I got a couple of discs worth of audio during the ice storm here last month, most of which was very bad; a few things, though, came out quite nicely. This recording is of me walking along the frozen grassy bank and near the storm drains of Waller Creek, just down the road from my house. I used my trusty AT-822 on a boom pole aimed directly at my feet while I was crunching the snow, and as I walked beside the storm drains I slid the mic inside the drain a bit to capture the echoey sounds under the bridge.

Waller Creek, icy & drainy, January 16, 2007, 1pm
4m57s 7.26MB mp3 (click to download)

Yes, it does occasionally get cold enough in Texas for water to turn solid and fall from the sky. But unless you're in the panhandle it happens only rarely. Earlier this month Austin practically shut down for a few days; it was fun if you didn't have to drive.

Since I'm fairly new to phonography, I haven't yet had the chance to record in icy weather; I had no idea how difficult it is. It's very frustrating trying to record when anything you put on the ground freezes to it in about 5 minutes. And I also kept getting a strange hum from my contact mics when they came in contact with ice. However, I did manage to get some good stuff.

It didn't quite snow, but we did get lots of freezing rain and sleet, and I made it my mission to capture the sounds of that frozen precipitation hitting the ground. My method was to place a contact mic under a frozen leaf and record the sounds of the ice/sleet hitting the leaf. I couldn't record it actually hitting the mic directly: you get nothing but clipping because the mic is so sensitive. And the leaf creates a much more organic sound anyway, I think.

Recorded with a homemade piezo contact mic (scavenged from an old telephone) into a Sony MZ-R50.

Freezing rain, january 16, 2007, 12:10pm
1m44s (click to download)