The Crystal Dragon
By Kedbreak136 on August 13, 2022 8:00 am
I took a few days off this week and went with the family to the countryside of Japan, more specifically a town called Takayama. It is a very nice small town that has kept a lot of the charm of ancient Japan, which is usually very hard to still find when you live around the Tokyo-Yokohama megalopolis.
There is a special festival at this time of the year when they hang little chimes with a wish under them. You can find them all around town, but especially at the main shrine of the city, where they have 2,000 wind chimes. I went through that section and did a field recording of walking through the wind chimes. It was also pretty windy, so you got these wind waves that would excite the chimes, as if a giant invisible animal was going through them.
If you're curious about that town and the festival, you can check the following video.
This was track was inspired by this experience. I used the 3+ minutes recording of the chimes at the shrine and then added a music inspired by Japanese festivals. The taiko (drums) are definitely Japanese, and the shamisen is country accurate, though you would usually not really hear that in a festival (flutes would be way more common). The melody itself sometimes reminds me more of the Chinese new year than a Japanese festival, but still I'm happy I captured a moment of my life in this track. 
Also, I brought the live bass that I used last week as well. Changing the battery on my old active pickup bass was a good choice. I should also change the strings to have that good Rotosound type of tone, that usually triggers a few rock tracks with the huge bite they have. In the meantime, It got a slightly smoother tone, appropriate for this track.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
