Sisters of Sound

Simone Torres is a Multi-Platinum, Grammy Nominated, engineer, vocal producer and vocalist. She was born and raised in Long Island, NY and began singing live with her father at the age of 9.

“Because I’m a singer, I tune like a singer and not like an engineer.”

After highschool, she went on to study at Berkeley and excelled. When she was 19 she was a competitor on the X Factor, where she realized that perhaps maybe performing isn’t her thing, and instead took to engineering.

Episode 17 of Sisters Of Sound has us hanging with Jenny Reader, President and CCO of Fearless Records. We Skype her in from Culver City, California, where the alt-rock label is celebrating 25 years.

Jenny grew up in England with a love for writing, creating and designing. She got a degree in design and media management and worked in publishing for a few years, later becoming freelance. An opportunity came up for her to write for England’s SkyTV’s new music alt-rock channels, which lead into the music ‘biz at the time when emo culture was popping off.

Listen to hear about her years later at Victory Records in the UK and her move to the US, where she eventually landed and worked her way up to run Fearless Records.

On Episode 16 of SOS, we Skype with Brooklyn, NY local Caroline Sanchez. She is a freelance musician, audio technician, and technology consultant who’s landed some pretty exciting gigs throughout her career thus far.

She’ll tell us how the audio ball got rolling with a Bachelor of Music in Sound Engineering Arts from William Paterson University. She then jumped at the opportunity to intern at Bonnaroo, which lead to more high profile jobs like working for SNL, Good Morning America and even The Grammy’s.

“I don’t get super star struck easy. No matter how iconic of a show, I try to take every call like “ok, this is really cool, it’s a big job, it’s a big client. But what is the job? What are the things I need to know? How can I prepare myself before I show up?”

Listen to hear her story plus her tips on how to make it happen as a freelancer.

Chances are you’re no stranger to binge-watching a series or two on Netflix. A lot of work goes into what those shows and specials sound like, and if you’re an audio nerd like us, you’re probably already thinking about the areas we hear that make a production shine; the music department, foley, ADR and sound design.

In this episode, we chat with Claire Dobson, an Emmy-nominated Toronto based sound designer with an impressive list of credits. She’s worked on The Handmaid’s Tale, Vikings and Fargo, to name a few.

Claire tells us how her career took off, starting with producing short films in high school. She loved the process of piecing a story together, and in university, her profs quickly took notice to her talent.

Listen to hear about her 9 years so far in audio, plus her 3 key pieces of advices if you want to get into the ‘biz.

Episode 14 has us chatting with award-winning Nashville record producer, Karen Kosowski.

Karen has been making music since she was a teen in suburban Winnipeg. She spent over a decade writing and producing in Toronto before making the move to Nashville.

The radio industry is no doubt an exciting place to be. It could be the best fun you could possibly ever have working a job – literally, your job is to make people happy most of the time. At the same time, the working competition is cut-throat, which doesn’t offer much stability for professionals. It goes without saying that the ones who are making it all happen on and behind the air are hella talented.

Throughout my time working in radio, I found the male/female disparity a little striking, mostly in terms of leadership or technical positions. In almost 7 years starting my career, I had never met one single female radio Producer in my field.

So I did some digging to find one. My network proved resourceful, and lead me to episode 12’s guest in my own city of Toronto, Elisabeth Hart.

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Elisabeth is the Imaging Producer at one of the largest sports station in the country, Sportsnet 590 The Fan. Don’t worry, she’ll explain what that means. Her career started here in Ontario where she, like many, worked in several departments of radio before settling into production.

Elisabeth gives us the low-down on how she landed where she is now, creating sounds to hype up listeners for the biggest sporting events of the year. She shares what her day-to-day is like and why despite being a lady in a man’s world, her gender hasn’t really mattered all that much. She’s naturally the biggest sports fan, which was effortless to prove.

Stories are a part of our lives from the very beginning. They come to us in many forms; a daily group-chat, the evening TV news or a perhaps a podcast. Almost half of the US population has listened to a podcast now, and that’s still on the rise. But what about books?

E-readers were the first technology to disrupt paperbacks. And now, it’s audio. But it’s not a bad thing for publishers. They’re switching things up quick, and are now publishing their books in both paper and sound.

Our guest for Episode 12 is Ann Jansen, Director of Audiobook Production for Penguin Random House Canada, where 90% of their adult titles, fiction and narrative non-fiction, published are coming out in audiobook format, as well as print and e-book editions.

Stories can come across vastly different in audio form over the written word.

“It’s like taking a book and making it into a film. Something changes, something gets lost, something gets gained.”

Ann tells us about her time working for CBC, where she lead their iconic Canada Reads program for 10 years. Ann read a lot of books in that time, so it’s safe to say she knows what’s good when it comes to bringing stories to life through sound. We learn how audiobooks are produced, her top three books you should listen to (authored by women) and why it’s such an exciting time for the audiobook industry.

Sound engineering is dominated by the dudes, which is no secret to us at Sisters of Sound. The Audio Engineering Society’s (AES) American women in audio committee—which is now, tellingly, defunct—loosely estimated that 5 percent of those working in the field are female.

On Episode 11, we got an engineer who’s been behind the board for over 25 years.

Annelise Noronha is a Canadian producer, engineer, and composer. She’s a proud mama to English bulldog Holly, who you might catch snoring in the background of this episode.

Annelise tells us about how she got into engineering in the first place and succeeded, working her way up as an assistant at Studio 306 and Digital Music And Post, and eventually cutting her teeth engineering at the now defunct Manta Sound from 1994-2003. Her Manta work fam was supportive and luckily not sexist at all, which is rare for the field. She admits there’s been times over the years where her gender has likely affected how she had been treated, but she didn’t care to acknowledge it. She was working too hard.

“It’s still a man’s world out there. Before, it would have been a sign of weakness for the women to band together.”

The roster of artists she’s worked with is hella impressive: Jennifer Lopez, James Brown, Blue Rodeo, and Oscar Peterson, as well as working with producers Phil Ramone, and John Whynot.

She’s scored films and musicals, composed her own music for film and TV and taught workshops on mixing for female and LGBTQ folks.

Annelise currently divides her time working between Toronto, and her home in Prince Edward County.

Meet D.W. Waterson, also known as hey! dw. She’s an artist of many talents. To some, she’s hey! dw, a DJ drummer party captain that lead them have the best night ever. To others, she’s the creator and director of their fave binge-watchable You-Tube series. On the real, she’s one of the hottest Toronto DJs around, a musician at heart and an award winning director/creator.

Her digital series That’s My DJ, inspired by the party scene she lives in, won her Best Director at the New York Television Festival and Vancouver WebFest. She has since been signed to GERSH & Meridian agency to take it all to the next level. 

“I’m a bit of a perfectionist. So I’m kind of applying that pressure to myself in the sense of ‘that stuff was great… that stuff people responded to…’ I gotta make something good now.”

Since founding her production company Night is Y, Waterson has dedicated herself to uniting the talents of filmmakers, artists, musicians and actors to tell visually stunning, dynamic stories.

hey! dw biked over to the studio on a very hot August afternoon to chat about her whirlwind of a career over the past 5 years. What makes her DJ set stand out? Who inspires her? And, what’s next?

Sisters of Sound is produced and hosted by TA2’s Morgan Sheppard. 

Lorraine Segato: is an accomplished pop singer-songwriter, filmmaker, event producer, artist director, lecturer and social justice activist. Her career spans over 3 decades. She’s best known as the lead singer and principal songwriter of the Toronto new-wave pop rock group The Parachute Club. Their hit “Rise Up” was a national hit in 1983, and is hailed as a unique achievement in Canadian pop music.

Lorraine’s story begins as the lead in Toronto rock band Mama Quilla II in the late 70’s. She tells us what life was like for feminist artists on Queen St West and how the Parachute Club formed shortly after. The Parachute Club went on to receive five Junos, five BMAC’s, five Casbys, two Platinum and one Gold record as well as a SOCAN Classic Award for “Rise Up.”

“The song cut through everything and became this crazy anthem.”

Throughout her career, Lorraine shed light on issues important to her, and incorporated her activism into her music and productions. We talk about gentrification and how it affects not only Toronto’s music scene, but also the neighbourhoods we live in.

Sisters of Sound is produced and hosted by TA2’s Morgan Sheppard.