Engineer Builds Custom Audio Tracks (Opinion)

Since I opened my studio in 1996, I’ve probably recorded more than 200 different bands and musicians. But in the last year or so, I’ve spent about half my time on audio engineering and sound effects work for film and Web sites.

One of the big projects I’ve been working on is a $200,000 AETN documentary about World War II called “In Their Words.” The film’s director of photography is a friend of mine, so when the producers needed someone to handle audio work, he referred them to me.

Hundreds of Arkansas World War II vets were interviewed, and we even flew 45 of them to Washington, D.C. to visit the memorial and shoot more footage. I had to record quite a bit of ambient sound and background noise to give the film a richer feel. I recorded everything from street sounds to the organist playing in the National Cathedral.

Because a lot of the archival footage had no original sound, I’ve had to get creative. There was a scene of the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, where these metal structures were burning. To create audio of that, I recorded some crickets outside and ran the sounds through a guitar effects processor and it sounded perfect.

Another project that’s been keeping me busy is writing songs and creating audio for Scholastic.com. I have a friend, Mason Rather, who lives in New York and worked on the kid’s show “Blue’s Clues” for several years. He and I, along with two other friends, formed a music publishing company called Suppertime Sound.

Kids these days are very media-driven, so a lot of educational materials incorporate music and audio entertainment. The turnaround time is very fast, too. Sometimes we have to get a song written, produced and turned in within 24 hours.

Because we all live in different towns, everything is done over the Internet.