It’s hard to say exactly how it started, this obsession I have with sound recordings.

When I was 2, my dad got hold of a reel-to-reel tape machine and recorded my sister and me playing “How Big Is the Baby”. You know, the adult asks, “How big is the baby?” and the baby stretches up tall and says, “This big!” I’m sure we were adorable (or at least our parents thought so). Unfortunately, I’ve never heard that recording because a fellow at my dad’s work carelessly recorded over it when he was trying to sell a tape machine. For which transgression, my father apparently drove the guy’s car into a brick wall out back of the building. One of the many things to love about my dad. Regardless, the recording was lost forever.

But the idea of how important a recorded voice was? That became locked in my psyche forever.

My mom was an actor, and so I kinda grew up backstage, which was all kinds of fun. Although I tried acting when I was a kid, it didn’t stick. Me, I loved music. And perhaps because of the era in which I grew up, the recording arts always seemed to be part of that. So while the world of acting, and being around actors, became part of my foundation, my head was filled with sound. And my heart became filled with making it special.

When I was about 13 or 14, I got hold of a clunky reel-to-reel tape machine. I would record my voice making all kinds of utterances and then I’d manually wind the tape backwards and listen to it, mesmerized by the transformation. Then I realized that by inverting the tape that way, I was able to record on just one channel at a time. So I started recording various sounds – books dropped to the floor was a favorite, but also shuffling bottles on table tops, opening and closing windows and doors, fluffing drapery, an oddly plucked guitar string, random audio recordings played out of a battery-operated cassette deck, and of course spoken and sung words…It all felt meaningful, combining sounds, listening in reverse, breaking the laws of physics (in my mind), although it was likely more amusing than important.

But yeah, that was probably the actual beginning. Those magical double-mono recordings and the constant search for fresh ways to record and listen to sound. It was a kind of fun that I found deeply satisfying.

Then in the 80s, at my first professional music recording session – such excite! – friends of my producer were in a small side suite at the Warner Bros. Amigo Studio, trying to hammer out some commercials for records that Warner Bros was releasing. The VO talent they’d hired apparently didn’t have quite the desired juice for the job. They asked me to try so that they could hear a female voice deliver the script. Apparently it was magic, and a few weeks later I got my first voiceover check. It was marvelous. And I did more. And more. The work was fun, and getting paid was very fun.

I continued to be an on-mic voice talent myself while deciding, slowly, that the elusive record deal was just too elusive. Eventually, I started scoring tv shows and indie film, which was a lot more fun than the record industry. And I continued to do voiceover, because it was also fun. I was vaguely aware that my experience of being a voice talent informed how I perceived the role of underscore. But only in retrospect, now, do I see how powerfully informative all my audio experiences have been upon one another.

In the summer of 1998, I was living in Silverlake and outgrowing my apartment with gear and more gear. So I started looking for studio space and called some places in the old L.A. 411 book. I connected with Wally Burr. Wally was the wayback machine of voiceover. He’d directed everything, from radio and TV spots in the 60s to the Transformers, Gem and the Holograms, G.I. Joe and so forth in the 80s. He had a full recording studio on Hollywood Way, and a small suite of studios a few doors north. He and I struck our rental deal with a handshake and I prepared to move all my gear, and then some, to Burbank.

I continued to live in Silverlake and commuted every day with my dog, John Macduff. I set up the patch bays into the late night on the 3rd of July, my grandmother’s birthday. As always, John Macduff supervised the setup work, to ensure I made no mistakes. (He was always the brains in the operation.)

Driving home on the 5 that hot summer night, windows down and sunroof wide open, John and I agreed that something special was happening. A new phase.