WINTER SOUNDS

This past December I visited Cleveland National Forest and spent a day hiking out around the Laguna Mountain area. Open meadows and Pine Trees, swirling winds, and quite a few Ravens and Woodpeckers. The plan was to complete a Winter SFX Library in January but nature had other plans. We got some snow, but unfortunately here in Southern California often the roads can be closed for weeks or damaged to the point where they don’t open for years. Work is typically too busy for me to get up the mountain during a lot of the year until May, but I was able to get up to a few other spots that got quite a bit of snow. I even bought some snow shoes and hiked deep in with the gear.

There’s a cool sound or maybe more the absence of it in a quiet snow covered forest. I remember in New York sometimes right after a hard snow you’d be out walking around and it would be so quiet, people would even bring it up as it was very obvious and I don’t think I put much thought into it but as I’ve gotten more into being in the sound world I imagine it has to do a lot with density, absorption, reflections, but screw the technical jargon, it’s super cool!

My plan for this website originally was to keep it mostly Field Recording related and a place to purchase libraries, but lately I’ve been delving into some of the other creative avenues I’m into or have been at one time or another over the years. I spent a lot of time writing and kind of roughing it. I started before I ever had a computer and still remember typing stories out on a Smith Corona and literally using white out to ruin every time my finger hit the wrong key, sending them off to literary magazines in large envelopes and then waiting for months to get a rejection notice. Fun times! Anyway I recently started going through some of the old stories and there’s a lot! I’ll be posting them over on Substack. I’ve got a bunch of writings from the 20 or so some odd days I spent in Central Park playing guitar in a tunnel and all the characters I came across so I’ll try to get those up at some point.

https://substack.com/@sethswaaley

There’s so many ways to find an outlet creatively and I can say music definitely did that for me for many years. It still does but now I just strum songs on the old acoustic. In the sake of keeping them from falling into the unheard archives of the internet, here’s a few of the various things I was a part of.