About

I’m David Power

This is how I looked in Kindergarten.

The day before this photo was taken, I decided I needed a hair cut. So I cut it. Myself. With scissors. That explains the extra forehead above my left eye.

I was close to this age when my dad brought a Phillips cassette recorder into our home.

It was big and heavy and had to be lugged around on a shoulder strap. It had a handheld microphone on a short, thin cable and it made noisy recordings.

 

My Old Best Friend

Despite its shortcomings, I was mesmerized by this “tape recorder.” It became my BFF — long before BFFs were a thing.

I carried it around the house and made recordings of anything that made sound…

• myself reading story books
• my younger brother reciting his list of Christmas gifts
• TV shows (I’m pretty sure there were a few episodes of Three’s Company in my collection)
• a lot of Neil Diamond records (I still remember the lyrics to all Neil’s hits)

In junior high, I taught myself guitar and played in a few neighborhood garage bands with fellow, long-haired, teenage boys.

I’d frequently set up a cassette deck and record our jams so I could prove(?) I was cool to the girls I wasn’t dating.

I stayed close to music and audio recording throughout my high school and early college years.

In my sophomore year of college — after I’d saved a few dollars from summer jobs — I stepped up my game and purchased one of these:

Steppin’ It Up

The Yamaha MT1X was a state of the art, 4-track, cassette recorder.

It was an indie musician’s dream.

Throughout my college years, I spent hundreds of hours recording on this thing.

I paid close attention to every nuance of every recording and tried to make each new recording sound better than the one before it.

By the time I finished college, home recording had (thankfully) moved away from the cassette tape and into the digital realm.

My first Digital Audio Workstation software was a a package called…

Baking The Cake

Cakewalk was revolutionary in its day.

It was one of the first DAW packages for the PC. To use it, you needed to install an expansion card in your computer. And not everyone was up for that.

And it crashed a lot.

Almost every time you used it.

But it was fantastic to be able to record (almost) pristine audio directly to your hard drive and see the wave forms and edit them in very nuanced ways.

Since that time, audio hardware and software has changed a lot. Almost everything has become cheaper, better and easier to use.

But I still use Cakewalk Sonar (i.e. their flagship product) for most of my audio production work.

Lights, Camera…

In 2009, I decided I wanted to make films.

So I bought a camera and a location audio kit.

And I made films.

Almost 100 shorts since 2009.

They’ve ranged from music videos to comedies to documentaries to on-the-street interviews to human interest pieces and beyond.

You can find a sampling of them at DavidPower.com

Audio for film presents a lot of challenges that don’t exist in studio recording. For example: hiding the microphone, controlling environmental noise and syncing the track to picture.

But I’ve always loved a good challenge and producing audio for film taught me a whole new set of audio recording and production skills.

Master Podcaster???

It’s now 2016.

I’m a few years older and (arguably) wiser than I was in Kindergarten.

And I no longer cut my own hair.

I live in Brooklyn, New York with my beautiful wife.

I have a small studio in our apartment where I record and produce audio, video and music.

I host and produce the Sure-Fire Podcast — an audio documentary on the making of an independent feature film called Sure-Fire.

MasterPodcaster.com is where I share my experiences with anyone who’s interested enough to visit.

Thanks for checking this out. I hope you’ll stick around and participate in the journey.

~dp