Listening with Francis Preve

Explicit content warning

11/05/19 • 22 min

With a career that includes designing sounds for Ableton, Dave Smith, Korg, Roland, and Xfer, plus serving as Technology Editor for Beatportal.com, Francis Preve has carved a niche as one of the tech industry's most in-demand sound designers. His work as a college professor in Austin, Texas, provides additional insight into how musicians of all skill levels interface with synthesizers, while his career as a technology journalist gives him a deeper appreciation of great product design and development.

Over the years, Preve's musical output has included remixes for Dragonette, Orbital, Gabriel & Dresden, Sander Kleinenberg, and Dave Seaman. His original productions include collaborations like "Yin/Yang" with Wolfgang Gartner, "Glow Ballz" with Matt Lange, and "Get Down" with John Acquaviva & Olivier Giacomotto. He is also the founder of Symplesound, a soundware company focused on creating intuitive instruments and presets.
In 2017, Preve introduced his Scapes artform—entirely synthesized recreations of field recordings—which got the attention of the immersive sound design industry. He has presented and/or moderated panels on sound, synthesis, and production at conferences including SXSW, MacWorld, O’Reilly, and Project BBQ.

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Listening with Charles Bernstein

Award winning composer Charles Bernstein conducted his first original orchestral compositions at the age of sixteen. His long career in film scoring can be heard in many popular films and television shows, including Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and scores for genre classics, A Nightmare on Elm Street (the original), The Entity, Stephen King's Cujo, the Dracula spoof Love At First Bite, along with a wide variety of Emmy winning dramas, comedies, action films and Oscar winning documentaries.

Bernstein is currently a six-term Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where he has also served as the Academy’s Vice President. He sits on the ASCAP Foundation Board and the ASCAP Board of Review, and is a founding and Advisory Board member and current Vice President of the Society of Composers & Lyricists.

As an author, Charles Bernstein has received the coveted Deems Taylor Award for his writings on music, and has published over 100 Essays on film music, many of which can be found in his two books, "Film Music and Everything Else” and “Movie Music: An Insider’s View,” and will soon be available in a volume of 110 Collected Essays.

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Listening with David Gamson

David Gamson is a Grammy-nominated keyboardist, musician, producer, songwriter, arranger, and engineer. Originally hailing from New York, he has worked with an impressive list of artists, including Kesha, Kelly Clarkson, Jessie J, Adam Lambert, Chaka Khan, Charli XCX, Meshell Ndegeocello, Green Gartside (Scritti Politti), Sheila E., George Benson, Luther Vandross, Donny Osmond, Miles Davis, Al Jarreau, Tony LeMans, Roger Troutman and Eden XO.

He is best known for his distinctive synthesizer work and arrangements as a member of the popular 1980s pop band Scritti Politti for three of their albums. Gamson co-produced, co-wrote and arranged most of the songs on three of the band's albums, which include Cupid & Psyche 85 (1985), Provision (1988), and Anomie & Bonhomie (1999).
A column in Vinyl Me Please describes his work as “fast-paced and packed with techniques known for accomplishing clear sonic pronunciation... It avoids melodic stasis by hurdling between distant keys, shifting between the verses and choruses.”