Free To Use Sounds

08/30/2026

That was a good save Libby. 😂 Can’t believe this was back in December 2019, somewhere on the coast of Malaga.

Looking at the gear I was using back then makes me smile. Today my setup looks completely different, but at the time this was the gear I chose and the place I thought was right for it.

Nothing wrong with the gear at all. I’ve just changed a lot as a sound recordist since then, and so have the choices I make.
Not bad, just different.

08/29/2026

08/26/2026

Take things day by day, keep working and see how things go.

That’s something I once told myself during a time in my life when I wasn’t the happiest. I didn’t have some big plan or know where everything was going. I just knew I had to keep going.

The older I get, the more thankful I am to my past self for not giving up.

Now that I’m in my 40s, I know what it feels like to be 20 because I’ve already lived it. I can look back at that younger version of myself and see the decisions he made, the mistakes, the difficult times and all the moments when things could have gone in a completely different direction.

But I don’t know what it feels like to be 60 yet.

And that’s something I think about sometimes.

If I’m lucky enough to reach that age, I hope I can look back at the person I am today and say the same thing:

Thank you for keeping going. Thank you for taking care of yourself. Thank you for still being curious, for still working on the things you love and for not thinking it was too late just because you were getting older.

Maybe that’s all we can really do. Take things day by day, do the best we can with the life we have right now, and hopefully make our future self a little thankful that we didn’t give up.

08/25/2026

Back to Europe after a little less than five years! 🇪🇺

The last time we were in Europe was November 2021, when we boarded a plane in Madrid and flew to Helsinki and then Bangkok.

Next month we’re doing it the other way around. Bangkok → Helsinki, and we’ll spend the first few weeks back in Finland.

This is our current itinerary, which we’ve already changed twice. :)

🇫🇮 Finland
Helsinki → rental car → road trip around Finland → back to Helsinki. All booked!

🇪🇪 Estonia
Ferry from Helsinki → Tallinn → a couple of days in Tallinn → rental car → road trip around Estonia → back to Tallinn. All booked!

🇱🇻 Latvia
Direct train Tallinn → Riga → a few days in Riga → rental car → road trip around Latvia → back to Riga. All booked!

🇫🇷 France
Fly Riga → Paris → pick up a rental car → roughly two weeks road tripping through southwestern France. All booked!

🇬🇷 Greece
Back to Paris → return the car → fly to Athens → stay in Athens for a while. Not booked yet.

More about that soon. 🙂

08/23/2026

December 2019, a time when I still had the Zoom H6!

Would I still use this recorder today? Of course I would! 🙂

And recording church bells again in 2026? Yes! Because right now we’re booking rental cars, hotels and apartments all over Europe and we’ve already changed a few things around.

Looks like there will be plenty more recording coming up.

I’ll tell you more soon! 🙂

08/21/2026

Time for some oldies! 🙂

The short period in my field recording journey when I actually used a boom pole!

This was back in 2020 when we visited Dubrovnik, Croatia. Oh, I still remember walking around and recording throughout the city with almost no other tourists around. We even stumbled across a movie production and saw Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal roaming around Dubrovnik.

I also remember changing my SD card at some point during the trip… and never seeing that card again. 😂

I came away with some wonderful recordings from Dubrovnik, but I also lost almost half of what I had recorded.

Well, that’s field recording sometimes.

And now, six years later, we’re heading back to Europe next month. 🙂

08/20/2026

Millions of people hear field recordings every single day without ever realizing they’re listening to field recordings.

Someone watches a K-drama and hears Seoul outside an apartment window. Someone plays a game and hears an ocean. Someone puts on three hours of rain to fall asleep.

Everyone knows these sounds.

They just might not know the term field recording.

And most people probably never think about the fact that somewhere out there, someone actually stood in that street, walked down to that ocean, waited for that rain or carried recording equipment halfway around the world just to record that sound.

Sometimes that person was me. 🙂

And I actually love that.

The recording doesn’t need my name attached to it. It just needs to work in that moment, wherever it eventually ends up.

08/19/2026

Looking back, Australia already feels like a blur. Thinking about everything we saw and experienced, it’s almost impossible to believe we actually drove more than 30,000 km around the country.

Besides the occasional freight train rolling through the landscape, once you’re out there it’s mostly campervans and enormous road trains. It’s a completely different feeling from being in or around one of Australia’s cities.

We recorded road trains all over the country, and one thing I’ll never forget is hearing them approaching through the Outback at night. Long before you could see them, you could already hear them from miles away.

This recording was made at Mundrabilla Roadhouse along the Nullarbor Plain.

Looking back now, the hardest part of the drive for me wasn’t the Nullarbor at all.

It was the stretch between Katherine and Broome.

What a journey.

And it isn’t over yet.

Our car is still in Australia with our friends, and even after driving more than 30,000 km around the country, it still feels like we’ve only scratched the surface. There is so much more we want to see and explore, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we go back next year.

Although next time… a camper with its own toilet and shower might not be a bad idea. 😄

08/18/2026

Ah, this was a fun day on our road trip around Australia.

As we passed through Murray Bridge in South Australia, we thought, “Let’s head down to the train station and hopefully record some train ambience.”

It turned out we had missed the passenger train by just two days. 🙂

No problem.

We set up our DPA 5100 with the Zoom F8n Pro and started recording the station ambience instead. It’s such a nice, compact setup for this kind of recording.

Then, in the distance, we heard a train horn.

A freight train was heading our way.

We got lucky. Just a few minutes later it rolled past us, and to make the moment even better, the driver gave us a friendly honk and a wave with the locomotive lights.

Great day, great recordings.

Sometimes you wait for hours and nothing happens. Other times, you’re simply in the right place at the right time. 🙂