Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543070
22 S P R I N G 2 0 2 6 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y In the 1980s, Eugene Gearty, Phil Stockton, Ron Bochar, Bruce Pross, and I created an editing company called C5 with the concept of having a sound design room where we could edit sound and play the sounds for the filmmakers. This allowed us to make a very concentrated session with a minimum of alternate sounds. We selected the Synclavier as the editing workstation, which could also play back the sessions for the filmmakers. Before we got to the mix, we could experiment and review—Is this what you meant? Do we have this right? If not, what should we change? How many tracks did you have available? Well, the Synclavier was limited in a different way—it required expensive RAM. You could have as many sounds as you wanted, but the sounds had to be sampled into RAM and then played from the RAM chips. Each Synclavier had 24MB-36MB of RAM. [Note: megabytes, not gigabytes.] Good for short sounds, not so good for longer events or music. What's the role of music in your life? I play bass and guitar. I'm trying to learn piano because I keep being drawn to piano sounds. When people ask me if I'm a musician, I would say "No." "Musician" to me means super skilled and lots of really hard work. I don't fit either of those things. I do use these instruments for many films I work on to produce musical tones. For these projects, I use basic music principles to put sounds together in rudimentary compositions. I can mix these sounds with recorded sound FX to complete the sound design. It's the gray area between music and FX. Did being a bass and guitar player have anything to do with you choosing sound as a career path? Understanding the parts of the soundtrack and how the parts progress the story and performance is paramount. Knowing about composition and how musical passages function is very helpful in editing and mixing. Sound effects can be musically organized, high and low, as well as tempo and things that grow and ebb. Certainly, there's an absolute requirement that the music and sound need to work together. But there is a balance, even if it's rudimentary. You lived in Los Angeles for a while. What brought you to California and what made you go back to New York? Well, at that time, my kids were getting ready for high school. My wife Elizabeth [Kling] was working as a film editor and a producer. The company that I had set up in New York was changing quite a lot and there was an opportunity for me to go to Los Angeles to unite with Jerry Ross and his crew at Acme Skip with Jonathan Demme