Rain storm recordings - "Environments" LPs

I remember people mentioning the use of recorded rain sounds to enhance their tiki palace. There are a number of releases out there but many modern CDs will mix environmental sounds with obnoxious relaxing music. Adding music has been the trend for some years now.

Back in the 1970's however there was a record series called "Environments," they had a nice range of different ambiences that lasted about thirty minutes (one LP side). Volume 4 featured "Ultimate Thunderstorm" and "Gentle Rain In A Pine Forest," both very useful rain ambiences. These can be found, fairly cheaply, on Ebay, if you like the vinyl.

The "nature" recordings in this series are nice because they don't come off as edited, studio-mixed stuff...they sound more or less totally spontaneous, with random noises occurring throughout.

Kool :) Just moved recently, got to get a record playe now...

We used to use one of these with our band. I made loops using a cheap sampler of various sound effects from one of the albums you just mentioned. I had 7 or 8 different loops going, including some really cool tropical rain forest loops, a loop of the austrailian outback at night (for the crickets) and some birdcalls that I added using an actual birdcall ( a cheap device that can mimic almost any bird). A couple of the sounds already had multiple sounds, like "Kingfisher". You could hear the bird calls, and the gurgling of a stream, but the cut was only less then a minute in lenght, so I sampled and looped it.

I really loved it, but some members of the band decided against using it. I still love it, though. I made a CD that had 80 minutes of this stuff on one track, so it would almost never end.
Adding a soundtrack like this to your Tiki bar is really cool.

Anyway, I like this post, Procinema.

these are pretty easy to find at the thrift stores--the ocean waves is good--I think I got one (NOT Environments but a worthy competitor) that had a Caribbean beach theme and one that was like a Sailing Excursion one 9creaking ship!)--they are GREAT but not really music--maybe 2 turntables going--the other with exotica? I agree--the digitized stuff that Homedics + others put out--you can HEAR the loops and it is more ANNOYING than soothing

I think the trick with the loops is that you find ones that are 30 seconds to a minute long, then loop a few of them with different loop points. That way, the sounds (over time) seem more random and realistic. I typically would blend like this: For a tropical rainforest, loops of:

Water or stream gurgling
Crickets
Jungle bird calls
ambient jungle sounds
fake bird calls with various mechanical devices.

I will try to find a link to some of these bird call devices.

http://www.larkinam.com/search.asp?t=ss&sb=0%22&ss=bird+calls&x=19&y=6

These are friction instruments, that are just amazing to use. I tried mine a few times in the backyard, and was astounded to find that birds started arriving, long as I stood still.

[ Edited by: lucas Vigor 2007-02-07 17:44 ]

The ones above are mostly for hunting, but these are more for bird watchers: (there are some digital sound cards that look rater promising)

http://www.bestnest.com/bestnest/bird_calls.asp?src=goto&kw=bird_call

Ooops, I stretched out the thread laterally.

If you're interested, I just found a series called 'Sounds of the Earth' on iTunes. They include titles such as 'Exotic Paradise', 'Ocean Waves' and 'Paradise Island'. I see this series is also carried at Amazon and WalMart.

Pretty sure all of them have new age piano music added.

I've downloaded both 'Ocean Waves' and 'Exotic Paradise'. Neither one has any music on it. I use Windows media player to play these in the background (or media player and Winamp if I want to layer them) while I play Exotica through iTunes. It took a little fiddling with volume controls, but once I got it, it was AWESOME! Great atmosphere for my bar....