Wind in trees — gale blowing — in open woods high in Teign Gorge (3)

On the southern flank of Storm Franklin on 21 February 2022. A strong wind with gale-force gusts racing and chasing through the trees. The last of 3 consecutive recordings in this immediate area during this 3+ hours session. For this recording, the recorder is still further up, off to the right (north) of Hunting Gate, the highest point on the Hunter's Path, out on the hilltop (grazed rough pastureland), with an imposing line of mostly beech trees, both ends of which link with Drewston Wood, and which make a gloriously imposing sound in strong winds. The wind is gradually decreasing, but is still enough to give a certain thrilling pandemonium quality to this day's recording here.

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!

Advisory:
Owing to the wide dynamic range, the most realistic sound level is achieved with volume control turned up 6dB higher than a normal sensible level (for realistic playing of symphonic orchestral music).

This recording being made. Recorder is in shelter of the base of this line of trees (I assume that whole line is the remnants of a one-time layered hedgerow), and is facing away from the tree bases, but at a quite steep angle upwards. This seemed to be the best arrangement, considering the constraints imposed by having to shelter the recorder from the wind (from left here). The aim was to maximize both the shelter and the wind-in-trees panorama — an amusingly challenging ask, if one stops to think about it! — Anyway, I seem to have done something right here!

The same line of trees during this recording, the recorder being sheltered by the basal ridge of the largest clump in the left-most third of this view, and facing us. It was difficult for me to hold the camera at all steadily while bracing myself against the wind, and with my eyes streaming in that blast. Considering that, the successful recording seems like a miracle!

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.

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