Backyard Rain & Thunder | Suburban Rain Recordings

Calm Rain for Sound Design and recreational Listening

Rain is high on the list on people’s favorite sounds to relax, study, or sleep to. For how soothing and common of a sound it is, it certainly is one of the most difficult to record – that is, if you want to still be able to use your gear afterwards.

In early spring of 2023, a little rain recording experiment on the fire escape leading to my somewhat sheltered backyard revealed that little to no city noise would actually make it onto the recording. Surprised by how clean these recordings came out, and by how wet of a summer we’ve been having this year, I proceeded to record in the backyard of my apartment almost every time it rained.

Over a period of 6 months, I recorded hundreds of gigabytes of rain and ultimately narrowed it down to the 3 hours contained in this library. If you are looking for rain recordings that are clean and work well for layering while still clearly anchoring your soundscape in suburban spaces, this is the library for you! Also included are two long thunderstorms that can be heard moving into the distance.

These recordings contain no distinct car sounds, people, or sirens, and have been minimally processed to make them flexible for use in films, games, and video productions.

As an added bonus, this library contains immersive, Ambisonic (AmbiX) recordings of rain captured from the inside of a tin shed. To convert these recordings to binaural or surround formats I recommend downloaded the free SoundField by RØDE plug-in.

Metadata: UCS file naming, SoundMiner, Soundly, BWF

Recording Specs: 24 Bit / 96 kHz

Channel Formats: Stereo, AmbiX (Ambisonics B-Format)

File Format: WAV