Wind in trees — gale blowing — in open woods high in Teign Gorge (1)

On the southern flank of Storm Franklin on 21 February 2022. A strong wind with gale-force gusts racing and chasing through the trees high up on the north side of the so-called Teign Gorge.

First of 3 consecutive recordings in this immediate area during this 3+ hours session. For this recording, the recorder is in a relatively sheltered bit of the woodland, and the gusts coming close around are not all that strong or loud, but that means that we're hearing all the more clearly the general commotion all around, including from the other side of the valley (to left). There's something really beautiful and invigorating about being in a relatively calm patch while crazy strong gusts are chasing about all around us.

It had been a long-standing goal of mine to record somewhere just around here a full gale such as I recorded here on 30 January 2013 in a Wind Chimes In the Wild session. That sounded really awesome. The catch, however, was that at that stage I was using the Sony PCM-M10 recorder, which has quite atrocious stereo imaging. More recently I used A1 Stereo Control to widen and sharpen those recordings, but then they suffered in much the same way as many sea recordings did from being so processed.

The result was that although they sound great via headphones, when one listens through speakers one gets peculiar phasiness effects, including a range of unnatural effects if one moves one's position in relation to the speakers. This mattered rather less for the chimes recordings, where the chimes were the prime focus of attention, but it definitely mattered for the recording of wind only.

Since then on a few occasions since I changed over to using the PCM-D100 recorder I'd sought to capture a similar soundscape, with a real gale roaring through the trees. Those recordings were all great in their own different ways, but didn't reach such a height of wind power. This session's three recordings are my nearest-yet to my 2013 'full-gale' standard, and each in its own way makes a wonderful listen (in some ways maybe more rewarding than the 'full-gale' ultimate aim), but capturing an 'equals or greater' version of that 2013 gale still lies out there as an evil siren leading me on to goodness-knows where!

This recording being made (on the left). This is the track the ascends from Fingle Bridge to meet the Hunter's Path (just a little ahead and round to the right in this view).

Techie stuff:
The recorder was Sony PCM-D100, with two nested custom Windcut furry windshields. Its Sirui carbon-fibre tripod was used at about its shortest, to minimize wind exposure.

Initial post-recording processing was to apply an EQ curve to compensate for muffling from the furry windshields, and I used my Extreme Wind-Cut profile in the dynamic EQ VST plugin TDR Nova GE to tame microphone wind disturbance.

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