"I write jingles for TV, do music for advertising, promos, and then sound effects for cartoons."

"When I was a kid I took piano lessons, I played classical music. In high school I started playing classical guitar. And then in college I got into electronic music. I studied with this whacked out, crazy musician who'd been doing electronic music since the '60s. He looked a little like the mad professor."

"My hours vary pretty widely. I come in every day, but sometimes I'll be in for three hours and sometimes five. The great thing is that I can make my own hours, take off for Tahiti when I want. But right before a job is due, it gets real stressful. Sometimes, you'll talk to the client and they'll say, 'Well, we need it more warm and punchy.' And then you hang up the phone, and say to yourself, 'God, I have no fucking idea how to do that.'"

"With sound effects -- a man peeing into a cup, a woman screaming -- I don't make most of the sounds from scratch. Most of the things I do come from a sample library and then I'll tweak it, speed it up, reverse it, morph it. Like I'll take a fart noise and mix it with another fart noise -- totally tweaked out shit. But I don't make original sounds, I do the meta level sound work. I wouldn't make my own fart noises, I don't have the credentials for that.

"Mostly I'll use a sampler and synthesizer, sometimes I'll hire a musician to play drums, like last week I hired this marimba player, so I had to fit this giant marimba in the tiny sound studio.

"I play electric guitar, keyboard, drums. I'm not Mr. Musician with any one instrument, but I play a little bit of everything. The skill I have isn't so much being a good musician, playing the instrument, but arrangement, knowing what sounds good together. In the old days, for something like 'Bugs Bunny' say, you would have a composer, arranger, conductor, musicians, and a producer. Today you have to have to know a little bit of everything.

"With classic cartoons -- Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry -- when you hear all the effects, all the tempo changes, you realize how amazing that stuff was. When you hear canned classical music in cartoons today, it's just totally different. Whatever I do, it's just in awe of that kind of thing."

"I also watch a lot of TV. I wish there were a channel just for ads, because there are some of them that are just great, sometimes so much better than the shows you're watching."

Previous Jobs:

"And then as far as getting this job, I fell into it kind of blindly. I was mostly into smoking pot and making music, you know. I met this other jingle guy who had been doing it for ten years. I checked out his studio, and I was like 'Oh my God, this is so cool.'"

The Down Side:

"When I tell girls at parties that I do jingles, they usually just giggle. So, it's not exactly a great job for picking up chicks."

"Then I did some really bad stuff for Fox News -- it's not exactly the cream of the crop of the news channels, you know -- some really schlocky stuff.

"The only time I've ever done actual jingles with words was for some Disney special, I got to do some fucking lame lyrics, and then we didn't end up getting the job. It wasn't that much fun."

"'Analog Warmth' -- I hate this term so much, adding a more natural sound to combat digital harshness or brutality. It's pretty much a crock, but a lot of people really want that kind of sound."

©1999 FEED