MIDI had now happened at that point, and I was working at a sort of “general” interest music shop which sold band instruments, Drums, Keyboards and Guitars and Basses- but there was also a high-end music store in town which sold the Sequential Circuit stuff, the Oberheim things, and they were our EMU dealer in San Diego. I went in and got to see the Emulator and just went, ‘wow, this is incredible’ and I remember pleading with my parents to co-sign on a loan for me to be able to get one. It was crazy money back then, I bought the base model emulator and the shop gave me a fairly substantial discount, but it was still $7,000.
I ended up getting hired by that place and they were the EMU service centre as well so when bands would come into town, invariably their Emulator E2s would always have issues so we got used to essentially having to re-solder power supplies on them to get the connections right. I went to the San Diego sports arena when Roger Waters was playing, and his E2 needed that service. I was literally on stage at the sports arena and I took apart their E2, soldered the power supply, got it running before the show started. The thing that was great was being able to get the access to those people; you would get to talk to them and you could trade sounds and stuff so I started making connections that way. Andrew Robinson, who’s the tour manager for New Order, who I met in a kind of similar manner, when they were playing at the university where I was studying electronic music. We ended up trading sounds for years and it was in that community where you’re getting to have engagement with people who are established, or becoming established pop artists. That got me into doing musical instrument stuff and I ended up doing sound programming for the Emulator and having my work go out on commercial products.
Later, I had a friend who got hired at Digidesign and became Peter Gotcher’s assistant. He said, ‘hey, we’ve got some openings at Digidesign, would you like to come over and talk to us about possibly working here?’. So, I ended up doing that, got hired into their technical support department right when Pro Tools 1 was entering development. Roughly about a year later, Pro Tools 1.0 shipped, and the promise of it was wonderful, but it was very chaotic. The development team for it was a little fragmented in the sense that we had OSC developing Pro Deck, which was the four channel software, and Mark Jeffrey, who had done Softsynth and Turbosynth for Digidesign, was working on the graphic editor, which was Pro Edit, and you would have to switch back and forth between the apps and it was entirely crash prone. It was challenging, but we survived.
a bit later, I moved from the Tech Support Dept at Digidesign, to the Software Engineering dept, and started doing more post production- specific testing for ProTools, and a newer product Post-Conform, which was designed for assembling sessions from Video Edit Decision Lists (EDL’s), I was also dealing with external beta testers in the film and TV world and ended up being able to leverage experience into a sound editing position here in Hollywood working for Universal Pictures. I moved here at the end of 1994 and did my first show at Universal in February of 1995. I was there for two films and then got laid off because there wasn’t a huge amount of work.
My first real kind of magic opportunity came when NAB happened at the beginning of ‘95 and Avid reached out to me to go and work in Las Vegas, to essentially present Post Conform to the NAB community, on the show floor. Through that I ended up meeting Steve Flick who had just won the Academy Award for Speed. He was in the process of setting up a new post production company himself and he invited me to work for him. That allowed me to work on films like Twister, Starship Troopers, Long Kiss Goodnight, Mystery Man, and others.
