– of Olympos

I actually bought three different sets of Woodstock Chimes, each tuned to a different scale, not for any conventional purpose but for my 'Wind Chimes in the Wild' project. For this I would take one or more sets of chimes out to a carefully chosen reasonable wild place, hang them up on trees alone or in various combinations where there was sufficient wind, and make longish recordings of the whole natural soundscape, incorporating the particular chimes sounds. These recordings have proved to be exquisitely beautiful, and my plan is presently to arrange commercial produce-on-demand CD productions of many of those recordings, which would then go up on Amazon.com. In the meantime I am putting a 5-minute excerpt of each recording up at Freesound.org (my personal website links through to all that). The full length recordings of combinations of the chimes are not soporific like the commercial recordings of wind chimes as 'relaxation' sound, but are in some cases quite as engaging as a work of symphonic music.I chose the 'silver' finish version of each set of chimes, because listening tests on other sites that gave short sound samples of the respective chimes to listen to showed that the 'silver' finish ones had an altogether brighter, 'sunnier' and more 'open' sound, I think because the various alternative finishes somewhat subdue the higher overtones.The Chimes of Olympos are tuned to what is described as an Ancient Greek scale, which appears to be the same as the very sad sounding scale of much Japanese koto music. I found that, when combined with the sound of the Gregorian Chimes, Chimes of Pluto, or indeed both of those, the Olympos chimes changed the others' emotional effect, always bringing sadness into the picture. However, the sound of any and all of them is beautiful beyond description and is far removed from the popular image of wind chimes as being just New-Agey sweet little tinklings. Okay, part of the equation here is the way that I, a composer with a highly sensitive musical ear, am using and recording them in a way that gets the best out of them, but I think few reasonably sensitive people would not be moved by the beauty of sound of any of these three sets that I bought.I cannot commend these chimes too highly. My own preference is for a well balanced timbre, with a clearly audible and reasonably even spread of overtones, right into the highest reaches of the audible frequency range, and these silver finish ones seem to fit the bill admirably.Update, 21 November 2013:I now have available a big range of my recordings of 'Wind Chimes in the Wild', which you can find if you Google "philip goddard e-store" (not in quotes), some of which include the Olympos chimes.

Beautiful looking and the sound is wonderful. A little loud for a suburban garden so have hung in a sheltered position where they gently play

Good quality, nice proper tones but a tad on the loud side for me. Bought it as a gift for my wife, she loves it.

So much bigger than I expected! Lovely chime and very good quality.

... Sounds a bit tinny, the clatter of pans being banged in a distant kitchen. I have a variety of different windchimes , ranging from tinkly to sonorous, hanging in the one tree. But if you were only going to have one, then this probably isn't it.