Sea & Surf

Sea & Surf is nearly 6 hours / 11 GB of wave sound effects – some over 15 minutes long.
49 separate files – recorded in 24bit/96kHz. All sounds are UCS-compatible.

Sea & Surf represents a decade of collecting wave sound effects on Danish shores. With over 7000 km of coastline to record, there is a bit of everything here. From the shallow waters of Aarhus Bay, to the roaring North Sea at Hanstholm on the shoulder of Jutland, I recorded waves crashing, splashing, lapping and even clucking.

I visited marinas, jetties, breakwaters, piers, a lake, and even the inside of a WW2-era concrete bunker. Here are close-ups from the waterline, from between the boulders of a breakwater and waves clucking quietly on the rocky coast of Bornholm.

At the North Sea, I recorded in several positions, from right in the waterline, to behind large sand dunes. I made sure to set up my microphones at several elevations, to capture the variation in sound this affords. These are not squeaky-clean recordings, as some of the quieter ones do contain the odd bird sound here and there. You will also hear grasses and other vegetation rustled by the wind, but that all adds to the realism, of course!

Recording waves is a bit like recording wind, by the way, in that it is basically white noise and can quickly be reduced to sounding like it – if you stand in the wrong place. This is probably the “soothing” quality, many people hear in wave sounds. However, there is a lot more to water waves than relaxation sounds, and so I’ve always attempted to capture the drama and the variation, along with the more obvious wave sounds.

Recordings were made in A-B stereo as well as X/Y, with the M/S sources included in the download. This gives you more flexibility to widen or narrow the sounds in post-production. Microphones used were both Sennheiser MKH series and Primo EM172 omni electret capsules.

Some recordings are focused on the distant perspective, while others zoom in on each wave impacting a surface, which is where M/S lets you choose how sharply you want to frame the sound.