JOE WALLACE: I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com and I'm here with Dave Huizenga from Kurtis Productions. How are you?

DAVE HUIZENGA: I'm good, Joe. Thanks for coming.

JOE WALLACE: Now, we want to talk a little bit about what you do here at Kurtis. You guys have a lot of television that you work on including Cold Case and a whole bunch of other things. Tell us a little bit about what you do and the tools that you use to get the job done.

DAVE HUIZENGA: [CLEARS THROAT] Excuse me. Well, I write the music for Kurtis here, Kurtis Productions, original music for every episode dating back 20 years now that I've been doing it here for Bill, and our show currently, Cold Case Files, is airing on A&E. I think it's almost every day now and it's a nice ratings boost for A&E. It's good. We -- Our past series have been The New Explorers, and that's kind of the one that kicked us off as Kurtis Productions in the late '80s, early '90s on the PBS network, and that's where I got my start with Bill was The New Explorer series, writing original music and doing the sound in the field as well. So, about the first five or so years before we got with A&E and our output of shows became so great, I was able in the beginning to go out with every episode and shoot with the camera man and do audio in the field before coming back, and then the luxury of being able then to take sometimes up to three weeks to four weeks to write the soundtrack for that particular show. So, it's truly been the dream gig you can imagine: sound in the field, coming back, writing music all around the world by the way, and then coming back and writing music for those shows.

We got to a point, however, like I say, with A&E, when we signed on with them, the series Investigative Reports was our first big series with them, and that evolved kind of into Cold Case, which then spun off and has now its own series. But when we got busy with A&E, the exploring -- my personal exploring came to a halt, and because the output of shows became great and I just ended up really basically here with not as much time, I must say, per show either, you know. Sometimes, it's just two weeks tops and sometimes less to try and get, you know, a 48-minute program filled with original music.

JOE WALLACE: Now, you use a lot of different types of gear to get this done. You've got keyboards and you've got a MIDI setup and you just got an endless array of stuff. Tell us a little bit about what kind of equipment you need to get the job done for every show.

DAVE HUIZENGA: All right. Well, I have -- I do use a MIDI controller but primarily Pro Tools is my sequencer and my audio workstation, Pro Tools 7 I'm using now, and I also have a few relics but mostly everything now, all of my samples and sounds, are stored on my -- I have a G5, a Mac G5, that's what I use, a dual processor, and I am currently -- What's pretty cool about, you know, the last say five to six years especially is sounds that I have -- You know, used to use an Emax II. [LAUGHING] Do you remember that? It was right here along with a couple of other keyboards. I used to have actually four or five keyboards in here, not to mention a rack of modules, and -- But anyway, the sounds -- some of the best sounds that I had at the time were from like an Emax II, which what I think was like an 8-MB memory, you know. So, I graduated years ago to this Akai sampler, but that got me in, especially in The New Explorers days, I was able to sample things like I'd go in the field for example and we're in Kenya with the Masai, for example, and I would be doing the field audio and in stereo, grabbing the Masai warriors, you know, doing their celebratory chants and dances around the camp fire. How cool then that I could come back here and using sampling, capture some of the great [IMITATES MASAI WARRIOR CHANT], you know, these great, throaty thing vocals that they're producing, and actually use them right into [IMITATES MASAI WARRIOR CHANT] by capturing the sample and just incorporate those sounds as an example. I try to do that as often as I could with other cultures and with other locations where we go. But -- so, there's a little bit of sampling still available here in terms of the Akai, but really primarily everything is Pro Tools and all of the wonderful plugins that are -- excuse me -- that are available here now. I can show you, you know, some of the things I'm using, but to answer your question, it's primarily I have one module that's let that I love the piano sound for, and I can quickly go and I can find a couple other synthy pads and some, just some of that, you know, analog, cool synth stuff is on a Korg TR rack module I still have, and there's a Roland 1080 from the day, you know, that is an amazing piece still.