The Crow Hill Company is proud to introduce its latest innovations in sampling with GONG PIANO � embracing entirely�new concepts (including so-called Shepherd Mapping polyphony, as well as recording Partials), engine, GUI (Graphical User Interface),�and an environment to work in that is firmly pegged and duly designed to deliver for music-makers wanting cinematic results in an instant�as a drone-making, super-chromatic gong machine, to paraphrase the driving force behind its ear-opening creation � as of February 26� As an undertaking that saw The Crow Hill Company co-founder and professional composer Christian Henson bravely binning his entire sound collection and starting from scratch, the�road to GONG PIANO was a long and winding one � hilly, too, with many marches up and down the nearby Crow Hill (from which the Edinburgh-based enterprise takes its name),�helping to clear heads and formulate concepts.
Christian Henson admits, �A few months ago, I committed an act; I don�t know if it was in a fit of pique or a legitimate and sound�artistic decision. That act was getting rid of all of my sounds � binning my sample libraries, my gun cabinet, my sonic arsenal, my toolkit, constructed, pillaged, rummaged for, and�discovered over decades of working as a composer and as a samplist. And when considering starting from scratch, where to begin?
Well, I guess at the beginning; the beginning�that we�re so used to, whether it be in cinema, or TV, or computer games � that trope of the drone. And the drone I�ve built and am introducing is called GONG PIANO.� Continues Christian Henson: �I�ve been focusing in on something that I never really have considered as a samplist � not just the room, not just the player and performance, not just�the instrument, but also the material.
The biggest intrigue for me has always been wanting a full and chromatic piano�s worth of a beguiling tone, but the problem with stretching�things up and down is that you change the quality of the material � not just the pitch.
So going back to the drawing board entirely meant thinking about sampling in a totally different�way � particularly where creating the impossible is concerned: a piano where the strings have been replaced with gongs; the ability to create drones � things that go on forever and�ever � out of finite objects like a percussion instrument.
And I guess where this whole ORIGINS series is concerned � plumbing the depths of my history with technology to find inspiration�that was there all along, I have to go back to my humble Roland D-5, a younger, shitter cousin of the D-50, where they used things called Partials � bits of sound.
Basically, these things�didn�t have the sampling power � didn�t have the technology or hardware � to be able to create something affordable that had fully sampled instruments, so, instead, they just�sampled little bits and then added things like wavetables and stuff.
For more information, visit thecrowhillcompany.com.
