Gentle night rain with a hint of seagulls and thunder (improved version)

Peaceful rain, yes, but always with a little bit of menace. Improved version of one of my first uploads here.

In the small hours of 28th June 2012 it was raining a bit here in central Exeter, UK (which very rarely has thunderstorms), and I heard an occasional very distant boom of thunder. Just in case the storm was going to develop more and come over, I set up my Sony PCM-M10 raised up on a window ledge in my bedroom and set it going at 02.50, getting back into bed and leaving it to to capture whatever it would.

I'd set the recording level very low in order not to have any close lightning strikes clipped, but I needn't have worried about that because all I got was a recording of the gentle rain (only just audible) plus the more noticeable trickling of rainwater off my roof, with the occasional sound of seagulls and an almost constant deep muttering and mumbling of thunder at or just beyond the limit of audibility (you need speakers / headphones with extended low bass response to hear much of it), and with the very occasional more distinctly audible but still very quiet booms of thunder. Because of the low recording level, my normalizing the file to a genuinely representative level has meant a very considerable amplification, and I was thus really surprised how well it came out.

As the thunder was receding and the rain / trickling sounds gradually reducing while the recorder was running, after some half-hour I terminated the recording (enviously seeing the sky lit up far away to the south-east by almost continuous lightning, meaning the storm was entertaining people somewhere else and not coming my way at all), and subsequently I cut off the last bit of the recording to improve the overall effect.

Actually that storm system remained virulently active through the day, causing widespread havoc especially in the Midlands and northern England, with flash floods, local large hail and the odd tornado. What I'd missed! :-(

So, this recording is a non-event as a thunderstorm recording but is still a nice bit of quiet 'atmosphere'. The seagulls are mostly Herring Gull, but with some Lesser Black-backed Gull. The latter have a similar range of sounds to the Herring Gull, but with distinctively reedy or hoarse-sounding voice.

Techie stuff:

The recorder was Sony PCM-M10, with Rycote Mini Windjammer furry windshield. It was set up on a Hama Mini tripod, which I regard as not just 'mini' but tiny, and so had to be raised up on a pile of books to be at the right height (NOT a good arrangement, as I learnt the hard way later on!).

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield — and to correct for a lower bass resonance caused by the shallow window alcove, and then more recently stereo widening / sharpening-up using the VST plugin A1 Stereo Control (160% widening).

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