I’ve been finishing up the third and final track on my new album of 528 Hz healing music, Auric Fields. I had everything falling into place the way I wanted it to, but it felt like something was missing.
I needed a gong.
My beloved has this black and silver thermos that we’ve been carrying on our walks with the dog this summer. The heat and humidity can get pretty oppressive in Middle Tennessee.
Sometimes when my head gets hot – which happens frequently – and I don’t need to keep the sun out of my eyes, I hang my ball cap through a belt loop on my shorts.
And, sometimes, when I’ve got a little swing going on the walk and my ball cap is hanging from a belt loop, and I’m holding the thermos by its handle on the ball cap side, the thermos bounces against the bill of the cap and makes a pleasant - and really, I’m just gonna say it out loud - satisfying sound.
The last track on Auric Fields evokes the sense of being out in nature in a beautiful open meadow. It includes recordings I have made of birds, frogs, crickets, my dog’s rhythmic breathing, astrologically-tuned wind chimes, and my friend Lisa‘s creek in Vermont.
(If you listen very closely, you might even hear the moo of a bull calf named Camus who was our next door neighbor for a couple weeks last summer.)
I love using found sounds, field recordings, and other “organic and local” sounds in my compositions. And I’d been making noise about recording that Thermos for a few months. Yesterday, during a break from editing the album tracks, I was washing dishes and saw the thermos on the counter. And I decided to just do it.
I didn’t really figure I was going to be able to turn it into the deep gong sound I needed to complete the track. But I wasn’t ready to go back into tweaking EQ curves yet. And I had been threatening to record it for long enough without taking action that my lack of follow-through was beginning to bug me.
So. I filled the Thermos at the sink and tapped it against the bill of my hat. The sound — perhaps because I wasn’t walking and/or was hearing it in a different sonic environment — was disappointingly small and dull.
Next I tried a rubber mallet - meeaghh. Dull and weird. More of a thud than a bell sound.
Back to the tool box - where the rubber grip end of a household hammer sounded, well, promising enough to experiment with.
I set my dynamic vocal mic up at waist height, hit record, and started tapping and clinking away.
The results were mostly uninspiring. The sound faded out quickly in my room and the initial transient (the hammer handle striking the bottle) seemed either too harsh or too dull, depending on which part of the Thermos I tapped it against.
(I will say, though, that the Thermos is a surprisingly musical piece of gear. I don’t know if it’s all metal Thermoses or if this one has special qualities, but when I was checking the frequencies later I found the fundamental on one of the more satisfying hits was almost exactly G=396 Hz, one of the solfeggio frequencies.)
I listened through a couple of times and then deleted half of the hits. Then I detuned the individual hits until the fundamental resonated at around 264 Hz (the dominant tone of the record is 528 Hz).
I tried out a few different reverbs before settling on a five-second “outside in Nature” convolution reverb. I recorded the remaining Thermos hits with a generous amount of reverb and then spent a few more minutes applying EQ to get rid of unwanted frequencies.
Lessons learned from past experiments
Finding success with these “found sound” experiments requires patience and perseverance. Sometimes there’s too much distracting background noise in the recording. I’m often recording sounds on my phone and sometimes the sound is too faint or the recording quality is just too crappy to be useful.
Crickets, for instance. I’ve gotten some pristine cricket recordings on my phone with no traffic noise or anything to mess up the sound - and when I pull the recording into Ableton it sounds incredibly harsh and sibilant.
I’ve spent hours trying to edit out background noise or EQ and saturate and otherwise massage a recording because I love it and I really want it to work — only to realize at some point that it ain’t gonna happen.
But I’m learning. The hours of frustration in the past have helped me get better at setting limits and developing a bit of ruthlessness. For this experiment, I limited myself to about ten hits with the Thermos half-empty and ten hits with it mostly full.
In the end, only four of the 20 hits sounded good enough to include in the track.
But — surprise! — I really like the sound of those four. And they did exactly what I wanted them to do — provide a consonant and vibrational low end sound in a couple areas of the track where more low end elements were needed.
I say “surprise!” because I really was pleasantly surprised. Before I even started recording, I let go of needing the experiment to work for this record.
I thought maybe I’d get a cool sound or two that I could use down the line in another piece of music. That level of trusting the flow while detaching from the outcome has taken me years of practice to work up to. But, man — when you try something crazy and it works, it’s really gratifying.
(I had a big smile plastered across my face as I typed that last sentence.)
If you want to hear the evolution of the sound, I made a very short video: