Carl Sondrol :: blog

I love working on animations, and the above sound design + music project was no exception.

I checked out a bunch of dragon ball z clips courtesy of youtube to get a flavor of their sound design. It’s largely a mix of explosions, jets, whooshes, etc. mixed with old-school sci-fi sounds (synthesizers galore!) I’m assuming the sonically dense fight scenes are the reason so many DBZ episodes consist of the characters just standing around grunting… their sound guys just needed some downtime?

The music mostly stays in line with the american DBZ music, which I must say is VASTLY inferior to the original Japanese music. Holy moly. In contrast, the former often sounds like some guy ham-fisting away at a casio.

Other than that, you can also hear me doing some vocalizations e.g. Goku yelling at 1:47 and Piccolo (the green guy) grunting at 2:15- probably the closest I’ll ever get to “acting”.

This project was my introduction to Jersey Shore, which I was quite fortunate to have never previously seen. This amazingly astute Netflix review (thanks reddit) pretty much sums up my feelings on the show I have to say, putting a nice huge punch sound in at 2:21 was QUITE satisfying.

Here’s a Boyz II Men parody I produced for CollegeHumor featuring Romany Malco (No Ordinary Family, Weeds, 40-Year-Old Virgin). I was all of 12 years old when this song came out… working on this was such a bizarre way to be revisiting my childhood.

To keep things simple / affordable, I decided to tackle this using 2 singers instead of 4. I really lucked out: that’s the incredibly talented Maurice Smith on lead vocals + some harmonies, and another great singer, David Vines, filling out the rest (including the airy “super-bass” vocals during the choruses.)

They shot this one out here in LA and invited me out to the set! (which happened to be a crazy mansion) A few pictures:

Myself with Romany Malco & backup singers. Left to right: Nic Huffman, me, Romany, Jordan Carlos, ____ (name escapes me!)

Sam Reich directed this one. Here is he working with the backup dancers on some smooooth choreography.

The outdoor stairway scene.

Here’s another song I produced with lyrics by prolific parodist Streeter Seidell.

When I first started listening to music as a kid the only CDs I had were by the Beach Boys and the Beatles.. and to this day I never get tired of revisiting them. This was my first time, however, recreating a Beatles track from the ground up and it was definitely a good learning experience. There are some pretty bold creative choices in the original mix such as:

• the bass and acoustic guitar are extremely compressed
• the electric guitars are mixed very high towards the end
• the vocals have a very strong slap-back delay (pretty typical for lennon, of course)

In my opinion, all this results in an overall sound that’s pretty compelling & interesting.. a nice reminder that experimentation and non-intuitive choices can lead to a much cooler result than playing it safe.

Props to Matt Geiler on vocals, Max Crowe on guitar & bass, Jon Steinmeier on drum sequencing.

Here’s a CollegeHumor Harry Potter parody I scored recently. CH requested a few spooky cues as well as simple orchestral accompaniment for the Hat (sung by Josh Ruben once again- he also directed)

Kudos to the Puppet Wrangler on this one! That hat looks exactly like the original.

Here’s something I scored for CollegeHumor back in 2009- a parody of one of my favorite childhood movies, Beetlejuice.

The dialog is so fast-paced (that’s the amazing Josh Ruben as the titular character) we opted to just give it a little intro and outro music score-wise. In any case, Elfman is one of my idols so it was a lot of fun.

Then there’s the end tag in which I do my best to sing like Harry Belafonte. Funny story… when I was working on this video the REAL Harry Belafonte just happened to be in town for a screening. I managed to get his agent’s assistant on the phone on the off chance he’d be interested in stopping by to record. As expected, they told me Harry’s about 80 years old now and doesn’t sing much anymore. Worth a shot!

I produced the music for this parody of Summer Nights from Grease, with lyrics by Jake Hurwitz.

This was the last project I made before moving from Chicago to LA, and was very glad to bring in one of my favorite singers, Leslie Beukelman as the voice of Sandy (Oliva Newton-John).  You might want to listen to the original song again first… she is EERILY accurate, and nailed every nuance we could find.

Lucky for me, she brought her friend John Tashjian along, who did a great job on the Danny (John Travolta) part.  I was shocked when he whipped out a dead-on Kineckie (thick Brooklyn or Bronx-ian accent) so I had him cover that part too.

Longtime friends Nick Thompson and Max Crowe respectively/respectably played saxophones and guitar/bass, and Josh Sauvageau was interning like crazy.  For the gang vocals I layed in a bunch of other fun people: Caroline Davis, Noel Taylor, Alice Wedoff, Jacob Carlson.

Enjoy.

I don’t have anything Thanksgiving-themed to post, but I do have something holiday-related. This is a piece I did music and sound design for earlier this year.. a parody of Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas.

As with Web Site Story, I:
1) didn’t have sheet music so did my best to recreate all the parts by ear.  (I’m of course using samples and a few great musicians rather than a real orchestra) Here is the original if you’re curious to compare.
2) thoroughly enjoyed dissecting this track and figuring out what makes it work. Danny Elfman is one of my all-time favorites and this was a real joy to work on. A very intensely-fast-paced-race-to-the-deadline kind of joy.

That’s Jacob Carlson on vocals (as Danny Elfman!) and one of my Chicago favorites, Gerald Bailey on trumpet. Last, and surely least importantly, I cameo (vocally) as a drunk priest at 0:55.

The lovely claymation is by Chelsea Manifold, and a few nice visual effects are by the wizards at Gloo Studios.

As for my friends at CollegeHumor: Josh Ruben and Vincent Peone directed, Ben Joseph wrote & produced, and David Fishel edited.

I got a request for some Dark Knight-ish music last year for this CH sketch. I checked out a few Hans Zimmer cues and created a similar sort of “stuff’s happening!” pulse accompanied by appropriately ominous low brass swells.

Featuring Pete Holmes as Batman (with a spot-on subtle lisp… “lightly irradiated bills-ss”, ha) and the very funny Matt McCarthy as Gordon.

One more post before hitting the road to LA…

“Scare Tactics” is a live action puppet piece co-directed/co-produced by the great Frankie Cordero and the also-great David Fishel.

This was a lot of fun to sound design.. my favorite part was recording the vocalizations (vocal parts besides the actual narration, which is by Andrew Schoen). Turns out my go-to guitar/bass expert Max Crowe is great at screaming so I had him handle the numerous freakouts for “Charlie”. I handled the narrator character’s vocalizations (e.g. grunting for the fence jumping at 0:47, ugh!’s and such for the fight scene at 1:20)

Back to packing!

Big news: I’m moving to LA next week!

Chicago has been a great place to build momentum over the past 4+ years, but the timing feels right to get out where all the film infrastructure is (NYC was very tempting too).  I’ll miss all the talented musicians and filmmakers I’ve had the pleasure of working with here.

I’ve somehow managed to trick my great friend Jason Jackson into co-piloting a moving truck across the country so I’ll have some entertainment for the trip.  Speaking of Jason… I had the pleasure of recording him recently, as the operatic voice of a (usually) inanimate object:

Kudos to Dan Gurewitch for writing the song (and starring in the video for that matter), and to the following killer musicians for some very fun sessions:

Man Vocals – Jon Steinmeier
Hoodie Vocals – Jason Jackson
Cello – Lilianna Wosko
Guitar/Bass – Max Crowe