Jewel Dirks

This is just #4, suitable for Andrea Taroppi to download, extracted from the album of 6 short pieces, The Evening Visitor.  To download, click on the little "Download All" which is just below and to the right of the picture of the trees.

One evening, when all the birds of the spring were in my trees singing their hearts out, I heard one new song I'd never heard before.  I heard it just a few times, on short low call, about 30 seconds between each call.  I managed to record it through my window.  (You can hear that original recording here. It's the second one down, "Mystery call.")  I sent the call to several birder friends.  Strangely, none of us could recognize it.  I never heard it again.  All the sounds you hear are created from that original one call.

The melody is played three times.  The first is a solo, the second has a slow pulse.  The last time the harmonics are gradually pulled apart and allowed to quietly melt into air.

When I was listening to this in the living room speakers to test the final master, I could hear tiny bird sounds near the end and wasn't sure that they were a result of the effects I was using or coming from the birds outside.  Turns out they were from outside birds.  Delightful!  So I went back into the studio and--still using the original call--created some tiny bird calls at the end by playing only the first pitch of the original sound, now up a couple octaves.

Technical details:  This is all using Cubase 11.  I used RX8 to isolate and clean up the call, and then put it through two sampling programs to use it as an instrument--Equator2 and Padshop2.  the first two times the melody is played on my Rise 49 keyboard which allows a sensitive touch to a looped section of the call.  I modulated both the fine tuning and the volume level with a low frequency oscillator to allow me to control a lovely vibrato by both the pressure and sliding up the key.

The accompanying pulse that enters was designed on Padshop2, splicing it down to a tiny portion to isolate that one clear tone on the lower frequencies.  Its presence was produced by running the clear tone from the call through Steinberg's Multitap Delay, which contains a tiny phaser on the inside loop, delay and filtering on the tap, which is set so small it is barely audible.  The I had an autopan and tiny reverb on the post effects.

The last time the melody returns, I played it now up an octave and added Eventide's ShimmerVerb, where I automated the pitch shifter on one side to pull out all the harmonics going up, and on the other side to pull out all the harmonics going down, all set to perfect 4ths, 5ths and octaves.