Realistic Church Bell?

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HummingMoose
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Realistic Church Bell?

Post by HummingMoose »

Does anyone happen to have a FM synth recipe for a realistic sounding church bell? I'm new to MX4, and I didn't find anything in the many many supplied patches... unless I missed it somewhere.

Thought I'd ask before I try to crank one out myself.

It's for a Christmas song I'm doing with a friend.

Thanks,
HM
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MIDI Life Crisis
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Re: Realistic Church Bell?

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

I'd just use a sample (SFX) unless it needs to play a tune.
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mikehalloran
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Re: Realistic Church Bell?

Post by mikehalloran »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:I'd just use a sample (SFX) unless it needs to play a tune.
If it needs to play in tune, do you have a sampler such as Kontakt, MachFive, EXS24 (Logic X or MainStage) etc.?
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HummingMoose
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Re: Realistic Church Bell?

Post by HummingMoose »

Unfortunately, no, no sampler -- and I'd like it to play in tune. I'm also looking at what I can get out nanosampler with some bell audio samples....
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cuttime
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Re: Realistic Church Bell?

Post by cuttime »

Last edited by cuttime on Thu Dec 03, 2015 8:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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mikehalloran
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Re: Realistic Church Bell?

Post by mikehalloran »

Easy to find a carillon VI. There are freebies out there, usually in Soundfont2 — free players are out there, too.

Here is the Ghent carillon.
http://sonimusicae.free.fr/carillondegand-en.html

You can also find carillon samples that you can copy and paste into DP one note at a time. Cumbersome but if doing one project only...

Search engines are your friend.

My old Casio and Yamaha keyboards have a carillon preset. I used my Casio in an opera orchestra to play church bells in a production of Tosca once. It was outstanding adequate.
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Re: Realistic Church Bell?

Post by mikehalloran »

So, did you get your church bells? What did you use and how?

Don't leave us hanging!
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Re: Realistic Church Bell?

Post by Martini Hill »

Hey Mike, is this the "Carillon" that is featured in the old Eddie Dunstedter records? I loved his Christmas albums as a kid. Out of sentiment as well as loving and learning about the Carillon, I recently started collecting more of his albums. Jeff





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Re: Realistic Church Bell?

Post by stubbsonic »

Pianoteq has a nice Carillon in it.

BTW, the one time I went to a renaissance fair, there was a guy who had a mobile carillon that was kind of a trailer. He put on a new-agey background track and played kind of easy listening pentatonic stuff. IIRC, he had kind of a Phantom of the Opera persona. I'm a little vague on remembering details, but I'm almost positive there was a mask, and all black garb.
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Re: Realistic Church Bell?

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

Well I hate to be a naysayer... but if you have a sampler (even the built in nano-sampler in DP would probably work) you could Google "church bell.wav" and probably find one you could sample and pitch to what you need. Unless it's a musical phrase that requires more precise and higher quality sound, or if it's a close up and you need to hear the clapper, etc., this will get you in the ballpark nicely at zero cost.

Just sayin'... :unicorn:
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Re: Realistic Church Bell?

Post by monkey man »

Cripes, Magilla, that's exactly what I was going to say... but less eloquently and politely, of course!

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HummingMoose
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Re: Realistic Church Bell?

Post by HummingMoose »

mikehalloran wrote:So, did you get your church bells? What did you use and how?

Don't leave us hanging!
Mike -- I did. Sorry for the delay. I actually used what cutttime suggested, the orchestral chimes samples and used sforzando and MIDI to sneak them in the sequence with pitch. Looking for church bell sounds but these were good enough to 'fake' it, plus I snuck them in to the actual song (the bridge) and one at the end.

The story: My good friend comes up with an idea for a Christmas song for church, lyrics and some melody ideas. Calls me in (the music department) to come up with something for music. Very little time, about two weeks total to go from start to finish (yes, I cut corners and broke a couple rules, hand slaps deserved). So we finally settle on an arrangement, mod the lyrics a little and I lay down a couple sample acoustic guitar tracks as a basis. Layered orchestration on top of that (in MOTU with MIDI and Garritan IO/GPO, just awesome using DP for this!!). This gave us our music for her to put her vocals in. One week till D-Day. Lay down her vocals in her version of Studio One. So I take her vocals, marry them with the music track, and comp vocals all in Studio One (the stuff was already in Studio One, so I just ran with it... probably should have just dumped some vocal stems to DP... but...). But we ran with it all, between DP, the chime sounds and sforzando, Garritan, and Studio One, (oh yes, a pinch of iZotope), we had something acceptable in reasonable time for her to deliver!!

I'm no pro musician by any means, but here's the YouTube link. Garritan is really new to me, and I know I only scratched the surface when it comes to that. Had to cut some corners to make a deadline....


(the lyric video was actually done in ScreenFlow)

Thank you all so much for your help, MOTUNation rocks!
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