Bio
Live sound and studio engineering since 1980. Film sound since 2001.
I have been making a living behind a console since 1980. Country, gospel, Christian, jazz and R&B, on tour, in the studio, in live broadcast and in film post. It has been continuous. There is no year in there where I was doing something else.
I spent twenty years in live sound and studio work before I ever touched a film. Through the 1980s that meant Donna Fargo, James Cleveland and the Gospel Music Workshop of America, and studio sessions with Stevie Wonder at Wonderland. Through the 1990s I was out as production manager and front of house engineer with Kool & The Gang, Cameo, the New Edition reunion tours and Gerald Levert, then Kirk Franklin, Fred Hammond and Yolanda Adams. All of that came before Lucasfilm/Skywalker.
Dallas to Skywalker Sound, 1998 to 2002
In 1998 I took the Senior Audio Engineer job at T.D. Jakes's Potter's House in Dallas.
In 2001 I was mixing front of house at a pastors conference at the Potter's House when Cynthia Montgomery, Head of HR for Lucasfilm, walked up to the audio desk, laid her business card on it, and said: "I've been watching you all week. How would you like an opportunity to mix at Skywalker Sound?" The Potter's House sent me to film school, at Media Tech Institute in Dallas, from 2000 to 2001.
At Skywalker Sound I came in as an intern, at a desk inside Gary Rydstrom's office, with twenty years of live and studio work already behind me, and I was hired on as a Sound Editor. Four pictures came out of those two years.
Monsters, Inc. was in previz when I arrived. Gary stopped the mix one day, decided the punches in the Sully and Randall fight were not working, and sent me to cut new ones. Those are the punches in the film.
I was the only sound effects recordist on Punch-Drunk Love. What the production sound recordist captured on set is his. Everything else in the effects tracks I went out and got: an Arco tanker at the fuel distribution facility in Richmond, recorded standing in the rain, and the freezer doors at a market in San Rafael. On Minority Report I recorded effects for Gary, who was designing it. We put a contact mic on a concrete pillar at the old Presidio Hospital in San Francisco and recorded the wrecking ball taking it down. Those are the booms in the opening.
Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony was the first film I saw through from start to finish, from the team being assembled through delivery. I was the music editor. I did every music edit on the picture and about three quarters of the sound effect edits. I was nominated for Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Music and Sound at the 2003 News and Documentary Emmy Awards for that work. The film won.
Front of house, and back to film
From 2007 to 2018 there are no credits on my filmography. I was not away from the work. Coming out of Skywalker I went back to mixing rooms. Front of house at Ed Young and Fellowship Church, then Chicago, where I was Director of Audio and Technical Production at Salem Baptist Church and its House of Hope Arena, overseeing every part of the technical production and mixing front of house myself. Then Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, running the department across six campuses, managing six production managers and building the training system they all worked from.
Potter's House in 1998 through Willow Creek is a long run of mixing rooms that hold thousands of people, live, once, on a weekly deadline, with nothing fixable afterwards. Broadcast came out of those buildings too, and I supplied the engineer for it from my own crew, but the room was my mix.
I kept touring through all of it. Faith-Based Communications, a relationship I still have, does live event and tour production, and in 2016 and 2017 they put me out as production manager and front of house engineer on a national gospel tour sponsored by the McDonald's Corporation, with some of the largest names in Gospel Music on it.
Film credits picked up again in 2018 with the re-recording mix on Robert Glasper Experiment: Live, a concert film built from separate shows recorded by other engineers in four places, from the North Sea Jazz Festival to the Troubadour. Much of that material needed corrective work before it could be mixed at all, and the finished film was delivered in 5.1 from recordings never made with surround in mind. Then two broadcasts for Grand Park and the Music Center in Los Angeles, the 2020 New Year's Eve show and the Fourth of July Block Party. In 2022 I did the sound design, sound editorial and the re-recording mix on Innocence, a short directed by Marcella Taylor.
Film sound post runs through KDP Post, LLC. Live sound runs through Kirk Denson Productions, LLC. I am also the founder and Executive Director of the MEMa Foundation, a Chicago nonprofit teaching media arts to young people and building a mobile production studio.
Chronology
1980 to 1990: Donna Fargo, James Cleveland and the Gospel Music Workshop of America, Stevie Wonder (studio)
1990 to 2000: Kirk Franklin, Fred Hammond, Yolanda Adams, Cameo, Kool & The Gang, New Edition Reunion tours, Gerald Levert
1998 to 2001: Senior Audio Engineer, T.D. Jakes and The Potter's House, Dallas
2000 to 2001: Media Tech Institute, Dallas
2001 to 2002: Lucasfilm, Ltd./Skywalker Sound
2002 to 2005: Ed Young and Fellowship Church
2005 to 2026: Salem Baptist Church of Chicago and House of Hope Arena, Faith-Based Communications, McDonald's Corporation, Willow Creek Community Church, MEMa Foundation