Ugo
Group: Members
Posts: 5495
Joined: April 2000 |
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Posted: Sep. 13 2003, 11:06 |
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The following two questions are respectively aimed to those of you familiar with the Pink Floyd song 'High hopes', on their Division Bell album, and to those of you who heard and seen it performed live. If you did both things... well, it'd be perfect  , but I'd like you to reply at least to one item.
1) When does the church bell heard in the song stop being real and start being a sample? I mean, of course it's not 'real' anywhere in the song, 'cause they didn't have a church bell in the studio but they recorded it elsewhere. But it sounds very realistic to me in the song's intro soundscape: a buzzing bee [crossfading into 'High hopes' from the previous song on the CD, 'Lost for words'], some wind, some birds chirping, and a distant church bell sounding somewhat like a knell (as Thomas Gray would've put it, "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day"). About 12-15 seconds into this, the bell sound is picked up by some piano chords and gets mixed in those. This is the point, as I see it, where the sound stops being realistic, because the rhythm created by the piano with the bell sounds too perfect to be a real recording of a real bell. Of course, it can also be that the piano was overdubbed on the original 'open-air' recording of the bell in such a way as to create a regular rhythmical cadence, as the birds are still chirping when the piano comes in. But I tend to doubt this, as the piano+bell bit crops up two more times in the song, with no birds but with exactly the same sound and the same rhythm.
2) When they played the song on stage, e.g. during that huge VW-sponsored TV live performance (from Berlin, IIRC) which formed a substantial part of the 'Pulse' videotape, percussionist Gary Wallis was shown hitting what looked like a real (small) church bell, producing exactly the same sound of the church bell on the album. That sound was not unique to 'High hopes', because, when 'the tolling of the iron bell' was mentioned in the lyrics to 'Breathe Reprise', later on, the same sound was heard after Gilmour sang that line, and yet again Wallis was shown hitting the bell. So, is that small church bell just a trigger (as I know that Wallis uses a lot of sampled percussion sounds), or does it contribute in some way to the overall sound?
Please tell me what do you think about this.
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Ugo C. - a devoted Amarokian
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