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Looper's Delight
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Mike Oldfield is my guest on this edition of NEW SOUNDS. Do you actually use tubular bells once again in the second volume?
Well, yes, but what we did was, really, design a bell sound. The problem with bells is that every note has a harmonic, and this harmonic quite often is out of tune with the--
fundamental?
--track you're trying to play over. Because the bells were so loud, what I had to do was to find a bell sound. I went through various libraries of bell sounds, listened to, you know, the Santa Barbara mission bell, and, you know, Big Ben, and, you know, St. Peter's, Rome, you know, listening to all these bell sounds. And eventually I found the sound I was looking for in this little tiny toy set, you know. And then I took that sound digitally into a computer, and I added my own harmonics electronically to it, and the harmonics change as the bell moves through different chord sequences. So it was a bit of a technological exercise, but to achieve this level of perfection, just hitting a normal set of tubular bells really did sound bad, so we had to do some serious work on it.
I didn't mean it to be a philosphical question, but I guess it becomes that when you say, "Are there real bells on the record?" I mean, there were these children's bells at some point, but now they're--
It was a big mixture--
--something different.
Our philosophy making this album was, whatever means we needed to use to create the best result, we'd use that. If that meant spending a couple of days leafing through global bell sounds that exist, we would do that. Adding harmonics was no problem.
So it would seem there are multiple timelines being concurrently maintained by some folks in the process. Confusing at best, since usually what one is used to is the idea that everything from the record company is BS, and the artist's version is usually closer to the truth. Hm, sometimes.