which the Edinburgh-based enterprise takes its name), helping to clear heads and formulate concepts. Christian Henson admits, “A few months ago, I committed an act; I don’t know if it was in a fit of pique or a legitimate and sound artistic decision. That act was getting rid of all of my sounds — binning my sample libraries, my gun cabinet, my sonic arsenal, my toolkit, constructed, pillaged, rummaged for, and discovered over decades of working as a composer and as a samplist. And when considering starting from scratch, where to begin? Well, I guess at the beginning; the beginning that we’re so used to, whether it be in cinema, or TV, or computer games — that trope of the drone. And the drone I’ve built and am introducing is called GONG PIANO.”
Continues Christian Henson: “I’ve been focusing in on something that I never really have considered as a samplist — not just the room, not just the player and performance, not just the instrument, but also the material. The biggest intrigue for me has always been wanting a full and chromatic piano’s worth of a beguiling tone, but the problem with stretching things up and down is that you change the quality of the material — not just the pitch. So going back to the drawing board entirely meant thinking about sampling in a totally different way — particularly where creating the impossible is concerned: a piano where the strings have been replaced with gongs; the ability to create drones — things that go on forever and ever — out of finite objects like a percussion instrument. And I guess where this whole ORIGINS series is concerned — plumbing the depths of my history with technology to find inspiration that was there all along, I have to go back to my humble [Roland] D-5, a younger, shitter cousin of the D-50, where they used things called Partials — bits of sound. Basically, these things didn’t have the sampling power — didn’t have the technology or hardware — to be able to create something affordable that had fully sampled instruments, so, instead, they just sampled little bits and then added things like wavetables and stuff. And this is, I guess, where the story to this new approach to sampling begins — at this idea of Partials.”
Put it this way: in Roland parlance, Partials refer to the foundational, discrete sound-generating components within many of that Japanese giant’s synths, classic or otherwise, whereby each ‘tone’ (sound) can consist of up to four individual Partials, allowing for complex, layered, and evolving sound design. “When recording these gongs, I always had in mind that we were going to separate them off into Partials,” confesses Christian Henson, adding: “I did the first round of recordings in the house and then tried two different forms of post-production to create the Partials — one was using iZotope, whereby, once you’ve removed the fundamentals, it’s quite easy to see the harmonics and just leave the transients; however, there’s a kind of noise reduction-y, digital squarbly sound that is really apparent that I’m very sensitive to these days, so I decided to do the post-production process again on those same recordings, but this time by using strong or stacked band-passes, high-passes, low-passes, and, again, when putting that together, it just felt like when you freeze some vegetables — they never quite taste like fresh vegetables again. So what I decided to do was to go into a more controlled environment — that being Castlesound Studios, where I’ve got some of the best recordings I’ve ever had the pleasure of being part of making, with the decision to use a selection of beaters but also different positions within the gong and, instead of creating Partials from single recordings, using multiple recordings to basically combine these three Partials — three totally separate recordings — into the sound that we’ve created. Am I trying to make a realistic rendition of this gong? No. I’m just trying to create something that is suitable for us composers as a drone-making, super-chromatic gong machine, but something that still sounds realistic.”
It is worth, perhaps, pausing briefly here to point out that those same gongs have already made an outing — albeit in a somewhat simplified sampled-based virtual instrument plug-in form — on The Crow Hill Company’s free VAULTS – TUNED GONGS, relatively recently released as a downloadable drop with a difference, effectively enabling anyone to play an extraordinary quartet of harmonised gongs designed and used by meditation gurus as part of gong bath setups in a way that was never intended by their Italian creator after being bought and sampled by Christian Henson.
Embracing entirely new concepts warrants an entirely new GUI to operate the new engine driving GONG PIANO: “When you see a bunch of faders on our new GUI, it means something entirely different — three Partials: the FUNDAMENTALS, the HARMONICS, and the TRANSIENTS. The fundamental samples work just like your traditional Akai samplers; there’s a lot to be said for all that magic that happens when you pitch something down loads — and, indeed, pitch it up, but down is better. So there’s a lot of fundamental tone here; we’re hitting the gong in the part of it that produces the greatest, roundest, fattest fundamental. There’s enough interesting harmonic material in there to create real interest across the keyboard, with a very pure, sine wave-type tone down at the bottom, but with all sorts of movement and fluctuation. No surprises here, then; however, if we move to the next Partial, this is the part of the gong that creates the biggest amount of interesting harmonic information — less fundamental and more of the surrounding harmonics. Finally, the TRANSIENTS is the aspect of the gong that creates the least recognisable fundamentals or harmonics. Whilst these gongs resonate at different fundamental frequencies, they’re all made of the same thing — metal, and, no matter what happens to that central resonating frequency, the thing that you can never get away from is material — what they’re actually made of. So what I’ve decided to do with the TRANSIENTS is keep the pitch static — loads of dynamic layers, loads of round robins, so you don’t get a sense of things repeating themselves, but it always stays the same pitch. So what I decided to do was take the harmonic Partial, duplicate it an octave apart, and gradually adjust the mix of that octave unison across an octave so that — whilst it will move pitch with the fundamental across the entire spread of the keyboard — the fundamental harmonic qualities of the instrument won’t change. And what I’ve created is basically a chromatic shepherd tone. The variable Partial, the static Partial, and this kind of hinterland between give the gong its characteristic — the FUNDAMENTALS, the HARMONICS, and the TRANSIENTS. This is just one gong — one pitch centre — that we’ve managed to divide into these Partials, spread across a keyboard, and what I love about it is the tonal change in characteristics depending on the pitch — the change in kind of emotional effect, but, to my ears, it doesn’t just sound like a sample that’s been pitched up and down.”
Provided patches — including Ensembles, as well as Gong Drones designed by Christian Henson himself — to gong glory notwithstanding, GONG PIANO’s gorgeous GUI concept will beautifully translate to future releases, as Christian Henson keenly confirms. “From here on in, whenever you load a preset into a Crow Hill interface, you know that it will always give you five completely different sample sets. Why five? Five fingers. Easy to remember: C is the bottom note, G is the top — all the white notes with different key switches there, which you can either switch on the keyboard or directly on the GUI. That these can be used to create a performance — particularly when creating these undulating, moving, swelling drones — that you can work to picture I think is key to really bringing out the humanity in how you’re helping tell the story. So there’s a ton of interactive improvements that we’ll be bringing to this engine and interface without over complicating it.”
It is fair to say, then, that Christian Henson himself is delighted with both GONG PIANO itself and what it represents in The Crow Hill Company’s creative journey going forward: “The thing that we enjoy most here is dreaming up crazy ideas. What if you were to strip the strings out of a piano and replace them with gongs? And also some kind of EBow mechanism in the piano infrastructure to make those gongs sing forever? And the ability to alter various different harmonic components of that drone while you’re playing it in order to create a single ongoing note and pulse that changes without drawing attention to itself? It’s taken a while to get here, but as the first part of this new beginning for me, which always starts with a drone, I’m absolutely delighted to have not just reinvented the wheel and recreated some samples that I already had from 30 years ago, but, in fact, to take those 30 years of sampling and working as a professional composer to create something new and fresh, which I’m really delighted to be able to share.”
Featuring four handcrafted tuned gongs from Grotta Sonora in Rome, Italy, recorded with five microphones (Super Close Mono: U87, Close Stereo: 2 x U47, Room: DPA ST4006A) at Castlesound Studios in Edinburgh, UK, GONG PIANO is available to buy for £29.00 GBP as an AAX-, AU-, VST-, and VST3-format-compatible sample-based virtual instrument plug-in comprising 10 GB of uncompressed material (compressed losslessly to 5.5 GB) that loads directly into a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) — with four unique sounds sets with five articulations (Multi-Hit, Muted, Metal, Harmonic Mutes, Scrapes & Swipes) each, plus an additional Drone layer, as well as three individually controllable Partial Tones (FUNDAMENTALS, HARMONICS, TRANSIENTS) and four included effects (SUB BASS, DELAY, REVERB, SPARKLE) — from The Crow Hill Company here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/tools/gong-piano/
For more in-depth information, including some superb-sounding audio demos, please visit the dedicated GONG PIANO webpage here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/tools/gong-piano/
GONG PIANO installation and activation requires installation of The Crow Hill App — an easy-to-use app designed by the best in the business to provide seamless download, installation, integration, calibration, and organisation of The Crow Hill Company tools — available for free from here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/crow-hill-app/
Become better acquainted with the drone-making, super-chromatic gong machine that is GONG PIANO while watching The Crow Hill Company co-founder Christian Henson’s highly-informative introductory video here: https://youtu.be/zliRp4pws8c