Torrential shower high up in Teign Gorge

A prolonged shower, torrential for a while, recorded beside the Hunter's Path, high up on the north side of the Teign Gorge (Drewsteignton, Devon, UK). The rain sound is augmented by the assault of drips from the tree canopy onto my umbrella. The recording begins with gusts of gentle breeze in the trees, with the first faint patterings of rain noticeable from about 12½' in.

As this gets building up, the sound of raindrops falling on the umbrella becomes dwarfed by the louder impacts of the drips coming down from the tree foliage, and in the torrential phase this becomes an entertaining din. As this gradually dies down, amid all the drippings from the trees we hear the occasional distant tawny owl, but the reality is that this is only about mid-afternoon — not in the night.

This was the serendipitous end result of a failure of my primary aim, for this session was intended to capture any of the thundery showers forecast for this afternoon that came this way. In the event there was no thunder, but at least a quite torrential shower developed, lasting a bit over an hour.

However, I was expecting to discard the recording because while the cloud was developing prior to giving any rain, the otherwise light northerly wind, from which my recording session was nicely sheltered, started picking up to force 5 gusts from the east, blowing along the valley and thus catching the recorder, and then once it was raining, especially when that got heavy, the rain made a great din on the umbrella that I had to use to shelter both me and the recorder, and it seemed to me that the recording wouldn't be worth keeping, let alone using.

However, once I'd very dubiously processed the recording back at home and listened to bits of it, I was surprised to find how good it was despite the din of the torrent of drips from the tree foliage onto the umbrella being really too strong. As for the wind, actually for this type of recording content the microphone wind noise was almost all within an acceptable range, though I did find it necessary to EQ the bass to reduce the lower boomy bass frequencies by up to 6dB in order to reduce the heavy intrusiveness of some of that microphone wind noise.

So, the recording starts with some gusts of wind blowing around in the trees, both up here and down below in the valley — and then at about 23 minutes in (12½ minutes in this CD-length version), the first faint patterings of small raindrops come to notice. This builds up very slowly to a torrential assault — and the umbrella rain noise is then quite an assault on the ears!

However, despite the intensity of the umbrella rain noise, the latter does not obliterate the general rain sound, which has a different quality — and, at least for me, in playback, the umbrella rain noise really does seem to be coming from rather above, as indeed it was, leaving the straight-ahead and lower physical levels in the soundstage surprisingly audible, and giving a particularly friendly and 'intimate' aspect to the soundscape.

To produce this CD-length version from the full edited recording (78'), I shortened both the torrential phase and the wind-only beginning.

Advisory
To hear this at a realistic level and not lose the quieter details altogether, the volume needs to be 12–15dB above a sensible normal listening level.

This recording being made, before the rain started. Positioned for great sound effects if only it had been a thunderstorm with lightning strikes down into the valley, echoing and reverberating therein! That's the 'holy grail' that I want to capture from somewhere high up in the Teign Gorge.

Although this position looks potentially dangerous for when lightning is around, actually the important point here is that the particular oak tree is stunted, with canopy standing up no higher than nearby trees — and I looked around for signs of already extant lightning damage on trees in the vicinity. The only obvious signs of lightning damage were on more isolated birch trees outside this small copse, out there on the slope, so the implication is that the chances of a strike catching this particular tree on any occasion would be very small indeed, even in a severe storm. I noted the same pattern all along the Hunter's Path.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was Sony PCM-D100, with three nested custom Windcut furry windshields. It was used on a full-size Zipshot tripod.

Initial post-recording processing was to use Audacity to apply an EQ curve to compensate for muffling from the furry windshields, with 9dB bass cut to tame the mic wind noise.

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