Sleigh Bells

How it's made

Source

a leather strap carrying ~12 small brass jingle bells, shaken by hand. Each stroke of the shake throws every bell against its neighbours; the pea (loose pellet) inside each bell hits the shell, giving a 1–3 ms metallic click per bell.

Body

a jingle bell is a small hollow sphere with a slit. Its shell rings in inharmonic modes at roughly 1 : 2.4 : 4.1 (fundamental 2.6–5.5 kHz, differing per bell by size), decaying in 80–350 ms, the upper modes fastest. Twelve different tunings add up to a dense, shimmering cluster rather than a pitch.

Envelope

strokes come as a back-and-forth rhythm (~7 per second) that swells in over the first strokes, holds, then dies away as the shake stops; the bells then ring out for a short tail (~0.3 s).

Events

each stroke fires the bells with 0–30 ms random offsets (they do not move in unison), alternating strong (forward) and weak (back) strokes; stroke timing has a small human jitter.

Variation

`rng` sets the tuning of every bell (-25 % to +50 %), the pan position of each bell along the strap, the strength of each hit and the stroke jitter; presets change pitch, bell count, speed and length.

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.