Capturing field recordings and incorporating them into music is one my stylistic passions. I composed the track The Merry Times, which is on the album Regretfulnot, to convey the joy I felt getting to know the maritime culture and geography of Nova Scotia, Canada, as well as the love I developed for the region and residents, which I still feel today after moving back to Seattle. The track The Merry Times includes five field recordings I took in Lunenburg and Halifax, Nova Scotia. I mastered a collection of those field recordings. The collection includes all of the original field recordings taken by me and any processed versions used in the track. I used two recordings without processing other than trimming and high-pass filtering (taking out unwanted rumble).
One of my favorite field recordings I’ve ever taken is the first one heard in The Merry Times. My wife and I were on vacation in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, in 2022 before moving to Halifax. I got up early and left our hotel before she woke up so I could get some recording done before cars were out and about (alas). After recording birdsong outside our hotel, I walked to the Lunenburg waterfront. At the very first dock, an older gentleman was working hard to bail out a large rowboat that was partially submerged. (Maybe there’d been a big rain a few days before, but I don’t recall.) I felt awkward asking him if I could record while he sweated away. But the sound was just so wonderful, I had to. He said good morning, yes, and never made a crack about me not helping. In the album, the recording is used virtually unprocessed (some low-end was taken out to spare everyone’s speakers) and again with some processing (some resonant filtering and gating). I included this field recording at the start of the track for two reasons: it just hits hard with the energy the guy was putting into his work, and it represents the effort it took my wife and I to move from the US to The Maritimes of Canada.
I recorded the next field recording in The Merry Times a couple of years after the boat-bailing recording during the 2024 SailGP. My wife and I watched the race from the Halifax boardwalk. As you can tell if you listen to the recording, that particular day was rather windy. During one trip to the restroom, I noticed the sound of the wind through the big Canadian flag near the Maritime Heritage Museum and the banging from the flag’s rigging against the pole. I used the recording in The Merry Times to give the track a lot of heft at different times throughout the track. Turns out, though, there’s so much low end in the recording that I had to filter most of it out by the time I finished mixing the album.
I captured the third field recording in the track in 2022 on the same Nova Scotia vacation before moving to Halifax. It’s the sound of the main water fountain in the Halifax Public Gardens. I know it was about 58 degrees Fahrenheit when I took the recording because I had to cut off the audio of my wife saying, “It can’t possibly be 58 degrees.” …I’m guessing she was cold. I included the raw recording in the track. But I also heavily processed it by filtering and slicing the audio into short pieces. It sounds like I pitch-shifted the recording but that’s just the effect of slicing into such short bits. It adds a great increasing tension to the track.
I took the fourth field recording in the track on a walk by myself along the Halifax boardwalk at some point after we moved there—so 2024. It was early enough that there weren’t many tourists out. It was a nice weekend, and, as happens in Halifax, there were a lot of large pleasure crafts tied up along the boardwalk. I couldn’t resist recording the rhythms of the harbor waves moving the boats, which banged against the floating dock. The raw recording appears on the track. I also sliced up the recording and added many random effects using the Momentum plugin from Big Fish Audio—one of my favorite free plugins.
I love the first field recording that you hear in The Merry Times and I love, almost as much, the last one. I recorded it about 30 minutes after the boat-bailing recording, several docks down from where the gentleman was trying to rescue his rowboat. I was standing looking across the Lunenburg harbor when I could hear the faint sound of a rowboat rowing. I turned to find it and was amazed to see how far away it was for how easily I could hear that sound. I pressed record to capture the boat and oarsman getting closer and moving away. You’ll be amazed listening to the recording that the boat was a few hundred feet away. The sound just carried right across the water. Other than high-pass filtering, the recording was used pretty much unprocessed in the track. I placed this recording last in the track because it’s just a tad melancholy to me. It sounds like the feeling I have in leaving and no longer being in Nova Scotia. It was a wonderful experience. It was the direction we chose. It’s now, unfortunately, behind us, but we’re better for the experience.