barCHIMES Concert Mark Tree

At last, a new percussion instrument for Reason! And it’s not another set of 808 samples!

Here we present a lovely Mark tree, an instrument created in the late 1960s expressly with modern music in mind. Also known as bar chimes (but definitely not windchimes!), the Mark tree is a series of small metal tubes hung linearly in decreasing tube length in order to produce rising or falling inharmonic glissandi simply by running a finger across them.

Whether it’s to add a tingling texture to tumultuous turnarounds, or constructing splendiferously sparkling stops and stalls, barCHIMES Concert Mark Tree gives you an extra professional sheen, one that isn’t merely another blast of filtered white noise, or random S&H sines.

We’ve recorded our Mark tree with a staggering 10 (ten!) round-robins (to enhance performance diversity and to minimise any chance of repetition) per Sweep (both Slow and Fast in both Up and Down directions, plus two dual directions) and Random performances.

The Random performances last 20 seconds plus a natural decay of around 10 seconds, while we’ve also added sub-groups of Random performances of the same length covering 12-bar ranges: low bars, middle bars, and high bars, allowing user-construction of even more variations. All the Random performances are available looped, unlooped, or unlooped with a variable sample start.

Each sample type is mapped over at least two keys to ensure fluid retriggering.

But we didn’t stop there. We recorded a Single hit on each bar and mapped them sequentially over three octaves for a true microtuned set of bars so you can create your own patterns or just trigger individual hits in any way you can, whether via keyboard, CV, or Player generation.

And we didn’t stop there either. Having recorded the chimes with a standard X/Y mic setup, providing a nice but narrow stereo recording that can mix down to mono, we performed the whole process three more times!

For those occasions you just need them to sound big and wide, now we present an O.R.T.F. setup, providing a more natural stereo width where you can hear the sweeps pan from side to side. And for those even bigger occasions you want to utterly bathe in metallic ripples, we recorded it all in mono. Twice. Then arranged them for true double-tracked bar chimes, for an amazing stereo performance!

There’s much more to barCHIMES, including different mappings, and the ability to change the pitch and, oh, the playback speed adjust is so cool!

But rather than bore you with yet another info-dump of bullet points about envelopes, or us start banging on about the cool Damping slider, it’s time for you to enjoy giving it a shimmy yourself! It’ll be the most original and inspirational 720MB you’ll download from the shop all week.

Try it out now and explore all the beautiful and weird things you can do with some suspiciously static metal rods hanging above your favourite Reason synths!

Please refer to the full user guide linked below for the complete “Performance Bar Chimes” key mapping. A per-note mapping display is available in the device.