Jewel Dirks

...are located in that album....

These are three memories of being with my pack goats.   All these dear animals pictured below are gone now.  To see these incredible athletes in action, visit my YouTube:  steinwaygoat. These three pieces are an exercise in...

I adopted a pregnant mini-donkey years ago to help protect my pack goats from intruding, predator dogs.  The new baby was born, and so started an enchanting existence with two delightful burros, Blossom and her son...

One evening, when all the birds of the spring were in my trees singing as loudly as they could, I heard one new song I’d never heard before.  I heard it just a few times, one short low call, about 30 seconds between each...

Egon is a little goat that came to live with me for one day, and then I had to give him to a friend because my bigger goats were too violent with him.  With his new friends, who are twice his size, he quickly gained control: ...

When I was in the Snowy Range I heard the most incredible coyote song.  It had been a rather frustrating trip--two new pack goats and two dogs, none of which had been backpacking before, and so they were constantly going back...

My intent was to create that feeling I get when cliffs and bluffs come in and out of sight in a snowstorm. The entire piece was based on sounds from my little cymbal.  The opening was the basic sound run backwards.  I had a...

Mark Karrer (Karrerphotography.com) is a freelance photographer and mycologist I met when goat packing in the Snowy Range, Wyoming several years ago.  To my great fortune, we became friends.  I have been the recipient of many...

These are all from car sounds, with the exception of the water drops added to “Tears for the Queen of Smoke.” My nephew Stryde loves drifter hotrods, and he got me hooked on a show HyperDrive.  (Stryde said the show was...

Thinking my pieces were beginning to sound all the same, I decided to do a piece of just rhythms.  I used the Cymbal instruments I’d designed, but chopped them off so I’d just have the attack.  Then I added several different...

These sounds are all created from two irrigation pipes that I hit with a stick.  The first was a metal pipe going under a culvert, underneath a dirt road, the other was a 16 foot plastic irrigation pipe, sitting out on the...

I was working on trying to get as much movement and sound as possible from one single keyboard key, and got to the notion of elementary particles. Just One Quark  This was made from holding down just one note for the entire...

Using the Palindrome program, I put in various segments of the meadowlark into the four voices.    I thought of the famous quartet of Verdi, “Bella figlia dell’amore.”  All the sounds you hear are based on the meadowlark I...

This is based all on my meadowlark recording.  Two main instruments--used PhasePlant to get the single tone that creates the background, enhanced by FX Crystallizer and Little Plate.  I had to really work to get the hiss from...