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.