Jewel Dirks

I usually had the neighbor down the road shear him.  He was sick for a couple years, however,  and so I had to haul Nook into the college to have the ag students shear him.  They seemed to love working with him, with each student taking a turn at getting the wool off.  Then the professor would quiz the kids on how much they thought he weighed, and how old he was.  One year I brought in two gift certificates for the students who guessed the closest–and the answers really varied.  Some students guess that he weighed only 100 pounds or less, (he weighed 355).  The age was more difficult for them, and the teacher hinted, “look at his dignified gray nose.”  (He was probably 12 at the time.)

All the sounds were developed mostly from Nook’s call in iZotope’s program, Iris2, but with two additional sounds–a birdcall and a sound of trees knocking together which I got from a camping friend, Mark.  

The opening sounds are from “J Nook Wandering bass,” which takes some of the lower frequencies of  the tree knocking sounds (“J Mark Drum rez822”) combined with very low frequencies from the “J Nook Airy Equa”--which I first designed in Equator, combining the Nook call and a bird call.  After running that through Shaperbox to provide an interesting reverb rhythm, that provided the main metallic drum melody.  I isolated the bottom notes of that, which by chance were producing a low “timpani” like sound, and put that in another track where I could pull it out a bit.

The middle section was developed in Iris2 solely from the very opening of Nook’s call, which is a low low octave before he hits the regular call.  He’d kind of have this low growlie sound before the main part of his call would sound.  So I took that low part of the call, isolated by Halion (“J Nook Russian Wave”) and then in Iris2 isolated bits of the frequencies.  Then, I played it in the higher notes, and also run through Shaperbox for some surprising delays.

The Eventide Tverb was the reverb throughout.