As previously mentioned I've been in South Africa for the past 3 weeks recording wildlife as part of the Sonic Mmabolela workshop. I will go into more detail about this in the coming weeks and months as I go through the hundreds of gigabytes of recordings, videos and photos. Until then I want to share a thunderstorm I recorded earlier this evening while I went out to dinner. I was just stepping out when I noticed a lot of lightning in the distance so I set up my D100 on the windowsill just in case the storm would get closer.
Storms seem to be much more violent in Johannesburg than in the UK where I'm based. The other day I heard a lot of thunder while on the trip back from Mmabolela reserve, but sadly I could not record it as we were still on the road. I felt a bit of regret but I've been really happy with everything else I recorded these weeks so I got over it quickly.
This evening's storm passed right over the city though and offered a few extremely loud cracks that were picked up by the recorder. Luckily I had set the input levels really low (as I normally do when recording thunderstorms) so none of the takes were clipped. Here's a short snippet you can download and use commercially as you would do with any library you would purchase from Mindful Audio: