DISTRICT WEEKLY ARTICLE
01/27/10Sound Snacks has been featured in the January issue of The District Weekly magazine. Check it out!
PHOTO by JEFFREY R. GOULD
STORY by MICHAEL COYLE
Shakespeare wrote that youth is nimble, while age is lame. Two Long Beach musicians are proving that you don’t have to move—or tour—to live creatively once youth is in the rear-view mirror.
Veterans of many bands, tours, gigs, recording sessions, showcases and much music-industry bullshit, Jesse Wilder and Peter Berberich created Sound Snacks partly because of what Wilder, who’s only at the beginning of his third decade of breathing, calls the “old-man syndrome.”
“Sleeping on people’s floors and being cramped in a van for 10 hours a day doesn’t seem as awesome as it once did,” says Wilder.
Sound Snacks creates scores, sound effects, jingles—any noise on the audio spectrum that one might desire, really—for Web sites, commercials, video games, independent films and television. You want your own personal theme song? Just tell them how you like it.
“Some companies or customers ask what our specialty is, but we’re really diverse. That’s our specialty,” says Wilder. “I’m not a technical jazz musician, but I can pull it off, no problem.”
“Other sites just don’t seem to offer a whole lot of personality,” adds Berberich. “We are as capable as anything we’ve heard.” And if they’re in a pinch, Wilder adds, they call in a favor to any of their friends—an arsenal of Long Beach musicians and artists.
Recently, while composing the score for an online video game, the two were asked to create a Celtic folk style. “Neither of us had ever played that, but we figured it out,” Wilder says with a happy confidence that’s anything but smug.
“Celtic music, electronic, super-speed metal . . . ,” Berberich trails off, smiling at the possibilities.
“It’s nice to have a definite beginning and end to a project,” he adds. “This allows us to be creatively on the move—whereas a band, playing the same style all the time, can feel more like an anchor.”
Wilder, who plays in ForceField ON, the live ’80s karaoke band Mr. Mister Miyagi (and its alter ego, the Beatles karaoke band Mr. Mister Mustard) and various other projects, admits that the whole band-shebang isn’t as rewarding as it used to be. “Recording with a band is a pain in the ass. For Sound Snacks, I’ve got a band at my fingertips. I don’t have to call seven people and coordinate things.” (It’s a pain in the ass he still happily endures, as ForceField ON is in the studio right now.)
Both Berberich and Wilder have home studios where they’ve invested “a ton of cash” into software that can create sounds their own instruments might not be able to make. Berberich even has one of those drum kits that plug into a computer and can be played in an apartment without pissing off all the neighbors.
Still, the two are learning that business is business, whether it’s booking a concert for your band or landing a contract to score a TV show. “It’s the exact same crap. It’s like 90 percent who you know and 10 percent talent,” says Wilder. “And Long Beach isn’t Hollywood, so it hinders what we get.”
But there are some things on the horizon. Sound Snacks is beginning to work with companies that build up whole libraries of music that they can sell license-free. They’ve already scored an independent animated film, as well as the online video game.
With dreams of doing sound for a pilot, the two are contacting producers and anyone else involved in television production.
“When we were asked to do the video game, we realized this doesn’t have to be a one-time thing. It has always kind of been a dream,” says Wilder. “The end goal is for Sound Snacks to be a company that uses Long Beach’s talented people to build an empire.”