June afternoon thundery shower

An afternoon thundery shower, with longish anticipatory lead-in with increasing gusts of wind in the trees before rain and thunder come in. All the thunder is rather to very distant, apart from one very loud and moderately startling (presumably) ground strike (probably two or three in rapid succession).

Thunderstorms are quite a rarity in Exeter, so for me each storm is a very special event.

This thundery shower developed and largely just passed by during early afternoon, 11 June 2020, and I was doubtful how worthwhile it would be recording at this time, with all the city noise. The small hours is the time to get decent thunderstorm recordings from my abode. However, frustrated with all the covid restrictions, I set the recorder up anyway as soon as I saw suspicious-looking cloud developments, just in case. In the event there was a lot of disturbance, including yacking neighbours, but at least the rain chased them off somewhat.

Usually my edits are carefully done and are undetectable, but there's one significant edit that does attract attention to itself this time. That is just after the rain has started, just at moderate intensity to start with. The observant listener would notice that when the rain rapidly becomes quite heavy, the trickling and gurgling of run-off from all the neighbourhood's roofs increases simultaneously. To avoid that giveaway, I'd have had to cut out a whole lot more, so I just had to keep it like that. Also, I'm not altogether keen on my immediate neighbour's budgies getting in on the act so prominently, but if I were going to cut them out I'd have little recording left!

Advisory:
To hear this to best effect you need high-grade headphones, and to have the volume setting about 9dB above a sensible normal level for a realistic rendition of symphonic orchestral music. That's a trebling of the sound level.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested Windcut furry windshields (custom design), and it was placed on a Velbon Mini tripod with full extension of centre column on my bedroom window sill, with the window as wide open as it would go.

Initial post-recording processing was to apply an EQ curve to compensate for muffling from the furry windshields, and to compensate for 'alcove resonance' in the bass. I used Audacity ('clip fix' function) to repair the clipped peaks of the one loud bit, but in this case the repair didn't work properly, and various peaks in that little angry outburst remain in a clipped state.

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!