Bells And Whistles

Over the past few years producer and sound designer Liam Fox O’Brien developed a habit of visiting cathedrals and churches in whatever city he found himself in during his travels from Australia, to Spain, to Mexico, to California. He was always captivated by beautiful bells ringing and echoing through churches of all shapes, sizes, and ages out into the streets. Every set of bells has it’s own unique character and sonic profile that sparked the idea to record them with the intention of designing samples around their individual characteristics. Liam also gathered recordings of similar sounds that were special to each village/town/city like train horns, sirens and municipal alert signals, resulting in a vast inventory of harmonic content with which to process and create a bespoke library of sound effects, musical loops, ambiences and one-shots. Using the higher resolution of 96khz is great for allowing deep processing and manipulation of the sounds in post-production while still maintaining the integrity of the original recording. Back in the studio, Liam edited the recordings and treated the sounds with a variety of creative processing and re-amping techniques and experimented with some digital and analogue effects. For the more clean recordings, they sounded great with a bit of warmth added by re-recording sounds through vintage preamps, tape machines, dictaphones and effects units. In particular, the creation of magnetic tape loops of various lengths and qualities, playing back through two tape recorders in unison was a big focus. This technique helped to create some beautifully ambient and captivating soundscapes that turned into musical loops with keys and tempos. For some more gritty lo-fi sounds, he created signal chains that plumbed some of the recordings through vintage Olympus Pearlcorder 400L dictaphone which uses micro-cassettes and sounds rather dreamy and nostalgic. Take a sample voyage through magical bells from around the world and give your next production a one-of-a-kind ring to it that can’t be sourced anywhere else.