The Crow Hill Company Introduces FOREST HARPS Incantatory Invention

video upload by CROW HILL

"In this video Christian walks us through his latest incatative invention made in collaboration with the entire Crow Hill team. Forest Harps is made up of a rare find coupled with medieval ingredients and his own very special and grotesque approach to sound design. If you're looking for a harp that isn't a harp, a classical guitar that isn't a classical guitar and some fully controllable shifts in darkness of tone for your next score, song or soundtrack it would be worth checking out"

Press release follows:

The Crow Hill Company continues investigating its Origins series of virtual instrument plug-in collectibles with FOREST HARPS incantatory invention

EDINBURGH, UK: The Crow Hill Company is delighted to continue investigating its Origins series of virtual instrument plug-in collectables with the release of its intriguing-sounding FOREST HARPS — being billed as an incantatory invention collectively crafted by the Edinburgh-based enterprise, effectively comprising a harp made from elk horn, conch shell, animal ribs, and fishing wire brought together with medieval psaltries fed through a slowly rotating Leslie cabinet to create a forest floor of plucks, textures, and atmospheres as a rare and grotesque approach to sound design — as of October 20…

Typically, the never normally short on words Christian Henson has a veritable field day when it comes to introducing the incantatory invention in question in his coupled capacity of The Crow Hill Company co-founder and professional media composer: “Sometimes a chance encounter can lead to a journey that, in turn, leads to adventure, and, at points, getting lost, but the end result, in this case, bears the hallmarks of every step taken — the opportunity, the adventure, the uncertainty, and the outcome.” Opening salvo duly dispatched, he continues — coming back down to earth, arguably, and somewhat closer to home in the process of doing so: “What is incredibly dangerous at the new place that we have here in the centre of Edinburgh is that there’s a music shop opposite — not just any music shop, but part of the Hobgoblin folk exotic instruments chain. That’s where it all began for me about 20 years ago, walking into one of those very same Hobgoblin shops in London, picking up an instrument, sampling it, and my life changed forever. The shop up here doesn’t quite pose the same risk, having not got the selection that its sister store does down in London, but I walked in the other day and saw this, the centrepiece of this new plug-in. It loosely resembles a kora; it’s a harp-like instrument, and, I guess, it’s designed to be held [upright], plucking the strings with your fingers and thumbs. The tensile string is fishing wire, just like you get with a kora, but — what’s extraordinary about this thing — its soundbox is a conch shell, its neck is an elk horn, and the ribs are definitely not from either an elk or, indeed, a conch! I don’t know, maybe the maker just had a barbecue. It’s got a bunch of machine heads, so it can be tuned to a concert pitch — diatonic, a mode, or, indeed, chromatic. But, the thing is, do shells resonate? I know you can hear the sea in them, but do they actually amplify the sound? The answer is: no.”

Needless to say, of course, Christian Henson was hooked — albeit not literally by that fishing wire: “What drew me to it is — like a kora — it has that interesting middle ground, sonically, between a classical harp and all of the nobleness that you get with that, flamenco or classical guitar and all of the connotations that you get with that. Though on [SIGNAL 1] we did, indeed, record it acoustically with some incredibly quiet microphones and an incredibly quiet mic pre, I think the maker agreed that the conch shell wasn’t the most ideal resonating box, so they stuck a guitar pickup on it and, in addition, they provided us with a small amp. Now, I thought that this was just going to be some kind of gimmick — it’s not even branded, but this is where the opportunity arrived — suddenly, something that just works: elk horn, conch shell, ribs of no known origin, fishing wire, guitar pickup jack, really crappy little amp — we call them fag packet amps here, as in a cigarette packet, yet it just immediately transports you to the Southern Mediterranean and North Africa. And when we were recording this, we just so happened to also be recording a Hammond organ and — another match made in heaven — a Leslie cabinet, which is one of those amps with spinning horns. We decided to put it through that at a very low horn spinning speed, and something totally magical happened. Add them all together and it’s not a guitar. It definitely isn’t a harp. It’s something way less refined than that. I think the reason it works in the amp and in the Leslie is it’s a kind of midrange-, upper midrange-sounding instrument.”

Though that is not the end of the FOREST HARPS backstory, one that effectively mirrors Christian Henson’s earlier chance-encounter-leading-to-journey-leading-to-adventure-type scenario. Says its principal protagonist: “I wanted to give it a bit of zing — a bit of detail, but I didn’t want to completely destroy it by adding something like a dulcimer or a lyre. I wanted something fiendishly feathery, almost, but bright and metallic, which is when I paid another visit to the store over the road and saw a psaltery. There’s no enigma around these things — unlike the conch, elk rib of no known origin instrument, they come up in the Bible; they mention people playing psalteries, and it comes from the Greek — to pluck, I believe. But this is a bowed psaltery. I didn’t want to bow it, I wanted to pluck it. I wanted something that wasn’t really designed to project too much of that dulcimer-y, string-plucking sound — something that could just complement the conch thing. Another quiet instrument — almost nightmarish in its softness, it has a true kind of scary pixie sound to it.”

Therefore, the journey continued: “I wanted to really create something that had a very broad stereophonic image. So, I wondered if, instead of just tracking the same instrument… well, I went back to the shop and found another psaltery — this time one that’s true to its title, designed to be plucked. But another quiet instrument, which gave us maybe a little bit more attack than the other psaltery. But bringing it all together — the plucked psaltery, the bowed psaltery plucked, it sounds richer, but it didn’t stop there.”

Taking a tour of FOREST HARPS’ reassuringly recognisable — certainly to owners of other virtual instrument plug-in collectibles and, indeed, several other sample-based virtual instrument plug-ins released relatively recently by The Crow Hill Company — and, as always, gorgeous GUI (Graphical User Interface), Christian Henson helpfully says, “What you’ll find the outer [TREMS] knob does on most of the acoustic samples is add this highly aleatoric kind of staggered tremolando — speeding up, slowing down, but each note is very different. And the net result — something I’ve been investigating on other plug-ins — is that the chords that you play suddenly form melodic phrases in the sense that — because these things are totally aleatoric — these notes pop out, not in phase, and they form these kinds of melodic cells, if you will. We’ve been somewhat agnostic about the three different signals — conch harp [SIGNAL 1], first psaltery [SIGNAL 2], and second psaltery [SIGNAL 3], but see these very much as things you should address and negotiate with whilst you’re performing — not just the set-and-forget that you would expect maybe more so of the effects macros. Now, when we tried putting the psalteries through the Leslie, there was a couple of problems with it — because these instruments are so quiet, they don’t really emit much in the way of the frequencies of the Leslie, which is very much a low mid- and subby-sounding cabinet. We found it just sounded rubbish, so we’ve filled up the slots with other layers that I think you’ll find very interesting. I also thought it would be interesting to create a loose ensemble of psalteries — the fingered, the bowed, double-tracked, but on SIGNAL 2 and SIGNAL 3 we have the other two psalteries just in solo — suddenly you’ve got this just feathery, almost echo-like sound, which is absolutely stunning. We also did exactly the same layout of instruments, but with an octave.”

Obviously, the inner (HPF/LFP) knob — controlling high-pass and low-pass filtering — and smaller knobs — controlling labelled LESLIE, DELAYS, SPARKLES, and SPLOSH effect levels — are all present and correct in their usual positions, playing their part in tweaking the 12 unique instruments that form FOREST HARPS. Concludes Christian Henson: “All are sound designed by yours truly, but all made solely from the psaltries and the harp.” It is fair to say that this, the latest in The Crow Hill Company’s always-creative Origins series of virtual instrument plug-in collectables, will provide hours of inspiration; whether used as a centrepiece of a new music project or, indeed, an engaging patina to add broader arrangements, its sheer beauty will be certain to captivate both users and audiences alike with its instruments and signals with preset combinations and sound design elements satisfying multiple use cases as an incantatory invention, rare and grotesque as its approach to sound design so clearly is.

Featuring the individual soloistic beauty of a one-of-a-kind conch shell-elk horn harp to the indistinct but highly-detailed metallic detail of a soprano and tenor psaltery creatively captured at Castlesound Studios outside of Edinburgh and presented as 12 unique instruments — including Electric Elk-Conch Harp, Harp & Psaltery Ensemble, Psaltery Ensemble (loose), Psaltery Ensemble (loose 8ves), Solo Psaltery 1, Solo Psaltery 2, and six Textural Pads), FOREST HARPS is available to buy for £29.00 GBP as a sample-based virtual instrument plug-in supporting AAX-, AU-, VST-, and VST3 plug-in formats for macOS 11 through to 15 (Apple Silicon and Intel compatible) and Windows 10 through to 11 directly from The Crow Hill Company here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/tools/forest-harps/

For more in-depth information, including some superb-sounding audio demos from The Crow Hill Company co-founder Christian Henson himself, please visit the dedicated FOREST HARPS webpage here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/tools/forest-harps/

FOREST HARPS installation and activation requires installation of The Crow Hill App — an easy-to-use app designed by the best in the business to provide seamless download, installation, integration, calibration, and organisation of The Crow Hill Company tools — available for free from here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/crow-hill-app/