Here’s a set of live tweaks to some sheet metal hits (recorded when we had a custom heat shield fabricated for our wood stove). In my library, when I see “forked” in a filename, I know it’s gonna get weird…

My mecca on a foggy morning: Urban Ore!

I went to the granddaddy of thrift stores recently, so much so that it’s more of a glorified junk store…but oh, what glorious junk. I’m talking about Urban Ore in Berkeley, California. Sometimes I’m self-conscious shopping for things by ear, picking up random things and just listening to them, but at Urban Ore – heck, Berkeley in general – I can ear-shop in peace.

I was in a metallic mood, so I filled a bag with things that squeak, resonate, creak, clank, and sproing. Based on the dronetastic results of striking wire shelving last year, I picked up a few thin-wire metal grills that had sonic promise, among other things that will surely find their way to this blog later this fall and winter.

For the grills, I decided to trot out my much-neglected piezo contact microphones. The resonant notes were so subtle that it seemed like the best way to capture the sound at a reasonable volume. I plucked them, struck them, and played them with a cello bow. The magic happened, though, when I realized one was easily played with a bow and the other was not, so I stuck the bowable one inside of the other, and played away, causing both of them to resonate when played appropriately.

The results were like ultra-low-fi bastardizations of stringed instruments played in horror movies, and I just loved the character. The rawness of hearing the actual hairs of the bow on the metal, in my opinion, lends to the eerie charm.

[Contact microphone into Sound Devices 702 recorder]

Rusty? Heavy? Covered in graffiti? You KNOW it will sound good.

Many people are unaware that the San Francisco Bay Area was once thoroughly fortified against attacks from the sea. Remnants of this past dot the entrance to the Golden Gate, in the form of bunkers that once housed gun emplacements.

One such installation was Battery Yates at Fort Baker. Located at the best vantage point for southward-facing photos of the Golden Gate Bridge, Battery Yates was meant for nothing other than picking off minesweepers that might try to get through the minefields inside the ‘Gate in wartime…minesweepers, of course, that would never come.

Battery Yates was active from 1905 through 1946. Now, only the U.S. Coast Guard maintains a station at Fort Baker, primarily for saving the lives of boaters and wind/kitesurfers. Now Battery Yates is a tourist attraction, is fun to scramble on and around…and, in swords to ploughshares style, is also a great source for cool sounds!

Each of the gun emplacements has four lockers, each sealed with a massive steel door. Some doors have outer latches that have been left to swing freely in favor of just welding the doors shut. These latches, rusted by more than 60 years of salty mist, are quite expressive when swung, manipulated, and otherwise mishandled. The perfectly square concrete rooms behind these doors caused them to have a lot of low end and resonance.

I decided to try my luck with recording some groaning metal effects on these doors, despite the fact that:

• I only had some time before work one weekday, which meant that…
• I could only record during rush hour, made worse by the fact that…
• The Golden Gate Bridge is only 1/8 of a mile away, plainly visible from the recording site.

All this meant lots of background traffic noise. I mitigated these risks by using a hypercardioid microphone for off-axis rejection of sound (a shotgun would have been a better choice in terms of pattern, but I just loved the sound of my MKH-50 too much to not use it), careful placement of the mic relative to the bridge (making sure that either the mic element faced away from the bridge or a thick concrete wall blocked line of sight), and the judicious use of the Denoiser plugin from iZotope RX. And, for effects like these, the small-condenser-mic proximity effect only helps!

The result came out pretty well, all things considered…although the editing in today’s post is pretty sloppy, so apologies for that. Everything was recorded at 24-bit, 192-kHz, as best befits complex groaning metal sounds, since pitching this stuff down can yield pure sound-design gold. I recorded even more massive metal hits from this session, which may be a topic for a separate post… (And until then, you can hear yet more heavy metal hits/impacts here, here, and here.)

[MKH 50 microphone into Sound Devices 702]

Pumps lift me out of the dumps.

This thread on Social Sound Design made me start thinking about all the manual pumps I had in my shed: One hand sprayer for my fruit trees, one for cleaning off my kayaks with fresh water, and another for bilging out my kayak in case I get water in my cockpit.

I gathered these all together and did a short recording session. As is usual, the proximity effect of closely-placed small-condenser mics were far too bassy, so I went back to my favorite solution for up-close foley and effects recording: The large-condenser mic.

Today’s post is just a small smattering of these sounds. Depending on which pump type it is, they range from sounding silly to serious, low-tech to high-tech, smooth to rattly. These sessions were more exploratory than looking for library-quality; the more rattle-filled pumps probably won’t be as useful as the smoother-action ones. The Bilgemaster hand pump was the cleanest-sounding of them all, with basically no moving parts except the plunger and a small rubber valve. But, the pressure sprayers have pressure release valves on top which can be most useful for air release or hissing sounds!

[Røde NT1-A into Sound Devices 702]

The home studio, circa summer 2011.

Following on my previous post, here’s how I break down data storage, redundancy, and backup in my own home studio. These strategies won’t work for everyone, but having tried lots of different configurations, this setup balances redundancy, backup, flexibility, speed, and most of all, cost. And, of course, this breakdown is only useful in the small home studio. Larger studios have totally different needs!

My Data Storage Topology

Internal Hard Drive: Apps and Personal Data

The internal hard drive inside my MacBook Pro 17″ laptop holds only applications, plug-ins, and non-mission-critical personal data. I upgraded the stock internal drive to a 1TB 7200rpm hard disk. If I had a desktop machine instead of a laptop, I’d probably want a second internal hard drive so that I could split my personal files and data separately from my system and application data.

External RAID: Project Data

I have an Otherworld Computing Qx2 RAID with four disks, striped for RAID5. I keep it to 1.5TB in size – four 500GB hard drives, since RAID5 has a capacity of N-1 – in order to ensure that Pro Tools can access it for live projects, and to reduce read/seek times. I use enterprise-class, 7200rpm hard drives and always keep a fifth hot-swappable spare in case one of the disks goes down. While the enterprise model is more expensive, its warranty and drop-shipment of replacement drives is worth the piece of mind.

External Hard Drive: Scratch Disk

This Seagate Barracude 7200rpm drive, mounted in an Otherworld Computing Mercury Elite Pro enclosure, is only used as a scratch disk for applications like Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Peak Pro, and transfers from Soundminer into Pro Tools. I never store any of my own data on it. It is only 160GB in size, which is more than enough for this purpose. Ideally this would be a 10,000rpm drive, but that’s a bit spendy with all the other stuff I’ve got going on. There are also confusing reports about the speed benefits (or lack thereof) of using a solid state drive as a scratch disk, so I’ll try that at a later date. If this drive fails, I have a spare 80GB Barracuda stored offline in a closet that I can press into service.

External Hard Drive Dock: Backups

This is a strategy that I picked up from Michael Raphael of Rabbit Ears Audio. Drive docks like my NewerTech Voyager Q are basically the guts of a hard drive enclosure in a little toaster-like box: You pop a drive in like a piece of bread, use it, then pop it back out when it’s done. I keep two raw, unmounted hard drives that each match the sizes of my internal hard drive and my RAID (meaning four drives in total). One drive is an onsite backup, updated weekly (or more), and one drive is an offsite backup, updated monthly (or more frequently when really in crunch mode). While I’ve done this with standard hard drives in the past, this method is faster, doesn’t require swapping of cables, and is far cheaper than owning redundant and unnecessary enclosures and power supplies. Each backup drive is matched to the size of the volume it’s backing up. I store my raw hard drives in clever little cases called Hudzees.

Just being able to rip apart failed enclosed hard drives and find that only a power supply went bad has let me continue to use hard drives that I’d otherwise not be able to diagnose, saving me hundreds of dollars and having paid back the drive dock within a month or two.

Backup Strategy

I always ensure my internal hard drive backups are bootable by using SuperDuper. If I’m deep in a serious project, I’ll pop a drive into the dock and use ChronoSync to keep daily work backed up. In regular use, I create weekly backups that are stored onsite, in my studio. Once a month (I useGoogle Calendar for such reminders), I bring my offsite drives home and do a backup, leaving them at home over the weekend (the backups can take a while) and taking them back offsite on Monday morning. Sometimes I’ll use DropBox for project-file storage if I need backups to be more frequent and if the file sizes aren’t too large, especially if I’m collaborating with someone. (I have yet to try Gobbler.)

What I love about this system is that it reduces MTBF – mean time between failures. With the drive only spinning up when you need it, wear and tear on the drive is greatly reduced. I’ll be the first to point out that drive docks don’t have fans to cool drives down during long transfers, but if heat can escape upwards, I think that risk is pretty minimal. I also love how my electricity use has gone down because my backups and archives are kept offline until needed. As a guy who grew up with Retrospect Remote, Exabyte tapes, and other dead technologies, it’s quite a revelation. Being able to put the backup drives away in a drawer, in cases that look like Betacam SP tapes, could be less likely to be stolen if my home is broken into.

It’s not instantaneous or perfect, but so far, it’s worked, and has carried me through multiple hard drive and RAID failures.

My final backup component is a “bug-out drive.” This sits in a backpack (a “bug-out bag”) with a bunch of emergency supplies that are a part of living in earthquake and wildfire country. This drive just holds my most precious archive of personal work and financial records, on a 1TB 2.5″ (laptop-sized) drive in an aluminum enclosure. It’s in a waterproof Otterbox, and gets updated whenever I wrap a significant project or update my financials. After a part of my neighborhood had the police demand that residents leave immediately, right now, due to a nearby wildfire, this jumped to the top of my backup strategy list. If I have more time, of course, I would rather throw my raw hard drive collection and laptop in a messenger bag, but that recent event proved that sometimes that’s not an option!

Thoughts on Upgrades

What’s the future hold? Well, I’m carefully watching the price of solid state drives come down, and considering having an internal boot and app drive that’s solid state. I’d also someday consider a RAID that will hold nothing but archived projects, but for now the modular hard drive dock system is more expandable, doesn’t need to be powered up all the time, is redundant between onsite and offsite, and takes a lot less power over the course of a year. I’ll need something pretty weird to happen (read: lose tons of data in some really creative way) to get me onto a different system. I’m also thinking of going back to a desktop machine after six or seven years of being a laptop-only kind of guy, which might make me consider a second RAID inside the box for, say, dedicated sample library storage, but time will tell.

But that’s just me. If you would like to share tidbits about your own backup strategies and data storage systems in your home studio, please share with us all in the comments!

Bits and bytes are mighty tasty. How does one store them for maximum freshness?

Portrait of the Artist as an IT Professional

Artists, designers, composers, mixers, and audio folks of all stripes must be conversant with the tools of their trade, and in this digital world, that means playing some role in managing hardware and software. This is where your hard-won creative output of blood, bits, and tears will be stored…and possibly lost.

This article is meant to help frame the challenge of selecting hard drives for one’s own home studio. I’m no IT professional, but I’ve been dealing with digital multimedia production for nearly 20 years, so I’ve at least got some perspective as a creative professional. I’ve seen my share of hard drives literally catch fire, glitch out, play the national anthem, and just simply stop working, sometimes one a day for three days in a row. I’ve had to manage IT issues from single machines to small clusters to an entire small studio. What follows, then, is what home-studio creatives of all stripes should consider when thinking about storing their creative output on hard drives.

This article is won’t give you a fish to eat for a day; the goal is to teach you how to fish, so you can feed yourself for a lifetime. Very few specific purchase recommendations will be made so that you can simply make a more informed decision based on your own personal needs.

There are loads of hard drive buyer’s guides online, and Wikipedia is a definitive source for things like RAID levels and hard drive terminology, for anyone who’d like to read more on this topic.

Hard Drive Types

There are two general kinds of hard drives: Mechanical and solid state.

Mechanical hard drives are what we all know, love, and often abhor. They have metal plates with data magnetically encoded on them. They are very susceptible to jostling, physical damage, and magnetic damage. However, they are also reasonably fault-tolerant. When things go awry, utilities or the drive itself can try to work around the problem. They also can give clues as to their imminent failure, such as odd noises, slow mounting or read/write times.

Solid state hard drives are essentially large flash memory devices, like Compact Flash cards. There are no moving parts. They are lightning-fast, small, light, and much less prone to physical or magnetic damage. They suffer from two things: High price and catastrophic failure. They’re extremely expensive per gigabyte, and when a solid state drive fails – not common, but they do, I’ve seen it – it fails immediately, irrevocably, and totally. To use a materials science analogy, mechanical hard drives are like aluminum, and solid state hard drives are like carbon fiber.

Of course, this refers to just the drive itself, which usually lives inside the chassis of a computer or in an external enclosure. Enclosures, in my experience, are just as likely to fail, and often more so, than the drives themselves. Fans, power supplies, and the dreaded power-brick inline transformers of these enclosures are all possible failure points. Knowing how to get a drive out of a dead enclosure is a good skill to have!

Enclosures also tend to influence how these devices are attached to our computers. This naturally takes us to our next topic.

Hard Drive Interfaces

At the time of this writing, USB 2.0, Firewire 800, and eSATA are the most common hard drive connector standards. More exist, from legacy formats to enterprise-level: Firewire 400, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and more. A little internet research can help you learn more about those other flavors. However, for simplicity, I stick with drives with all three of those initial connector types. USB 2.0 is so universal that I can pretty much take a drive and plug it into anything, which has merits for massive file transfers and emergencies. Firewire 800 is the MacOS X standard broadband connectivity standard (the new Thunderbolt connector notwithstanding), and has decent speeds. eSATA often requires third-party cards to support, but when it’s available it’s the fastest kid on the block. Having at least two options, and perhaps all three (or more), can help leverage your hard drive investment in case you change computers, or computer platforms, in the future.

Types of Hard Drive Storage Needs

Not all hard drives are created equal. Likewise, not all storage needs are the same. It turns out that what you want for your internal system drive may not be the best kind of drive for your daily storage needs, or for your long-term backup needs.

Below, I’ll cover five types of storage needs: System and app storage, scratch disks, external working storage, and long-term project storage.

System and Application Storage

This should be all one’s internal boot drive should be responsible for. This lets the drive stay clean and defragged, since only log files, preferences, and the like will be written to it. Speed isn’t the top concern here, but it does help; a solid state hard drive might boot a machine and launch apps up to twice as fast as a standard 7200rpm hard drive. Most laptops ship with 5200rpm drives, so upgrading to a 7200rpm will make a difference.

These drives should always be backed up with bootable copies. This means using a disk cloner application (I prefer SuperDuper!) to ensure that the copy is fully bootable, so if something disastrous happens, you can just plug in your bootable system backup disk and it’s all good.

Scratch Disks

Scratch disks are where apps – and sometimes RAM-constrained systems – write temporary files to facilitate things like undo, revert, and rendering crossfades or audio effects. The funny thing about scratch disks is that you want ultimate speed and don’t need backup of its data, since ideally no user-written files will be stored there at all. This is theoretically a good use for solid state hard drives, which boast lightning-fast access but aren’t as large as standard hard drives at the same price.

In fact, the smaller the drive, the faster the access speeds will usually be. Scratch disks should be small and as fast as possible without compromising their utility.

External Working Storage

This is what most of us know, love, and hate about hard drive storage. What will you be writing to and  reading from for your actual work, like session files? There are a number of approaches to this, which will vary based on each artist’s risk tolerance and budget, but it all boils down to balancing speed, capacity, reliability, redundancy, power consumption, and cost.

• Speed. 10,000rpm drives can be fast, and solid state drives are faster still, but one pays for such speed. Striping multiple slow drives together as RAID 0 can really boost read and write speeds, at the cost of buying two or more drives and not gaining anything in the redundancy department (see below). But some applications, like video editing, demand the fastest disk access possible.
• Capacity. You need a fair amount of space for your files, especially if you’re involved in high-definition audio and video, but sometimes too much space will cause problems. Pro Tools, at the time of this writing, can only play back from, or record to, volumes of 2TB or less. Most other apps do not have this limitation.
• Reliability. All drives will fail. The more drives you have, the more frequently you will have drive failures, statistically speaking (so think about this when you consider multi-disk RAIDs, below). The cheapest drives usually aren’t the most reliable. Many consumers are unaware that there are specific enterprise-class hard drives out there that are held to higher quality standards than others, and these can be good values relative to piece of mind.
• Redundancy. How many copies of your data do you have? The answer must be “more than one” if you are to be reasonably secure in preserving your life’s creative work. Many folks simply buy one drive and back it up to a second drive of the same size. This works, but it’s not a constant process, since this is done manually or via scheduled synching. Others opt for the RAID option (level 1, 5, 6, or 10), which ensures that every write to disk is duplicated automatically. One drive goes down and, based on what RAID level you’ve chosen, you either have a backup or the remaining drives can rebuild a replacement disk automatically. RAID 1 is pretty slow, while RAID 5 (one of the more popular configurations these days) is a compromise between increased speed and distributed copies of data.
• Power Consumption. Part of the TCO – total cost of ownership – of a hard drive is how much you’ll pay on your electricity bill for using that hard drive. There are now “green” versions of hard drives that can draw less than three watts when not in use. If you’re running one or more RAIDs with lots of platters a-spinning, this can really add up!
• Cost. Greater speed, reliability, and redundancy all cost more. Your workaday storage isn’t a good place to skimp, but do remember that hard drives won’t last forever. Also remember that every external hard drive you buy, you’re buying a hard drive that you can’t remove yourself without voiding the warranty, and you’re paying for another power supply and case that isn’t working for you when it’s unplugged for long-term storage.

Long-Term Project Storage

That huge project is over; you’ve got raw recordings, tons of track bounces, massive sessions. Where do you put all that when you’re done?

The first choice is online or offline storage…this means whether it’s on a drive that’s normally spun up and plugged in, or if it’s archived on physical media that is being stored somewhere that’s not attached to your workstation or network. This “hot” or “cold” storage, as I tend to call it (as the term “online” means something different these days), depends on how often you might need it.

At the moment, there is, for better or worse, no other storage device that holds as much for as long for the price as a hard drive. Hard drives are also more shelf-stable and reliable than DVD-R’s. They may be a little heavy, but they are small, and the cost per gigabyte is low.

This has given rise to the hard drive dock, into which bare hard drives are inserted, mounted, copied to, and taken offline. This provides redundancy and backup at a very low cost per terabyte, and by spending most of their time offline, bare hard drives should last a good deal longer than a hard drive that spins all day long. Speed doesn’t matter as much in this usage, either: Sure, backing up to them may take a while, but do it when you go to bed at night and it won’t make a bit of difference, and buying slower drives can save money. Hard drive docks are also great for troubleshooting: If an enclosed hard drives goes down, you can extract it and pop it in a dock to see if the fault lies in the drive or the enclosure’s power supply.

The second decision is, if you opt for “cold” storage, whether you store the data locally or on a remote network (“in the cloud,” as they say these days). The primary challenge with cloud-based storage is transfer speeds. Every recording session I do, no matter how short or informal, will usually generate at least a gigabyte of data. Even though I have a fast internet connection, it’s asynchronous, as most of them are: The upload speeds are slower than the download speeds. For my purposes, I can’t make cloud computing work given how much data I generate. Note, however, that the new (at the time of this writing) service Gobbler is optimized specifically for Pro Tools users.

It’s great for backing up your personal and business files, though. Speaking of which…

Backups

Backups are usually considered copies of your data that aren’t in daily use. Therefore, the extra disks sitting in your RAID aren’t backups; they’re for daily redundancy in case of failure. Backups are meant to be retrieved when some seriously bad juju goes down. In my opinion, everyone needs both onsite and offsite backups. Why? Two simple reasons.

• Offsite backups, depending on how far away they physically are, won’t help you when a disk dies and you need to immediately repair or replace it when you’re in the middle of a project. I store mine more than 20 miles away from my home, and it would take 2 hours to retrieve them.
• Offsite backups, by their very nature, are kept less up-to-date than onsite backups…unless your backup drives are co-located in a data center, but that’s too complex and expensive for most home studios.
• Onsite backups won’t help you if your studio is burglarized, burns down, floods, or collapses in a tornado, tsunami, or earthquake. These are not paranoid doomsday scenarios. They can and do happen all the time, almost anywhere.

There are too many backup strategies to list, so let’s stay focused on hard drives for this purpose. I prefer to match capacities between the real, “live” drive and the backup, but to use drives from different manufacturers, or at the very least, have the live drive and the backup drive be from very different serial number ranges. This way if there’s a manufacturing defect in a drive, you can at least know that the other drive has less of a chance failing around the same time for the same reason.

Whether you use a hard drive dock with bare drives, fully duplicative external hard drives, or even cloud-based network backups, do it. One massive data loss on a project without backups can cost you money, but more importantly, it will betray a client’s trust in your professionalism.

Local vs. Network Storage

This article isn’t going to focus on network-attached storage, or NAS, devices for larger studios, so I won’t get into robust, scalable rackmount RAID units, JBOD, Fiber Channel and iSCSI devices. However, NAS can have a place in the home for a few reasons.

Many of us with home studios share a network with housemates, significant others, or families. Some of us have multiple computers within our home studios. In either case, sometimes multiple machines need to access the same files, and needing to have one computer dedicated serving files just isn’t cost-effective or sensible. That’s where NAS comes in.

NAS devices are either hard drives that plug into other devices via USB to act like NAS devices, like the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station, or are hard drives with embedded computers inside of them, and they plug into an Ethernet network just like a computer would. The only reason to consider this approach is for multiple computers to access the same files without needing an external host computer to provide the shared hard drive volume on the network. NAS devices and drives largely follow the same purchase decision points as single drives to, above, but backing up a very large NAS device can be tricky and/or expensive, so be sure to think about what your backup strategy will be before you traipse off and buy a 16TB rackmount NAS!

However, the speed of accessing that NAS is dependent on your Ethernet network. With gigabit network switches being so standard and cheap, this isn’t a big deal for small files. Factor in hefty media files, though, like audio or video and the fact that many studios rely on WiFi, which is further bandwidth-constrained compared to wired gigabit Ethernet, NAS can definitely try your patience.

So…How do I do it?

I don’t skimp on hard drives or redundancy, but I do absolutely have a budget within which I need to operate. How I have my hard drives arranged and how they’re used will be the topic of my next article. Stay tuned!

Of COURSE I had to get it in red.

Hand-built one at a time by Eric Archer, the Grendel Drone Commander is a two-oscillator synth built inside of a metal surplus ammo box. Its apparent simplicity belies its sonic complexity. I’m still feeling my way around the thing, but I wanted to post an example of what it makes possible. (Next step: Play with CV control!)

This heavy, drone-y, smeary track was created using only the Grendel Drone Commander, recorded live thee times, each on a different track, in Logic Pro (with a few plug-ins as well).

This is a recording (longer than most I usually post) that features everything I like in an urban ambiences: Sirens. Heavy trucks. Busses. Voices in different languages. Motorcycles. Car horns. Murmuring and footsteps.

And a guy noodling around on the trumpet.

[Sony PCM-D50 recorder, capsules at 120°]

The bottom reads, "WARNING: Beware Unauthorized Personnel." How true.

My downstair work neighbors are an art collective, and all sorts of weird things show up in our lobby from time to time. One that caught my eye was a vintage adding machine. It sat in our lobby for weeks, unclaimed and unmoved (the thing is about 20lbs, despite being the size of a lunchbox), so I decided to borrow it and see what sounds I could get out of it.

It’s in amazing shape for its age. There is a panel that is removable, ostensibly for where paper tape or imprinted ribbon would come out; removing this panel let the inner mechanisms be heard more clearly.

Having close-miked small objects many times before, I guessed that this wasn’t a job for my usual small-condenser hypercardioid mics. The result would be too bass-heavy, sounding “out of scale.” If the sounds were going to be repurposed for, say, the mechanisms of a heavy doorway or industrial machine, the low frequencies would be deepened with downward pitch-shifting anyway. I wound up using a large condenser mic, since I was going for brightness, detail, and clarity.

Here’s a compilation of some of the sounds it generated, stitched together from the two or three dozen discrete sounds I culled from it.

[Røde NT1A microphone into Sound Devices 702 recorder]

Thus quoth the raven, "Press record, idiot!" (This picture was taken years ago in Oakland, CA, not where today's sound was recorded.)

[One in a series of posts from my spring 2011 trip to the southern California desert.]

I love ravens. Not because I’m all Mr. Gothy McLordbyron, but because they’re big, majestic, smart as hell, and have gravelly voices. Like crows, but drunker. They’re the Tom Waits of the bird world.

Ravens aren’t exactly rare, and perhaps because of this, they’re hard to record in the wild. They can be anywhere: Urban areas, tops of trees, windswept hills…but by the time I show up with a recorder, they’re either deciding to be quiet or are surrounded by traffic noise, intense winds, other birds, or even people. I’ve had the darnedest time capturing one cleanly.

Thankfully, the ravens of Joshua Tree National Park are pretty fearless…well, they’re also always looking for snacks, and have learned that people can be a good source for tasty (dropped) morsels. I’ve noticed that they often travel in pairs or groups of less than four to six, and one day we were followed by a pair of ravens as we wandered the desert trails. The vocalizations aren’t anything super-special, but they’re (for once) pretty clean, articulate, and detailed. Just what I was hoping for!

This raven was talking to his companion quietly as they spread out looking for snacks. He landed about twenty feet from me and I recorded him as he was hopping around. I like the little lilt he added at the end!

[Sony PCM-D50 recorder, capsules at 120°]