Approaching Storm

How it's made

Source

lightning heats an extended air channel; independent pink/white noise bursts model its shock. Distant channels lose high frequencies; approach opens the bandwidth from 300 Hz to 2.5-6 kHz.

Body

35-360 Hz pressure rolls plus diffuse 100-900 Hz noise, with no pitched resonator or baked reverb. Delayed lobes at 0.12-1.6 s model unequal propagation paths along the branching lightning channel.

Envelope

4-10 irregular thunder arrivals span 6-86% of the render; level rises about 20 dB and attacks shorten from 160 ms to 4-20 ms. Low tails last 3-7 s; high-frequency cracks decay in 80-350 ms.

Layers

decorrelated 90-1800 Hz wind swells with 5-12 s gusts and a rising pressure bed below 140 Hz. Thunder stays more central than wind; independent rolling lobes spread across the stereo field.

Variation

seeded timing, channel-lobe delays, pan and turbulent envelopes differ per arrival. Wind, crack bandwidth, rolling weight, arrival count and stereo spread have distinct controls.

Presets

a sparse soft front, long bass rolls, a wind-dominated squall and dense sharp near thunder. The approach fills the requested duration (30 s by default); the final tails fade without a hard cut.

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.