I used to alive in Edinburgh, a breezy city at the best of times. Once it was so windy that I could feel my second floor flat moving slightly – in a Victorian building fabricated out of sandstone.

So I have a off-white chip of experience of trying to brand field and location recordings in loftier winds. For the uninitiated, wind on a microphone makes a rumbly distorting sound. Directional mics are specially bad for it. Here are some examples:

Wind creates very low frequency vibration in the mic diaphragm, then that the mic is essentially sending a DC electric current into the preamps. This not just makes a lot of sub bass, hence the rumble, but as well overloads the preamps, hence the distortion.

Some people are more than tolerant than me, and debate that a bit of wind noise tin requite a sense of conditions and atmosphere.

Simply if wind is causing you lot trouble, hither are some suggestions for how to reduce it.

The best solution is to avert getting wind noise into your recordings in the offset identify. To achieve this yous tin:

1. Use appropriate wind protection. Cream windshields are non much skilful for outdoors unless in that location'due south very lilliputian wind around. You need the hirsuite things – yous might accept seen them on TV, thrust in front of a politician or being knocked over by footballs when a goal is scored. Wimbledon fifty-fifty has special light-green coloured ones to blend in with the grass.

Rycote make windshields in all shapes and sizes, for but about any decent mic or recorder available. Their basic wind jammers ones are cheap (from around £30) but less constructive; the more sophisticated ones are more pricey, going upward to effectually £500 depending on the options. My feel is that you become what you pay for: the more expensive ones are more effective.

Rycote gear
Rycote air current protection. Left: a low cost mini windjammer will provide modest current of air racket reduction for portable recorders such as this Zoom H4n. Right: a more than expensive full modular windshield provides much higher wind dissonance reduction. The piffling brush is for combing the pilus!

two. If y'all're on a tight upkeep consider Rode'southward offerings (e.k. the 'blimp', 'expressionless cat' and 'dead kitten' models offer varying levels of protection but at lower prices than the Rycote equivalents), or endeavor to borrow a wind protection kit from somewhere, or rent stuff – wait for places that loan out broadcast sound gear, such as The Warehouse in Edinburgh and Glasgow .

Alternatively there is the DIY approach. I've not had much success with that myself. There are online tutorials about how to build your own windshield, so I once spent an entire weekend sourcing simulated fur and disassembling several sieves, whose mesh I then oestrus-glued together with a reshaped wire coathanger to brand a zeppelin style basket. The mic was held in place past elastic bands. The only fur I could discover was luminous pinkish, so it looked like a tiny Elton John costume. Sadly information technology wasn't very effective. Soon later on I managed to discover funds to buy the existent deal from Rycote. The sieve/fur/coathanger/Elton John job got binned swiftly. Never looked back.

3. Buy a high wind cover for your Rycote. This is a fleece layer that sits between the basket and the fur, and it adds a few dB of wind racket reduction. See here for i example. It'due south not too expensive, and I think it does work, enough to be worth using. Together with the fur it reduces the high frequencies a fleck, but a modest shelving boost in mail (e.g. in your audio editing software), say 3dB from around 8kHz, will aid with that.

4. Notice shelter e.g. by fishing your torso into the air current and pointing the mics away, or looking for a construction that will act as a windbreak, or moving into the lee of a loma. I usually carry a rucsac with me when I'm out recording, and so I sometimes dump that on the ground and put the mics in the lee of it to break up the air menses a fleck.

five. Get low down. Wind shear ways that wind velocity drops massively the lower to the ground you go, and increases every bit you get college. Try putting your windshielded mic actually on the ground – it can help. (I've heard of acousticians measuring wind turbine noise by mounting miniature mics in wooden boards, with the mic flush to the surface. The boards are then placed on the basis with a windshield over the acme.)

half-dozen. Use omnidirectional mics. They are more resistant to air current than directional mics. DPA 4060 miniature mics are skilful for this. They yet need some windshielding, only in whatever given windshield they will perform ameliorate than a directional mic. I find that the little lavalier windjammers that fit over these mics, like furballs, are OK for a light breeze, only for anything more I have to mount the DPAs in my full Rycote suspension. Simply then they work slap-up, and the combo seems to be more wind resistant than when I have directional mics mounted in the windshield.

7. Consider using contact mics or hydrophones when recording in a windy place. Contact mics volition sometimes option up a bit of the air whistling past them, but otherwise they're allowed to wind noise. And hydrophones, being in the water, won't be troubled by unruly air flows.

Contact mics
Contact mics transduce vibrations in solids rather than in air, then they don't suffer from the same problems with wind noise as ordinary microphones.

8. Engage the loftier pass filter on your recorder. This will only be helpful if the filter is a hardware one located in the preamps. Peter Cusack once explained to me that often these filters are digital, and therefore at a indicate in the signal concatenation after whatsoever overloading of the preamps has already occurred. In that case you're probably meliorate off waiting until mail-production and doing loftier pass/depression cut filtering in that location, and so you have more command over the state of affairs (come across below).

In the Audio Devices 702 that I use, the kickoff pole of filtering is counterpart, 40Hz with a 6dB per octave slope, which tin can definitely help reduce the overloading of the preamps from very low frequencies.

9. Avoid recording in high winds. Stating the obvious, and sometimes non possible, but worth thinking about. Wait till it's all diddled over.

If yous end up with current of air noise in your recordings, there are several means to reduce information technology:

  • Edit information technology out. If the noise is a trouble for just a few occasional moments, you can cut out the relevant sections in your editing software and use equal ability crossfades to bring together the bits either side back together again. This works specially well where the recording is of a fairly continuous sound, so the crossfade won't be besides noticeable.
  • Endeavour a racket reduction program such as iZotope RX. The Avant-garde version of RX has a de-wind module specifically designed to remove wind noice. This software is aimed at professionals, so it's extremely impressive but with a price tag to friction match. If yous're a DIY or hobbyist recordist on a budget, you could effort the gratis demo, and if it works well for you lot look at monthly subscription options. Or you could look for a audio engineer who has RX Avant-garde and would be willing to help you for a small-scale fee (this is the sort of freelance sound work I oftentimes practise for people – experience gratis to drop me a line). At that place is also a low cost version of RX called Elements which y'all could try. It doesn't accept the de-air current module, but information technology has a general purpose noise reduction facility called 'voice de-noise'. My advice would be to train it on a section of wind noise using the 'learn' push. It can then be used to intelligently remove these offending frequencies from the whole audio file.
  • Apply a high pass filter or low cutting equalisation. You'll need to play around with the frequency and slope. I suggest starting with about -6dB of shelving at effectually 100Hz, and and then move the frequency effectually a flake to find the best spot. If you're having trouble deciding on the frequency, i fob is to first with a elevation EQ and heave a lot, say by +12dB or even more, and sweep around to find the frequency where the dissonance seems to bound out at y'all nigh. And then cut at that frequency. It's easy to overdo it though. If y'all cut also much bass from everything you can stop upward with very sparse sounding results, so go along with circumspection. It will work better where the other sounds are higher frequency, e.g. most bird song isn't going to be affected past cutting low frequencies, whereas the drone of traffic contains lots of low end so will exist more than adversely affected.
  • Utilise automation to activate the filtering/EQ right at the moment when it'due south needed, and then remove it afterwards. That fashion, the depression end volition be retained in the balance of the recording. In DAWs such as Logic audio you can automate the controls to reach this. Prepare an EQ plugin on your aqueduct. Turn automation  on. Over again, start with a low shelf cutting around 100Hz, maybe a bit college; once again play around and listen for what works best. Then observe your spike of current of air noise in the waveform, zoom in, and use the automation to adapt the amount of cut on the EQ. Outset with the EQ gain at zero dB, so just before the noise automate it down to say -12dB, and and then bring it back up again to zero. The shorter the time y'all cut for, the more extreme cut you can get abroad with. Using a slight curve in the automation line will usually be more subtle and less of an obvious edit than if you only switch the filter straight in and so out again.

This 'how to' guide was produced equally role of a research fellowship entitled 'Researching sonic environments: exploring audio methodologies'. Thanks to the AHRC for funding this project.