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. The Franklin tour is what led to the Adams tour. All of that came before Skywalker.
Skywalker Sound, 2001 to 2002
In 2001 I went to Lucasfilm. 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.
Broadcast, 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 into broadcast at the largest congregations in the country: Senior Audio Engineer at T.D. Jakes's Potter's House in Dallas, then Ed Young and Fellowship Church, then Chicago, for Salem Baptist Church and its House of Hope Arena, Faith-Based Communications, and Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington. That is two decades of live multicamera broadcast mixing to a weekly air date with no second take.
I kept touring through all of it. In 2016 and 2017, Faith-Based Communications, a relationship I still have, put me out as production manager and front of house engineer on a national gospel tour sponsored by the McDonald's Corporation, with the largest names in the music on it.
Film credits picked up again in 2018 with the re-recording mix on Robert Glasper Experiment: Live, cut from the North Sea Jazz Festival multitrack. 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: Kool & The Gang, Cameo, New Edition reunion tours, Gerald Levert, Kirk Franklin, Fred Hammond, Yolanda Adams
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. and Skywalker Sound
2002 to 2010: Ed Young and Fellowship Church
2010 to 2026: Salem Baptist Church of Chicago and House of Hope Arena, Faith-Based Communications, McDonald's Corporation, Willow Creek Community Church, MEMa Foundation