Church Hymns | Chimes Volume 1

27 May 2008

Chimes Volume 1

What follows is a listing of the cd, with a link to purchase it, as well as a list of the hymns that are included (and a link to each of their purchase pages if you would like to just purchase the mp3 of one of the individual hymns.) If you’re interested in the background of the CD, you will find that below the track listing.

Buy Chimes Volume 1 ($8)
Chimes Vol. 1 cover

The first tracks of this CD were recorded sometime in 1998 or 1999. I recorded about 6 to 8 traditional hymns for our Church to use as chimes. For a good number of years, an old reel to reel tape had played chimes for a few minutes in the evening over the loudspeakers on the roof. Well, the reel to reel had broken and one of our Ministers at the time had donated an old tape deck to make use of them again. One problem though was material. I believe we had a tape that we used for a short time, but then the tape deck stopped working and we started looking for a cd. Most cd’s we could find at that time were either TOO busy for what we wanted, or had too many instruments and gave full orchestration. All we wanted was the sound of bells playing hymns.

So, I had a Kawai 640 digital piano that had a relatively nice vibraphone sound and I also had powertracks pro for Windows and I recorded about 6-8 songs and prepared a short (15 minute) cd. We made use of it several times, either before service or before Vacation Bible School.

Along about this time, mp3.com was giving musicians a place to put their music online for free download, or for people to buy a cd and as I recall, they were paying based on the number of cds sold or downloads played. I put those same songs up on mp3.com (along with some other recordings.) And, if I recall correctly sold 1 or 2 cds of the chimes. Recently, I had a bit of a “reawakening” of interest in getting back to recording and among the first of the old files I discovered were the chimes. I had for some time known of a site called lulu.com where you can self publish a book, pictures, cd’s, etc. and had wanted to give a try. On looking at what I had recorded, I found a few problems with the recordings (slight distortion) that I wanted to fix. Additionally, the idea of selling a 15 minute cd for 6 dollars seemed quite…. uninspiring. So, I decided to add to the cd and prepare it for release. Finally, after several months of work in selecting, checking public domain status, recording, editing and proofing, then re-recording a few…. I’ve finally released Chimes Volume 1 (Everything was finalized late on October 22,2006)