Feb 25, 2022 – San Rafael Valley – audio snippets

On Thursday night I camped in Arizona’s San Rafael Valley during a sub-freezing night. Well, I stayed in a friend’s cute cabin sans electricity and running water.

This was my fifth San Rafael Valley visit. My first solo.

This grassland fascinates me. It’s not just that it’s a deliciously golden bowl slung between gorgeous mountain ranges. It’s the lack of wall, the lack of destruction. I hope to document the liberating feeling of calmly and easily gazing past a low vehicle barrier to Sonora, MX. It’s the visual confirmation that the land is the same and that the border is inconsequentially human.

There was a gale wind just a day prior in Douglas. It was insanely raging above 40 miles per hour. You had to shout your way through it and swallow a lungful of grit in the process.

The quiet on Thursday night was deafening. My ears were grasping for static. It was so still. I pulled into my San Rafael Valley overnight spot around 8PM and nary a strand of grass was swaying. It was astounding to not have wind.

Figuring out the “drop rig” process

I woke up Friday morning, powered up on some instant coffee and started setting up a recording session outside my sleeping spot.

I’m am a very amateur field recordist and was excited to try out a cute matched stereo pair of Primo EM272 omni mics – “The Clippy” from UK-based micbooster.com.

I hadn’t tried out a test setup at all and this would be their maiden voyage. A niave move. But, I felt prepared with my borrowed mic stand and a passed-down Zoom F4. Additionally, I haven’t really used the Zoom much at all and at the moment it feels like a toy… but, I think I just need to put in some more patience.

I did less than a amateur job smearing some masking tape on the mics. There was a bare whisper of wind and I didn’t even think about the aural danger of letting the wires sprout free to get potentially buffeted by breeze. That proved to be a stupid move when the wind picked up later in the day.

I left the setup recording for over about two hours while I went filming a few miles away.

I haven’t listened to the whole take, but I’m psyched by what I’ve already scrubbed through to. All the birds came out to play and sing! Mourning doves, some trilling warbler-sound critters… and ravens! A raven flew right over-head! The mics are incredibly sensitive and I think I should have played around a bit more with setting the levels.

I ended up doing a bit of a low-pass filter, but there aren’t any other edits to the recording.

I have a ways to go to figure out my field recording set-up.. but, I’m already really happy with the results.