Björk's Gameleste - the making of
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- Опубліковано 21 вер 2024
- Gamelan + Celeste = Gameleste. Novel, bespoke instrument commissioned by Björk.
Made in the UK and Iceland by Matt Nolan and Björgvin Tómasson for the Biophilia album and tour and featured on the songs Crystalline and Virus.
Videography: Andy McCreeth
Editing: Matt Nolan and Andy McCreeth.
© 2011 A McCreeth, M Nolan.
www.mattnolancu...
www.bjork.com/
The painstaking craftsmanship & passion necessary to put in that level of effort here is very impressive. Now if only i could stop bjork from saying Crys-Tal-Line over & over in my head
YAYYY !!! thats great and very cool BJORK !! Hello from INDONESIA !! Thanks for making Gamelan sound that much more beautiful. :)
You can hear the beautiful instrument on the Biophilia album, or live at the Biophilia concerts. As this video was made before the album was released, we were careful not to give too much away in advance and steal the thunder from Bjork herself.
Does anyone have an instrument such as this besides the amazing and talented Björk ? Thanks for all your hard work, Love and Light.
As far as I know this was the first combination of the timbre of gamelan metallophones with the modern western 12-note even tempered scale in a 5 octave self-playing midi/acoustic instrument. I don't know if anyone has made another since.
In gamelan the instruments are often paired. In a pair each instrument is detuned, one up and one down, so that when they play together they produce the most wonderful detuned metalophone sound. The beatings of that detuned sound is the life of the sound, that is what they are after.
You're right. Alas, we only got the commission to make a single Gameleste and not a complementary pair.
I have been watching this video on and off for the past 6 months or so - I never, ever get bored of it :-)
so pretty and wonderful! you should be beyond proud of what was accomplished with this! 🌟
That's an awesome job. Must be so interesting to make such an exquisite instrument and work with such a nice person as Björk. Well done, mr. Nolan! The world is a little better place to live now :)
@DDDtripaDDD You know, I'm not sure. As we were building it and testing it with a pretty basic MIDI keyboard, it didn't appear to have any velocity sensitivity - it was all one level. But when we did the recording sessions for the album with Björk's MIDI sequences, it appeared to have some rudimentary velocity sensitivity.
It was explained to me later though that the pieces were written assuming the instrument wouldn't have velocity sensitivity - and that dynamics come from the orchestration.
Thanks Boo. It was indeed a pleasure.
I made what I was commissioned to do. The slendro and pelog scales (though which ones? there are so so many...) would not have worked for Bjork's album songs or for her tour where she also used the Gameleste in new arrangements of her older songs. Even-tempered ref 440Hz was asked for so that's what I made. As it happens, I'm working on instruments for someone else just now that are in a just intonation pelog scale. Perhaps you can draw some happiness from that.
I’ve just drawn a great deal of happiness from this and I don’t have a clue what you’re saying. 🙂
My friend Andy McCreeth is an excellent cameraman. The editing was done mostly by me, with some tweaking by Andy. Soundtrack was by me. Most of this information is in the credits at the end...
@MattNolanCustom I have looked through the google pages for Gamelan, as I was not familiar with the name - it truly has a beautiful sound and I can appreciate that it was no mean feat to craft this hybrid.
Hats off to you, sir :-)
I love the editing of this video! !
+LemonadePie Well, Andy McCreeth is a great teacher, and he tightened up my work a bit on this too.
61 bars that have to be pitch perfect - no pressure, huh? Incredible :-)
Amazing stuff, I wondered what the instrument was on that track and turns out it's a brand spanking new one!
@calpurnia1706 61 bars that needed to be in tune AND sound like Gamelan. I changed the design of one octave of bars in my workshop in England, so that's 73 bars made, and then decided that a further 7 didn't quite sound right once they were in the instrument. So I made 7 more in Iceland - 80 bars made and tuned.
The bars were rough-tuned in England as my workshop is too cold for it to be worth making them exact. Then they were all fine-tuned in the workshop in Iceland.
Worth it though ;-)
👍...Lot's of interesting stuff in your workshop....my kind of stuff!
THATS AWESOME
amazing.
Imagine being able to, on a whim, create your own instrument!
awesome!!!
@KralDano Björgvin plays Inventio #13 by J. S. Bach (both on the organ earlier in the video and on the Gameleste at the end of the video.
@elferi Yes, the timbre (but not the scale tuning) of Indonesian Gamelan
@calpurnia1706 Not sure how many man-hours. I didn't count them all. There was a lot of initial research and experimentation uncounted. Making the 61 final bars in my workshop in Bath took upwards of 120 man-hours and I believe that the cabinet making in Iceland was around 200 man-hours. Then 2-3 of us worked for 3 and a bit 8-ish hour days in Iceland assembling, fine tuning and trouble-shooting. So, that's about 385 man-hours. And we already had a lot to start with i.e. the guts of Scheidmayer!
The gamma celeste plays on its own
A simply amazing woman. Where can I see/read more about the Gameleste. So this was Bjork invention?
There used to be a few magazine interview articles online. Maybe you can still find them. As usual with those kinds of things they often made mistakes, or mis-attributions, or cut whole paragraphs so that nothing makes sense any more or has lost its context. Anyhow, the concept of an acoustic Gamelan-like instrument, portable, in a "box" that could be played with MIDI was Björk's. I think that the question of whether we could start from the guts of her old Shiedmayer Celeste also came from Björk, albeit not immediately. The sonic investigation and implementation was mostly me and the electro-mechanical implementation came from Björgvin, who had already made Björk a "compact acoustic MIDI pipe organ" which also featured on the Biophilia album and tour.
@@MattNolanCustom Thanx Matt!
This is very good. It makes me happy. :D
@heptaparakashingkok It is considered related to gamelan because the overtone spectrum of each tonebar is the same as the overtone spectrum of the keybar gamelan instruments. It probably doesn't come across as sounding gamelan to you because the scale is a western 12-tone even temper and not a slendro or pelog scale and because the music you have heard on it is not arranged in the typical gamelan doubled octave style. Next to a regular Celeste you would hear a big difference
Listen how they grow.
@MissIshiokaShibuya Of course you can buy one. Though it would help if you could provide a Schiedmayer Celesta to start with. Making all those resonator chambers and the manual key mechanisms from scratch would add an awful lot to the cost.
@chalice4ever It is Inventio Nr 13 by J. S. Bach
The noisy soundtrack represents the *making* of the instruments, rather than the instruments themselves. Noisy work! :-)
Is there a name of the song "noisy track"?
MattNolanCustom It's kinda a Keyboard Glockenspiel w/ Bronze Bars. I'd prefer having Felt Hammers so that the Bars won't get scratched.
The point of the hard boxwood hammers which replaced the felted ones was to simulate the hard mallets used in Gamelan orchestras on the keybar instruments in order to excite an authentic sound. They are traditionally made of animal horn
@@MattNolanCustom It's more like a Keyboard Glockenspiel but w/ Bronze Bars rather than Steel Bars if you were to compare it. All the Celesta & Keyboard Glockenspiel repertoire still works on it. It's a Schiedmayer.
@@RockStarOscarStern634 With respect, all the Celeste and Keyboard Glockenspiel repertoire works on a Piano too. This was a custom instrument based around a Schiedmayer "donor instrument" to achieve a very specific sonic requirement and to be playable electronically using MIDI. The choice of bar material, partial tuning and hammer material was all very deliberate towards that end.
Astounding work! Hurm, is there a damping system to mute certain sustaining tone for Gameleste?
*I R e a l l y W a n t t o P l a y It !*
Not quite sure why it is considered as related to gamelan, I know it is a metal sound, but, sounds just like a regular celesta. Maybe a little dryer... anyway, it is a nice idea to do this "midi-leste" or "eCelesta"
Tradesmen make the best lovers.
gamelan from INDONESIA, is very good
what tune was the guy playing in the end of the video? it was very beautiful
Lovely
@anllume Every note besides the top handful have damper mechanisms
Indonesia love you!
whatttttt is thiis background music? It's awesome
Thanks. It is Inventio Number 13 by Bach. Björgvin plays it on the pipe organ and the Gameleste. I took snippets of it and manipulated it, added workshop sounds, made a backing track for the video from it.
This song is great.
Reminds me of being in a straight jacket.
... Not that I've ever been in a straight jacket, of course. :)
Awesome work and video quality. Do you hire a professional video producer or something?
This is an amazing piece of kit - how many man hours did it take in total?
Does anybody know what is the classical piece played near the end? It's gorgeous.
it is Inventio number 13 by J S Bach. Bjorgvin plays it on the pipe organ also and the Gameleste rendition at the end is part of the source material making the rest of the backing music - listen carefully and you will hear it.
I can't say that I'm certain. But I think it involves a bit of luck and a lot of determination.
can i ask question,are u coming to Indonesia to get that gamelan pieces?Are u mixed up thing from Bonang,saron,slenthem or just take one part of them?Im javanese,so i know that gamelan thing
Hello. Nothing came from Indonesia - though that would have been more fun! I made 61 bars a little like saron or slenthem. They had to be the same size or smaller than the old celeste bars and be tuned to the western classical scale but with the overtone spectrum like the saron and slenthem.
well,i never played celeste before but in my childhood, i always playing saron because its very pretty easy to learn,haha.im glad u using our traditional music especially my favourite instruments.I hoper u more explore another traditional instrument in Indonesia like sasando,tifa etc. thanks for reply ;)
Gameleste is just a xylophone with a piano interface?
No, xylophones have wooden bars (from ancient Greek, xylon = wood, phon = sound). A Celeste is "just" a Glockenspiel with a piano interface (Celeste because of the "celestial" mellow yet twinkling sound, glocken being bells in German, spiel being play in German). Glockenspiels are made with steel bars and, generally only in the top couple of octaves, and without resonating tubes, and are played with very hard mallets by hand (with 2 mallets generally, but 4 or even 5 is not unheard of). A Celeste puts a wider chromatic compass in a piano interface (5 octaves in this case), with resonating tubes or chambers and soft, felted hammers. The Gameleste combines the form-factor of a Celeste with the sound of Indonesian Gamelan. The bronze bars and the hard, boxwood hammers help generate this sonic flavour. On top of that, it has electromechanical actuation which can be driven by MIDI from a computer sequencer and so it can play many more notes at once than a 10-digit human player, or even a duo or trio of human players, with faster note repetition possibilities also. So, it is capable of more than just a tuned percussion instrument with a piano interface, while remaining at its core a real world acoustic instrument.
@@MattNolanCustom There is weirdly much flavor in just one note, interesting instrument.
Gamelan, Indonesian's Gamelan?
This is sik
@Johnny123456789x send me an email...
Amazing.