My Take on Music Recording with Doug Fearn
My Take on Music Recording with Doug Fearn
Spring Birds: How I recorded birds in the woods in DSD
I live and work in the woods, surrounded by wildlife. There are many species of birds and in the spring their songs are pretty amazing. Over the years, I have thought about recording those birds, but the background noise level was a problem. Although very quiet by most people’s standards, there is still a lot of man-made noise -- too much noise to make recording the birds feasible.
But an opportunity arose in May of 2020 during the Covid pandemic when there was very little travel. I took advantage of that short window to capture the spring birds in the early morning.
This episode is the story of how that recording was made. I explain the challenges I faced and the technical decisions I made to effectively make a recording that I find quite compelling.
It is recorded in DSD digital, and it is available on Outer Marker Records through our international download distributor, Native DSD. You can listen to a CD-quality version of the album for free, and purchase it in several high-resolution formats, including DSD256, which is an exact bit-for-bit file of the original master.
It’s also available on all streaming services, under my name, Doug Fearn.
I hope you find this story interesting.
https://www.outermarkerrecords.com/
email: dwfearn@dwfearn.com
www.youtube.com/c/DWFearn
https://dwfearn.com/
Episode 106 Spring Birds: How I recorded birds in the woods in DSD June 22, 2025
I’m Doug Fearn and this is My Take on Music Recording
I live and work in rural Chester County, Pennsylvania, about 25 miles west of Philadelphia. Our property is one of the smaller parcels in the area, at ten acres, the minimum by the zoning regulations. Our land is all wooded, except about an acre where our house and my business are located.
Surrounding our property are a couple of other houses, each on a minimum of ten acres, several farms of hundreds of acres, and a nature preserve with even more hundreds of acres. Adjacent to our property is the Brandywine Creek, a beautiful stream that features heavily in the history of the area, going back thousands of years to the native Americans who were the original occupants.
It’s a great place to live, especially for someone like me that grew up living next to a large wooded area. I spent a good deal of my childhood exploring the woods.
I partially attribute my good hearing to a life spent in nature, away from loud noise. That, and my aversion to noise in general. It is very quiet here, which makes it easy to isolate my studio from outside noise.
It’s not entirely quiet, however. There is a busy road about a half mile away. Busy for a narrow country road, that is. And there is farm equipment that sometimes can be heard.
Our house is less than a mile from the Modena VOR, a ground-based navigation station for aircraft. And although GPS has made the VOR navigation system largely obsolete, it is still functional as a backup system. The Modena VOR location is used as a waypoint for a huge amount of air traffic travelling up and down the East Coast. Airliners passing overhead are at 30,000 feet or more and cannot be heard.
Modena is an important waypoint for airliners departing and arriving at Philadelphia International Airport. When the wind is easterly, arriving flights from the west converge on our area. The airplanes are at low altitude, generally 4000 to 6000 feet. But they are at low power, so their noise is minimal.
Departures from Philly to the west pass over us, too. They are at climb power, but they are over 10,000 feet up as they fly over, so their noise is pretty low. Still, aircraft can be heard frequently.
I tell you all this to give you some background into a recording project that you might find interesting.
As you can imagine, our woods are filled with wildlife, including deer, foxes, coyotes, raccoons, and other smaller animals. And birds. Lots of birds. We have the usual assortment of songbirds found on the East Coast, along with crows and jays. Plus, raptors like hawks, owls, and Bald Eagles. And large birds like turkey vultures, great blue herons, wild turkeys, and Canada geese. It can get pretty raucous with all those birds, especially in the spring.
For years, I wanted to record those birds. I had no particular reason to do that. I just wanted to try. It would be a new challenge.
But despite the relative quietness of the area, it is far from silent. Distant cars and trucks can be heard. A freight train travels nearby, very slowly, several times a week. Our neighbors have dogs, chickens, pigs, goats, horses, cows, and even long-horned steer. Plus the sound of tractors, lawnmowers, and chainsaws. One of our neighbors likes to shoot guns.
If I wanted to record just birds, there was too much non-bird noise out there. And most of it is man made.
Recording outside is always a challenge anyway, because of the weather. The wind has to be calm, and, of course, it can’t be raining or stormy.
I was pretty much resigned to the fact that it was never going to be practical to record the birds.
Until… an opportunity came along in 2020. It was May, and the world was pretty much shut down due to the restrictions on travel caused by the Covid pandemic. People worked from home. Air travel was practically non-existent. No one did any non-vital driving. It was a strange time. To this day, most people divide their lives into pre-Covid and post-Covid segments. Most of us had never lived through a situation like that before.
In some ways, the world was quite pleasant during that lockdown. It was quiet. The world was on edge, but oddly calm at the same time.
It was the perfect opportunity to record the birds. It was the right time of the year. And it was quiet.
I had been thinking about this project for a while, contemplating what the challenges would be, and considering what equipment and techniques I would use.
I knew I wanted to record in DSD. That format was perfect for capturing the sound of the birds, due to its lack of noise, artifacts and aliasing.
I also knew I wanted to record in Blumlein stereo. That’s two bidirectional microphones oriented at 90-degrees to each other. Blumlein pickup provides an almost uncanny feeling of actually being in an acoustic space.
And what better space than in the woods? The woods are an almost perfect acoustical environment. There is an infinite third dimension straight up. No reflections from above.
And the trees provided thousands of cylindrical diffusors, all at random distances, with varying diameters and effective heights. Leaves on the trees, and the plants and organic debris on the ground provide nice, flat, wide-band sound absorption. Indeed, the sound of the woods is better than any concert hall.
And since we are on a hill overlooking the long, wide Brandywine Valley, the echoes from the distant terrain provide a mid- to low-frequency reverb time of over ten seconds.
A neighbor has an annual Fourth of July fireworks show that rivaled that of any small town. I recorded that once, from my house about 200 feet higher in elevation than the launching field on the valley floor below. The reverberation of those explosions persisted in the valley for many seconds. That sound influenced my attitude towards reverberation whether in a real space or by a reverb unit.
I thought about what mic or mics I would use. I would have preferred to use ribbon microphones, for their unique ability to capture compelling sound. But ribbon mics are fragile. Any air movement would result in terrible wind noise as the air rattled the delicate ribbon. A ribbon could be stretched and ruined under those conditions. No, ribbon mics were out for this application.
One of my favorite mics is the Neumann SM69 stereo condenser. It’s long out of production. I have one from the 1980s, which replaced an even older one that was stolen.
The SM69 has two condenser capsules, one above the other, and very close together. The upper element can be rotated through 180 degrees, providing a stereo image that ranges from near-mono to X-Y.
And both capsules have selectable patterns, from omni, to cardioid, to bi-directional. You can use the SM69 for any coincident stereo technique, like X-Y, M-S, or Blumlein. It is a very versatile mic that sounds good on just about everything I’ve used it on.
I discovered the magic of Blumlein stereo back in the 1970s. At first, I was under the misconception that Blumlein yielded an omni-directional stereo mic. It is easy to presume that, with the two figure-8 patterns providing pickup from four separate quadrants. But I soon realized that thinking that was a trap.
The front stereo pair and the back stereo pair work fine. But the two sides utilize mic elements that are out of phase with each other. That means that anything off the sides of a Blumlein pair will partially cancel out in mono. And even in stereo, engineers immediately recognize an out-of-phase sound and want to do something to correct it.
So how was this going to work in the woods, where the birds could be coming from anywhere in the 360 degrees circle around the mics?
This is about the only drawback to Blumlein pickup. And this was going to be a situation that would surely have half of the sound in the out-of-perfect phase sectors. But the sound is only totally opposite in polarity at a very narrow point directly 90 degrees from the front and back pickup. As soon as the sound is out of that direct null, the pickup trends toward in-phase as it approaches the front or back of the mic.
Any sounds, or reflections of sounds, arriving at the sides seem to add to the sense of space. It was what makes Blumlein stereo so uncanny and compelling.
I might have put up additional mics that would always be in phase. That’s X-Y, the only stereo technique that offers decent mono compatibility. But that would limit the pickup only to the birds in front of the mics.
M-S can be manipulated to sound better in mono than its natural pickup, but I have never been a fan of M-S. It just doesn’t fit my style. And it would only pick up the birds around the front of the mics.
In the end, I decided to go with Blumlein and see how it sounded.
It was the third week in May 2020 the world was quiet. The birds were in place. Now I only needed the weather to cooperate.
I watched the forecasts. I saw that there were a couple of days coming up that looked promising. I checked multiple times leading up to the actual recording days, checking the forecasts and going out in the early morning to experience what it was like.
The birds cooperated. That would be the least of my concerns. In addition to the native birds, this time of year still had an influx of migrating birds of many species. My “talent’ was in place and I was ready to record.
May 20 looked promising.
But there was another concern. Condenser mics like the SM69 utilize a fairly high voltage on the capsule, and high humidity could cause some of that high voltage to leak across the condenser element, creating noise. It might be constant static. Or it could be occasional pops. In any event, it would make the recording unusable.
And it is humid in the early morning. One hundred percent humidity is common until the sun warms things up enough that the moisture in the air is no longer capable of condensing on a surface. I would start recording just as the sky was starting to brighten. It was the coolest and most humid part of the day.
In addition, putting a vintage microphone out in those conditions was taking a chance. I did not have confidence that a ruined capsule could be repaired or replaced. There was something about those old capsules that is different from current capsules.
I got up around 4:00AM. The sun rose around 5:40AM on that date, at our latitude. I wanted time to let the mic settle down if it was noisy at first.
I ran about 150 feet of a two-pair mic cable out to a location I thought made sense. It was on the edge of the woods. Actually, in a clearing that had the woods closer on two sides and farther on the other two sides. I don’t know why I picked that spot. It just felt right to me.
The SM69 was on a medium-sized boom stand, about six feet above the ground.
It was still dark out, but there was enough light in the eastern sky to see what I was doing. And the birds were already warming up their voices.
The mic went directly into a D.W. Fearn VT-2 vacuum tube microphone preamplifier. And from there it went into a VT-5 stereo equalizer. I could patch the eq in or out, depending on whether it was necessary or not.
The output of the VT-5 eq went into the inputs of the Merging Technologies converters, which were set for DSD256, which has an 11.2MHz sample rate. I used Merging’s Pyramix software.
I hit record and let it roll for two hours.
I did use the VT-5 equalizer, with a gentle low-cut shelving roll-off starting at 100Hz. It wasn’t much, maybe 4dB, but it did clear up some rumble in the background noise.
I hear that rumble all the time, even when the environment is quiet. Sometimes a distinct very low frequency boom will get my attention. I have often wondered about the source of that infrasound. It’s not traffic, because it can be heard when there is no traffic for many miles. Perhaps it is seismic energy, although our area is one of the most geologically stable areas in the world. It remains a mystery.
Since the VT-2 mic preamp frequency response is only down 3dB at 0.5Hz, I was concerned that the ultra-low frequency noise could be heard when played on systems with extended low frequency response. The low-cut had no impact at all on the sound of the birds.
There is considerable high-frequency content in the song of the birds, however, and I believe some of that sound extends well above our hearing range. I know that is true because I once built a device that converted ultrasonic sound down into our hearing range, and discovered an entire new world of noises made by insects, bats, and some birds.
Frequencies that high are highly attenuated by the air, so it is only a problem when the source is less than about 100 feet from the microphones. The high-frequency response of the VT-2 and all the other gear in the chain extends well into that ultrasonic region, so I used a high-cut shelving filter from the VT-5 equalizer to gently roll off the response above 28kHz.
Those frequencies would not be a problem for DSD recording, but it could be a problem if the recording was converted to a PCM format at some point.
That was it for the eq. Switching the eq in and out showed no effect on the sound of the birds. But the VT-5 did prevent any potential problems for listeners.
Sitting in my control room, I could close my eyes and imagine I was out in the woods, surrounded by birds. It seemed like it was better than actually being there. The stereo sound stage was immense, wrapping around me. It was easy to visualize the varying altitude of the birds, too. My concern about Blumlein vanished. I could not even tell which were the out-of-phase quadrants. It felt completely natural.
It was even better on headphones.
I recorded again the next morning. Altogether, I had nearly four hours of birds.
Was it perfect throughout those four hours? No, it wasn’t. There were some parts that were distracting or worse.
A medical helicopter flew nearby. Emergency medical services were about the only aircraft operating. I could hear it coming for a couple of minutes, and after it passed, it was still audible for several more minutes.
There was no traffic nearby, except for one truck. I couldn’t see it, but it must have been a large farm vehicle. They have to move equipment from farm to farm, even during the lockdown. And this truck was noisy. Like no-muffler noisy. Maybe it was just the contrast with the solitude, but it seemed incredibly loud and disruptive. Farm equipment, being towed or moving under its own power, moves slowly. You don’t need to go over a few miles per hour when working in a field.
The sound came on suddenly. It must have started quite nearby. But I could hear it for at least ten minutes. I could even tell where it was going, imagining the roads I knew well, and where there was a turn or a stop sign. I could hear it fading away for miles.
Then there was a horse that seemed annoyed at something. And a farm dog barked at something that offended him.
But the most startling event was when a bird landed on the boom of the mic stand. I couldn’t see her from where I sat, but it was obvious that she came in from the left. Her wingbeats were massive. The air movement sounded like an enormous animal. I heard her feet hit the metal of the boom, with a few oscillations as she stabilized herself on the unexpectedly slippery surface. Slowed down, it would have made a perfect horror movie sound.
And she made a raucous sound just a few inches from the mic, which about blasted me out of my seat. It was one of the very few times I had a digital overload while recording. She didn’t stay perched on the mic boom for long.
Other than those interruptions, it was a clean and pleasant recording session. I heard birds I recognized, and many I did not. I was amazed at how many wild turkeys I heard gobbling. Those birds tend to be reclusive and I rarely saw them. Obviously, they were more abundant than I thought.
And the Canada geese. They were distant, and you could hear them wheeling around as they followed each temporary leader. I know where they hang out, and it is close to a mile away from the microphone. The nesting geese are on the banks of the creek, or maybe on a small island in the creek, except when they are flying. Their ground location about 250 feet lower in elevation than my microphone location, and the distance and the valley acoustics gave them a particularly haunting sound.
An occasional screech from a red-tailed hawk must have been terrifying to the songbirds, and they stopped singing for a few moments.
There was one bird that was particularly loud and not exactly soothing to listen to. In fact, he was pretty annoying. And it kept it up for a long time, and never moved. A little of that would go a long way.
I wish I knew more about the calls of the birds I heard on those mornings. Recently, I found a phone app from Cornell that helps identify birds, including an audio feature that will listen and report what bird it thinks it hears. I have to run that one day and make a list. Or ask one of my birder friends for help.
It wasn’t only birds I captured those mornings. There were also foxes, with their eerie barks that sound nothing like what you would expect.
It was a little late for the owls, and I only heard one of them, briefly. Too bad. We have many owls in our woods, of several species, each with their own distinctive pattern of “whos.” And there are screech owls that sound more like an animal in distress than a bird.
I was pleased with what I captured. I didn’t start out with any particular plan for the recording. I just thought it would be a fun project. Regardless, I felt compelled to edit it down to a reasonable size. I thought no more than an hour would be good.
But it was another year before I decided to tackle the editing project.
This was recorded in DSD, a format that allows almost no manipulation. But the Merging Technologies Pyramix DAW does allow editing. Up until that point, I had not really had much experience with editing DSD files, and I imagined it to be glitchy and imprecise. I thought the edits would be obvious. Perhaps that is why I put it off for so long.
But I found the editing to be pretty good. Better than splicing tape in the old days, particularly on such an exposed recording as this. The challenge was to take out parts I couldn’t use and have the edit be reasonably smooth.
The problem was that the background noise of all those birds was very inconsistent. They would rise and fall in volume and intensity fairly often. Sometimes they would be nearly silent for a few seconds. Most of the time, it was a cacophony of birds defending their territory or seeking a mate. It was difficult to find sections that would level-match closely enough to not make the edit too obvious.
Was I completely successful at hiding the edits? No, I’m afraid not. Perhaps with more time devoted to it I could do better, but it was daunting working in a format that does not allow any level manipulation. Edits in DSD are pretty much butt splices, with no finesse. You can manipulate the crossfade to some extent, but it’s still only milliseconds.
I concluded that although not perfect, it was probably not going to bother most people listening. After all, this would be background sound, not something you would listen to at high volume, with intense concentration.
I still wasn’t sure what I would do with this recording. I have a couple of friends who had medical practices that are meditative in nature. I asked them if they would be interested in the bird recording. They thought it would be great. Also, people who ran Yoga studios were enthusiastic. I envisioned selling a CD version, but when I asked these people about the source of their background music, they all said streaming.
Around this time, George and Geoff Hazelrigg and I started our own record label, Outer Marker. We agreed that the Spring Birds would be a good release. But at that time, our catalog was only available as a digital download or on vinyl. We avoided streaming because of lack of consideration for the creators.
All our releases are recorded in DSD, and our international download distributor, Native DSD, was enthusiastic about the Spring Birds recording. It was released in multiple formats on Native DSD in the spring of 2024, where it has sold reasonably well for its narrow and specialized nature.
We recently changed our stance on streaming, looking at it as an advertising medium and not a source of significant revenue. In June 2025, Spring Birds was released to streaming.
You can find it under my name, Doug Fearn, on all streaming services. Or you can purchase the recording from Native DSD in the original DSD format, or in high-res PCM formats. The DSD version is a bit-for-bit duplicate of the master.
One incident proved to me the power of this recording. It was at a concert that the Hazelriggs and their jazz trio gave at an intimate venue in New Hope, PA. It is a relatively small space, underneath a fancy restaurant.
My wife and I went to the concert. The venue was very dark. We walked in, our eyes trying to accommodate to the dimness. There was already a large number of people there as we found our table, greeted friends, and settled in for a great performance.
(START SAMPLE OF BIRDS IN BACKGROUND)
What I didn’t know was that the Hazelriggs decided to play the Spring Birds recording through the sound system as people were coming in. It was low level, and I didn’t even notice it at first. Soon other people heard the birds, too, we were at once transported to the outdoors. The walls of the venue disappeared and were in the woods, surrounded by birds. It was uncanny how it felt. Not only were there birds all around us, but there was significant height to the sound. Some were distinctly above us, and others at our ear level or below. I noticed that while I was recording and editing, but that was with great speakers in a good acoustical environment. I often hear height in the music I recorded. Remarkably, it was also obvious through the sound system of the venue.
I didn’t expect to hear that in a situation like that, especially with the constant hum of conversation and people moving about.
I have talked to Shawn Dealey at Sweetwater Studios, who does the Atmos mixes for Outer Marker. He is intrigued with the challenge of taking a stereo recording and adding the immersive qualities. We will do an Atmos mix at some point.
That’s the story of the Spring Birds recording. You can take a listen for free on the Native DSD site, or purchase it if you like. The link is in the description. And you can stream it from any provider. You might find that it creates a pleasant background for many activities, even at a very low level.
And now you know the details of how it was done.
Thanks for listening, subscribing, and commenting. You can reach me at dwfearn@dwfearn.com
This is My Take on Music Recording. I’m Doug Fearn. See you next time.
