Tuned Gongs Virtual Instrument

The Crow Hill Company has brought what they describe as a beautiful set of tuned gongs to its free VAULTS... Virtual Instrument collection as ...TUNED GONGS. They say that this effectively enables anyone to play an extraordinary quartet of harmonised gongs designed and used by meditation gurus as part of gong bath setups in a way that was never intended by their Italian creator after being bought and sampled by company founder Christian Henson. Here's the details in their own words...

It is sometimes said -- quite often, truth be told -- that All roads lead to Rome. And although that popular proverb does not apply to The Crow Hill Company's VAULTS - TUNED GONGS in the true sense of those words' intended meaning, Italy's capital city could be said to have played a passing part in the VI in question's road to reality. Composer Christian Henson picks up the tentative thread, teasing, "There is a cave, just outside Rome, and in that cave they make gongs; we're not sponsored by them -- they don't even know we're making this thing. They do more than you'd expect out of a big cymbal."

Changing tact, Christian Henson clarifies: "Ask any member of The Crow Hill team about my attention span and they will say that whilst, like most of us musos, I have the capacity for hyper-focus, I'm also easily distracted -- especially when it comes to something new. We're meant to be working on a fascinating new addition to the Origins... series, but, unfortunately, I'm easy prey for an Instagram post featuring an instrument I hadn't heard before. Correction: I'd heard gongs before; I've even had the chance to play one, but none that sounded like these ones. Or rather this one. The big one. So I bought a whole tree of them! That's what's so fulfilling about this Crow Hill project; we get to make investments on behalf of the composing fraternity, so we all get a go."

Get this, though. "This VAULTS... features four incredible-sounding tuned gongs that were designed, I suspect, for gong bath therapy," theorises The Crow Hill Company's original founder, following up with some characteristically vibrant verbiage: "Beautiful, bold fundamentals; mystical, engaging harmonics; and also a bottom end that shakes the room. I very much get the feeling that these gongs are not designed to be whacked. They really do complain when they're abused in this way. The big one... well, she growls like a distant dragon, while the smallest protests in the shape of a scoop up an entire perfect fifth before it reluctantly settles into its fundamental. We've basically overlapped them and layered them to give you a quite rudimentary piano-style, chromatic instrument."

It is fair to say, then, that the sometimes badly behaving VAULTS - TUNED GONGS sounds somewhat different to any of its software siblings. Saying that, though, its intuitive GUI (Graphical User Interface) is comfortingly familiar to anyone who has laid eyes on any VAULTS... release, identical in (almost) all aspects -- bar its distinguishing background colour change -- to all of The Crow Hill Company's current collection. "Front end-wise, we've got EXPRESSION on CC11," continues Christian Henson. "On the gongs that are higher in pitch you do get a kind of rumble, so I would recommend being very cautious about the SUB BASS control -- particularly when you close the LPF [Low Pass Filter], when there's a super-wide low end, which is so difficult to achieve; getting that kind of fatness, but also having that stereo width is pretty incredible. If you're confident with your bass response in your studio or on your headphones, then go for it, but this thing really does shake the room. Then we've got some DELAY. You can make it even wider with the REVERB, and, because we're naughty, there's a little bit of CRYSTALLIZER in there, which is just incredible. As always with the VAULTS... macros, they're designed so that you can't make it sound terrible -- everything has a subtle musical quality to it."

Concludes Christian Henson: "We're doing something incredibly exciting; a new way of sampling, but also treating these gongs with utmost respect, appreciating their soft, infinitely nuanced harmonics that change on every hit. The distraction has become a serious one, taking weeks as they're not easy to record. When something is shaking the room and all the air inside it, what do you mic? So we needed a test recording. What better way of ushering in 2026 than with a shuddering tree of room-shaking gongs? There are some lower dynamics in there, which will give you a sense of where we're headed with this project -- a useful tuned metallophone that's difficult to place, but, really, the purpose of this VAULTS... is to gong these! For that odd time you need a gong for a cue, these are pure class. I also found turning my speakers up and playing at full velocity to be an excellent way of getting my teenagers down for breakfast; they don't like them at all."

Pricing and Availability:
VAULTS... releases from The Crow Hill Company -- including ...TUNED GONGS -- are free for all to download and make music with for the rest of their lives from here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/vaults/

VAULTS - TUNED GONGS 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/

Although anyone adding a VAULTS... release to their account (https://thecrowhillcompany.com/my-account/) for free can make music with it for the rest of their lives, only six such releases are available to download at any given time -- the oldest being 'rested' whenever a new monthly release is added. All is not lost for those who may have missed the boat, so-to-speak, since those VAULTS... taken out of rotation periodically reappear as donation-ware, with six rested releases already available as VAULTS ARCHIVE N°01 (https://thecrowhillcompany.com/vaults-archive-no01/) for a small donation to Love Music (https://lovemusic.org.uk), a Scottish dynamic music inclusion and education charity that strives to increase its participants' confidence, musical skills, and well-being through an exciting range of open-access projects designed to remove all barriers to participation and increase diversity in music-making.

More information:

• Tuned Gongs

• The Crow Hill Company Intros Arcane Strings 17-Aug-26
• Broadcast-Grade Strings For All 07-Aug-26
• Harmonics Sampled From Grand Pianos 29-Jul-26
• The Crow Hill Company Releases Brackish Pads 06-Jul-26
• The Crow Hill Company Releases Crystal Pads 15-Jun-26