2016 Holiday Freebies

December 22, 2016

2018 update: there’s a new freebie library available. Get it here!

2016 is almost over and it's been a pretty good year for field recording. On the first day of the year I was in Romania recording ice, snow, dead silent forest ambiences, gears and a whole lot of other stuff. Some of these sounds made it into two sound effects libraries which were pretty well received.

Later in the year I attended a couple of field recording workshops with Chris Watson, I recorded a WW2 training airplane with the help of Rob Brown and Joe Cavers, and I got a Double MS rig which I then used for recording ambiences in South Africa. I'm still going through the recordings I made there and I will compile them into at least two libraries in the near future.

I've also done many smaller recording sessions which resulted in a multitude of very varied sound recordings, from water dripping in various places to beaches and from various vehicles to hits and impacts. They come in very handy in my daily work as a sound designer but they're also quite an eclectic mix that can't be organized in libraries. Therefore I thought I'd share some of these as a freebie set to thank everyone who has ever purchased a library from me.

Happy Holidays and may the next year be even better than 2016!

Dispatch from South Africa and thunderstorm recording

November 30, 2016

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.

Hidden gem - Great Tit solo recording

November 10, 2016

Quick post to share a beautiful Great Tit (Parus Major) solo. I'm working on a project that requires me to dig deep into my field recording archives and I keep finding all kinds of gems. Since I haven't shared a recording in a while (and I'll soon be away for a month or so without access to internet) I figured I'd take a minute to upload this. Enjoy!

Wildlife Sound Recording Society Autumn Meeting 2016

October 23, 2016

The past weekend I attended a very enjoyable WSRS Autumn meeting in Norfolk. Having attended last year's Autumn meeting, I was excited at the prospect of getting away from the busy soundscape of South East England (where I've been living since September). As a special treat this year we were joined by the Society's President, wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson.

Hydrophone recordings of aquatic life

July 22, 2016

Hydrophones are too often overlooked as tools for field recording or sound design, even more so than contact microphones. I guess the reason for his is that (1) they're so unpredictable and (2) no one wants to realistically portray underwater sound. Hollywood and by extension the media in general will happily throw a lowpass filter on noise and add some bubbling sounds and that's about the extent of underwater ambience that we'll get.

Ravens mobbing Buzzard

July 13, 2016

Yesterday I went on my daily walk in the Pentland Hills just outside Edinburgh. It was quite windy as it has been around here for the past month or so, making it impossible for me to go out and record anymore dawn choruses.

Recording birds in open fields

June 8, 2016

I've recently taken an interest in recording open air spaces such as hills, meadows or fields. This proved to be a bit more difficult than recording woodland or quarries for a number of reasons:

man-made (or sheep-made) noise can easily pollute these places
there's far less wildlife than in woodland or forest
there's little to no reverberation so the sounds are perceived as softer
wind is a much bigger issue than in woodland

Wildeye field recording trip to Northumberland

May 24, 2016

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of joining Chris Watson, Jez Riley French and several others on an enjoyable field recording trip/workshop in College Valley, Northumberland. This was my 3rd Wildeye course actually so I knew exactly how to prepare and what to expect.

The workshop location was Mounthooley Bunkhouse, same as last year. For those unfamiliar, this is deep in the College Valley, far away from traffic or industrial noise and surrounded by hills, pastures and wooded patches. College Burn flows close by and can make recording ambiences rather difficult since it's quite noisy however.