Digital Download Catalogue — Natural Soundscapes (Section 2)
— Wind Chimes in the Wild

The timbre of these chimes is a particularly good balance of 'voice' tone and overtones, though their sound is quite bright so that for indoor use some people would presumably find them a bit on the harsh side.

Their being made of steel means that they are significantly heavier than similar-size chimes from other sources — the weight being stated as 6lb for each set (there aren't alternative size ranges except to some extent in the case of custom-made sets). That limited to two the number I could sensibly take out on a session, so on any particular session I didn't record more than two of these combined, seeing that I don't have my own transport, and rely on hitch-hiking / walking to and from recording locations carrying a heavily laden rucksack on my none-too-strong shoulders.

However, as each DB chime is an eight-note affair, it's already musically quite substantial even as a solo, so really an ensemble of more than two of these at a time would almost certainly be overkill, sounding just too confusingly dense and complex. Indeed I quickly established that two of these at a time (at least, the ones that I chose for this project) are already quite challenging enough!

The available range of Davis Blanchard (DB) chimes tunings is large, the vast majority being on scales that sound pretty consistently sweet and consonant in the just intonation that underpins the sound of all their stock range of chimes. My interest was in chimes that are more interesting musically, and so the four sets that I chose from their range each included at least one dissonant interval, so that we hear a stimulating interplay between consonance and some degree of dissonance.

All the DB chimes are 8-tube sets that span 1½-2 octaves, so they have more musical potential in their sound than from most other makes of chimes. In all these DB chimes the individual tubes are not in scale order, presumably in order to make each set reasonably balanced weight-wise; otherwise the top plate would be very much tilted, which would adversely affect the sound balance between the different tubes.

A note (sic) about the chimes' notes and notional tuning
I give below the eight 'official' pitches played by each of these chimes, and describe their tuning. However, there's more to the sound of each chime than that, because actually each chime sounds more than eight notes!

This appears to be because in addition to the nice clear 'ringing' sustaining tone caused by the striker hitting a tube, another tone sounds as well, which is presumably a harmonic, but is heard as an altogether separate note rather than just an overtone of the main note. It thus gives the impression of being a much higher, hardly-sustaining 'impact tone'.

For this reason actually a straightforward description of the tuning of any one of these chimes gives an incomplete idea of the actual sound, for these 'impact tone' harmonics can be outside the 'official' scale, chord or motif that the chime is tuned to.

For example, listen to the Debussy Bells chime, and you will hear a pronounced D7, and a weaker F7 repeatedly sounding in the mix — but actually (a) the highest note is officially A6, and (b) any D at all is outside that particular transcription of the whole-tone scale, so will inevitably introduce a dissonant element.

To what extent those unintended extra notes cause dissonance would depend on the particular scale being used; the whole-tone scale is particularly intractable in that respect, in that any note that brings in the interval of a fourth or fifth or minor third, or their inversions / octave displacements would bring dissonance to that scale. As already said, the supernumerary D7 is dissonant with this version of the scale, but the supernumerary F7 is one of the notes of the scale, so we have one 'sweet' and one 'sour' there.

At least, in the case of all the chimes here any such dissonances that do occur don't spoil anything. Rather, they add more musical 'spice'.

Another great factor for production of an astonishing musical sound-world is the effect of the just intonation when any two of these chimes are performing together. If they are tuned to different keys, some coinciding notes between the pair would generally not be completely in tune with each other, and so we hear the most exquisite microtonal intervals in the mix, in addition to the odd interval within one chime possibly being slightly 'out' (to ensure the purity of other intervals from that chime).

On the other hand, if the chimes are both tuned to the same key, at least for the most part they would be fully in tune with each other, though if the odd 'foreign' note has been added to the scale for one of the chimes, then that would be likely to produce some degree of microtonal clash with particular notes of the other chime.

Debussy Bells
Named after the 20th Century French composer Claude Debussy, widely known for his frequent use of the whole-tone scale in his compositions, the 'official' notes of this chime are indeed on the whole-tone scale (with the qualification mentioned in the note above regarding its unofficial notes), but with gaps that allow its eight notes to span two whole octaves.

This gives a much more interesting sound than just a straight run of consecutive whole tones would, and it has a gently menacing quality thanks in particular to the emphasized augmented triad and tritone intervals:
A4 D_b5 F5 A5 B5 E_b6 G6 A6

Pluto (to be referred to in the recording notes further below as DB Pluto)
Completely different from the Woodstock Chimes of Pluto. This isn't at all pentatonic in sound, its sound instead being an ethereal-sounding minor scale but incorporating a minor major seventh chord, spread through the two octaves, which embraces both minor triad and augmented triad, and gives it a teasing, mysterious dissonant aspect, somewhat reminiscent of the odd moment in Neptune the Mystic in Gustav Holst's orchestral suite The Planets.

Often its musical / emotional effect comes across as incandescent, steely, monolithic and outright visionary, especially when it comes into focus from the sound of other chimes in a duo or ensemble:
C5 F5 A_b5 C6 E6 F6 A_b6 C7

Twilight
Rather similar to the DB Pluto chimes, including a distinct echo of the same bit of Holst's The Planets, thanks to the minor major seventh chord produced by its bottom four notes, but the dissonant interval doesn't stand out so strongly here; this is also in a different key, so it's bound to interact interestingly with the DB Pluto chimes. On a subjective level, the overall musical / emotional effect strikes me as autumnal and rather plaintive:
B4 D5 F^#5 A^#5 B5 D6 F^#6 G6

The Blues
This uses a blues scale — and I don't care at all for the blues sound! So, personally I set aside any blues connotations and just take this as a particularly nice interplay of sweet consonance and a teasing dissonance, with its 'blue' note gently spiking the sweetness. — Well, except that, once I'd got listening to my first recording of it I found that I did really love the blues sound as such, when given by such exquisite-sounding wind chimes! However, when combined with any of the above chimes things get much more interesting still!
B4 E5 G5 A5 B_b5 B5 D6 E6

Custom chimes…?
In January 2017 I was getting all excited because, following a lot of vain online searching for a source of custom-tuned quality chimes, first I found that Davis Blanchard Wind Chimes was into doing custom ones. However, it turned out that their production facilities limit their chimes (custom or otherwise) to 8 tubes (not more nor less), which have to be in the range A4 to E7, but actually the tubes from C7 upwards produce a weak tone, especially above C7 — and my custom chimes would all require a top note of C7 or above (highest one reaching F7). So, this appeared not to be a workable option.

Then I found that Grace Notes Windchimes were willing and indeed keen to do some custom chimes for me, but after I'd okayed working on a first one as a trial there was a period of silence, and when I enquired they said they'd found that it was just too much work and expense for them to proceed, and just not worth their while — which had all the sound of just coming out with excuses to avoid admitting to the real reason for not wanting to do them. I suspect that the real reason was that the fellow involved found the tuning of my custom chimes just too (musically) challenging for him to want to countenance dealing with.

So, having drawn only blanks in my further Internet search, I returned to Franz Connor at Davis Blanchard Wind Chimes, to have up to three custom chimes made, which, as explained above, wouldn't be optimal for representing my musical ideas, but could still potentially give a beautiful and rather thrilling experience in their own right, capitalizing on the special sonority of those chimes with their galvanized steel tubes.

All being well, two or three custom chimes would be announced here very soon. I'd order more (I have other fantastic-sounding ones on my wish-list), but I was already rather overdoing my expenditure on having even one custom chime done for me.

However, eventually I did more precise listening tests and established that there are too many unpleasant beats between particular notes of chimes from the different sources, because of the overall pitch tuning difference. Davis Blanchard chimes are tuned to A448, while Woodstock and Music of the Spheres are tuned to the much more normal A440.

I therefore drew a line under the older chimes and didn't intend to use them again, just concentrating on the new. That A448 tuning of the DB chimes, although having the compatibility disadvantage, does make them sound subtly brighter and more radiant than they would at A440. That's claimed for them by the makers of course, but I did careful listening tests with my would-be custom chimes notes played through a MIDI sequencer using a MIDI wind chime sample, and I found the difference of effect between those two tunings to be quite marked.

As you'll see, however, I did finally make an exception by having a few recording sessions pitting the Music of the Spheres Gypsy Soprano chimes against the DB chimes in various combinations. The results have all been wonderfully challenging, and I found that in particular the DB Twilight chimes were really a bit too out of tune with the Gypsy Soprano, so I didn't want to use the recording I made of just that pair together. In a trio I found the sound of those two more acceptable, but that particular trio is still probably my most outlandishly dissonant one.

One 'outside' combination that does work well — do it with bamboo!

Occasionally I combined some of the Woodstock and Music of the Spheres chimes with a pair of very cheap and roughly made African bamboo wind chimes from a local store. I actually got rid of those bamboo chimes, but more recently obtained another set of them — again a large and small set, and again they display something of an approximation to the whole-tone scale.

In the event, despite various initial doubts of mine I found it quite workable, although not exactly easy, to carry out the bamboo chimes to my recording location along with the considerable weight of two sets of DB chimes, and I found the metal and bamboo chimes to work together just as well as happened with my earlier combined bamboo and metal chimes recordings.

The not-very-precise tuning of the bamboo chimes is as follows:

Large: G4 B_b4 B4 D(-)5 D(+)5 E_b-5

Small: G^#5 A5 C^#6 D6 D^#+6 E_b-6

The + and — signs are intended to show microtones, though whether they're intentional I don't know, but I'd give an inspired guess that the top E-flats of both sets are intended to be at a pitch between Eb and D, and indeed the top two notes of the small set to be roughly equidistant between each other and D-natural and E-natural on either side. In other words, about a third of a tone between them.

In the case of the two D5s of the large set, they sound almost identical, with only a very marginal pitch difference, so I wonder whether there was an error there, and one of those tubes should have been a little higher or lower in pitch.

Overall, each of these bamboo chimes has a whole-tone sort of sound, despite its including a semitone and the odd microtonal interval within the span of its six notes.

Note that I eventually sold off all my metal chimes and gave the bamboo chimes to a charity shop. So, the tuning details given above refer specifically to the bamboo chimes used in my recordings with metal chimes in 2017.

The separately recorded bamboo chimes used in my 2023 (onwards) Nature-Symphonies are chosen from a fair little collection I purchased, mostly online. At the time of writing this update, I have (temporarily) 5 small (c. 30cm longest tube), 3 medium (longest tube c. 40cm — one of those 42cm), and one large (longest tube 50cm). I tried to obtain one or two more large ones, but everywhere I turned they were out of stock, even where claimed to be in stock!

They all have different note sequences, and surely will each roughly equally have their place in further Nature-Symphonies that I produce.

Back then, after quite a long wait I'd emailed him to ask if everything was okay and he was still happy with doing the job, and he said he was poised to go, except that he was still waiting to receive a really suitable batch of the conduit pipes that they use to make their chimes (and which give them their distinctive timbre). I'd understood previously from him and DB that they got a lot of batch variations and had to return some batches as unsuitable (typically, giving too much vibrato).

I let the matter run its own course over the summer as I was very busy with other things, but heard nothing more, so, as I say, I was poised to email him at this point in October — when, to my surprise, I had an email from a person who was really enthusiastic about my sound recordings and was wanting to know if I had any information about what had happened to DB Wind Chimes, as she had an outstanding order with them and they seemed to have disappeared.

I checked up online and found that indeed the website had disappeared, and Google reviews for that site showed a recent string of disgruntled customers who'd paid good money and not received their chimes and mostly not received replies to their emails — though a few had received promises of an imminent refund and indeed 'free' chime as well, though none actually received either. One of those reviewers mentioned 'a death within the family' as the claimed cause of the 'delays'.

To tell the truth, none of this was that much of a surprise to me. At the time of my correspondence with Davis and then Franz (purportedly son of Davis, though I'm not sure how the surname Connor adds up), there were some turbulent changes occurring there, which looked to be associated with some sort of family bust-up, and then suddenly Franz taking over the business as its Director, which all seemed pretty screwy to me.

I sensed about the two a great creativity and sensitivity but also a considerable volatility / instability — especially in the case of Franz, and felt pretty sure that the business wouldn't last long. Even back then I also sensed that Franz (in particular) had a strong predisposition to want to commit suicide if he got stressed in particular ways.

So, what I'm coming to is that I think Franz probably committed suicide, and Davis couldn't or didn't want to continue the business as a one-person concern. It looked quite possible indeed that Davis himself, in a state of great emotional turmoil, had followed suit and ended his own life, albeit that being less likely. However, in August 2019 I found a Facebook profile that appears to belong to this particular Davis Blanchard, and it appears to have been set up in April 2019.

It appears that he was going through some severe health issue that year, which I won't speculate about, and his posts' subjects are a mix of his song-writing activities, his dire health shenanigans and a lot of very normal confused spirituality-related stuff — but nothing about wind chimes, apart from one or two links that are chimes-related, and no mention of Franz, and Franz not showing in the Friends list. The whole picture, while not actually proving anything, is at least consistent with my suspicion about Franz.

My conclusions about all that are necessarily speculative, but if anyone at all can give me a factually-based account of what actually happened I'd be grateful and would add that here.

Thankfully I myself didn't lose any money over that, because Franz was going to make a trial custom chime for my approval first, before we decided between us whether it was worth my buying it and indeed his proceeding to do further custom chimes for me.

B4 C5 C6 D6 E6 F^#6 A6 D7 (intended for just intonation with C root key, though it would still work in ordinary equal temperament, though be less interesting). It has a radiant sound but with an evocative clash in the bottom end, suggesting the drone of bees and hoverflies, and I entitled it Springtime Woodland Glade.

Another one I'd particularly like to have done for me would be pitched as follows: