Thunder Recordings

Hi, I'm Jason Romney, a theatre sound designer based in North Carolina. For the last few years I've been chasing thunder storms in an effort to build a library of quality thunder recordings for use in theatre. Thunder is by far the most common sound effect used in theatre and it is the most difficult to acquire. Aside from the obvious safety issues, background noise is particularly problematic. There are a couple commercial sound effect libraries that have some decent thunder recordings but those are so overused that most storms in theatre all sound the same. These recordings are my humble attempt at providing myself some more material to work with. Some of these are better than others and I'll continue to post more as I'm able to predict where lightning will strike and it happens to be at a time and place where I can record it without frying myself or my equipment and I can do it without the dogs barking, birds chirping, motorcycles racing for cover, and the other gluttony of extra sounds that seem to accompany every thunder storm.

All of these recordings were done using an AKG CK91 and CK94 mic in a Mid-Side configuration. The mics are placed inside a Rycote blimp attached to a suspension system and covered by the Rycote windjammer. The mics are fed into a Zoom H4n recorder running on battery power and recorded in 48kHz/24bit resolution.

I've posted the recordings here for all to use. Please see the Creative Commons license below for questions on permissible use. The recordings are in .wav format with the Mid signal on the Left channel and the Side signal on the Right channel. They are most effectively used in theatre in a Mid-Side loudspeaker configuration but can easily be modified for use in stereo or multi-channel surround configurations.

To view examples of my other work, please visit my home page.

Creative Commons License
Thunder Recordings by Jason Romney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.