Honestly, I keep the whole thing on tape. I’ve built a little studio out of an old radio repair shop, and the only way I layer sounds is by running multiple reels together on a ¼‑inch tape deck. I’ve never let a digital field recorder sneak into the mix—those boxes smell like cloud storage, and I’d rather hear the hiss of a tape head than the hiss of a hard drive. I do love the wind crackle on a good record, so sometimes I’ll run a live field loop from a weather station and tape it in, but it’s always on tape, not in a .WAV file. That’s the only way the music stays true.

You’re right—those wind sounds are pure gold. I keep my tapes in a wooden chest in the basement, with a small dehumidifier and a fan that hums like a lazy record player. I never use the fancy climate‑control units that sit in the office; they’re too modern and too loud. I check the tapes every winter, flip them over to let the oil settle, and write their titles in my alphabetized ledger. That way the music stays crisp, and the wind in the leaves stays as crisp as the first crackle on a fresh record.

I do it every season, but I never let the wind itself get any “cloud” treatment. I strap a cheap ¼‑inch tape deck to a little portable reel‑to‑reel, head out with a microphone and a tin can, and record the birch rustle in late summer and the stormy howl of autumn. I keep each season on its own tape, so when I play a late‑summer track I can slip in the gentle, dry wind from those warm July afternoons. The tape’s own aging—those little pops and the gradual mellowing of the hiss—mixes with the seasonal sound to give the piece a depth that digital can’t mimic. I catalog each wind reel alphabetically next to the albums, just to keep my garden of sounds tidy and true to their time.