This episode was written & produced by Katie Clark Gray and Casey Emmerling.
To celebrate ten years of Twenty Thousand Hertz, Dallas reveals the oral history of the show, including the career detours, financial gambles, and chance encounters that made it possible. From touring with The Cavaliers, to mixing Mythbusters, to building a sound studio in his basement, he traces the winding path that led him to start a podcast… and the act of generosity from a personal hero that helped it find an audience. Plus, we open the archives to play the unaired 20K pilot that he can barely stand to hear.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Wesley Slover - Just Facts 04
Wesley Slover - Viable Device Positive
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - 6th Symphony - Movement II
Mary Riddle - Play Loud, March Proud
Loreana - Cuando Estes Conmigo
Wesley Slover - Routine
Wesley Slover - Playing with Ideas
Wesley Slover - First Wing Flaps
Wesley Slover - Shore Gloss
Wesley Slover - Into the Light
Wesley Slover - One Sec
Wesley Slover - Breach of Trust
Wesley Slover - Searching the Garden
Blue Saga - Slow Rhodes
Wesley Slover - Friendship Will Return
Wesley Slover - Searching the Garden
Wesley Slover - New Package
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.
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View Transcript ▶︎
Dallas: Back when I started Twenty Thousand Hertz, I remember very vividly thinking, "If this podcast makes it to 10 years, it has been a success." So now we are at 10 years, and something that I didn't realize is happening is a flood of memories, expectations I put on myself, mixed with succeeding in those expectations and being satisfied with the body of work that has been created over the past 10 years.
Dallas: So from there, where shall we start?
[music in: Wesley Slover - Just Facts 04]
I can’t believe I get to say this finally, but it’s true. This is the tenth anniversary of Twenty Thousand Hertz. We’ve been officially making this podcast for as long as they made the show Friends, and even a year longer than Seinfeld.
For me, it's been an incredible, difficult, and life changing decade. And now that we've reached this milestone, I want to tell the oral history of Twenty Thousand Hertz, including how it all started, the struggles and triumphs we had along the way, and what's in store for the future.
This is not at all like a typical episode. What you’re gonna hear is my raw, unscripted thoughts, mixed with some narration that gets us from point A to point B… rather than just hearing me in a four hour ramble. In other words, I’m both the guest and the host.
This episode is filled with the details that I've never talked about on the show before. It’s really about what was happening behind the show. And as an extra bonus, somewhere along the way, you’ll get to hear our unaired pilot episode, which I absolutely cannot listen to without cringing.
So, with all of that out of the way, on with the show.
[music out]
The story starts with me telling our producer and writer of this episode, Katie, about my childhood.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Viable Device Positive]
Dallas: I grew up in the Delta of Arkansas, at a… a lake called Horseshoe Lake. Went to school in Hughes, Arkansas. Those schools don't exist anymore because they all got decommissioned.
Dallas: But there's incredible teachers that were there. My band director took me out of her own time after school, an hour and a half to and from lessons at night, at a university, to just take one-hour trumpet lessons and back.
Dallas: I mean, we were struggling financially, and so my parents had to work a lot. And we lived so far out of the city that… I don't know, I just felt like trapped and poor. And the trumpet kind of put me on this trajectory where now it was my ticket out.
I told the whole story of my time as a young trumpet player in an episode called “Breathe.” Back then, when I was playing the trumpet, band was my entire life.
Dallas: And the trumpet was the thing that gave me attention. I went from a very quiet kid to it built all of my friendships. I was first chair, gosh, the all-region in trumpet five or six years in a row, like through middle school and through high school. So that's every school in the entire area. Then went on to all-state all three years.
Dallas: And I got a full scholarship to what I consider the most premier school, probably on Earth, for music, which is the University of North Texas. But a couple weeks after I auditioned and got a verbal commitment from the trumpet teacher that I would be getting a full scholarship, he actually called me back on the phone and said, "I'm so sorry to do this, but we have a master's student that I've got to give this scholarship to, so I've got to revoke that."
[music out]
So instead, I went to my backup school, which was an in-state school called the University of Central Arkansas. I started at UCA kinda disappointed in myself.
Dallas: Hindsight being 20/20, everything worked out great, because I met my wife there. I have some of the dearest friends there. I loved Conway, Arkansas. But it always pulled on me, because I was still doing all of these, to my mind, bigger things with the trumpet outside of that school.
Dallas: Throughout the summers I was touring the country with this drum corps called The Cavaliers. Very intense. It's like three months of being on tour on the road, playing all day in the sun. Lost a ton of weight, got very physically fit.
[clip: Cavaliers finals 2000]
Dallas: It was just such a beautiful time of my life of just discovery and people and just friendships that still last to this day.
Dallas: But I was playing the mellophone, which is like a trumpet but closer to a French horn. Was very capable on it, but moving back to the trumpet was very difficult. My embouchure and my approach to the trumpet really went sideways when I started playing a different instrument and then just expected to come right back to the trumpet. They just operate differently.
Dallas: I was realizing, “Oh no, everyone said that if I went to play the mellophone, it would ruin my trumpet playing, but I don't want anybody to know that,” but it kinda did.
Throughout this process, every time I picked up the trumpet, I started becoming less and less confident. It led to panic attacks that I didn’t really know were panic attacks.
All of it kind of peaked during a huge performance to celebrate the opening of a new music hall at UCA. And right before my big trumpet solo, I started having a panic attack, and completely botched it.. It was at that moment where I just wanted to bury my head in the sand and just run away.
Dallas: And then, I think it was I don't know, 2000 or 2001, one of my dear friends, Neil, he said, "You gotta listen to this album by Radiohead."
Dallas: Up to this point, you know, I'm listening to classical music.
[music in: Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony - Movement II]
Dallas: I worked in the music library at school, super into Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich… I just adore classical music, and still I love classical music. And so I was a bit of a music snob at that time. And I was like, "I'm not interested in Radiohead. I'm a classical music person."
[music out]
Dallas: And gave me Kid A. I remember—I feel like the biggest sonic mind expansion that ever has happened to me in my entire life were the first five notes of Kid A, which is "Everything in Its Right Place."
[clip Radiohead - Everything in Its Right Place]
Dallas: Because it's so much more than just the notes. It's like this vibe through electronics, through curated sound that instantaneously just like, crystal clear… like I couldn't be able to communicate into words. And that just blew my mind.
Dallas: A fork in the road happened. Like that was the start of: “This music world is so much bigger than music.” And I just became obsessed with, "If I love classical music and I love this, like how deeper does this rabbit hole go?"
That one album opened up this whole new pathway in my mind. It wasn't onstage under a bright spotlight. It was music, but it was also sound design that I could disappear into. It was something I thought I could try myself, but before I could, I had to learn some of these tools.
[clip: Mary Riddle - Play Loud, March Proud]
Dallas: First things first, I was like, "Okay, I need to learn Finale." So I was writing a lot of like marching band music, but doing it in a computer.
[transition into: Loreana - Cuando Estes Conmigo]
Dallas: Then that expanded into Fruity Loops, where you could make beats. I started to really get focused on, "Wow, I can make things without needing an entire band or an orchestra to recreate it. I can make it in a box and take it from there."
[music out]
Once my wife graduated, I transferred to the University of Texas at Arlington. I had hoped that this new scenery would kind of solve my panic attack issue. But the panic attacks followed me to Texas, and they were even worse. They made it basically impossible to play the trumpet.
I realized during this time that there was no way this was going to be my lifelong career, like I always thought it would be.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Routine]
So, I’m in a fog just trying to figure out what I can do now. Then, the summer after I graduated UTA…
Dallas: I did a full summer intensive program at a school at the time was called the Dallas Sound Lab, and they had a program for audio recording.
Dallas: I remember the first week, almost–it may have been the first day, we were talking physics of sound, and I was actually angry that when I was learning about the physics of sound, this was not first semester music school. Because so much about how frequencies work, what hertz are, what bit rates are, like, how sample rates work, how the air changes sound was all built into like day one recording school.
Dallas: And all of it was relevant to my trumpet playing because it all explained how if you wanna play a solo over a loud orchestra, you brighten your sound because it soars over and everyone else kind of darkens their sound to blend in. And there's all kinds of cool physics things that are happening.
Dallas: But I fell in love with it. 'Cause it also like engineering meets creativity meets something that most people don't think about that affects them so deeply.
[music out]
At first I thought, "Hey, I’m a musician. Maybe I could record and mix music for bands." But I quickly learned that wasn’t for me.
Dallas: I felt very uncomfortable being in the recording seat because I felt like I had to be somebody who I'm not. I had to be like Mr. Cool Guy to this guy, and if it was a classical thing, I had to be very professional, and I had to be this… this chameleon to people and couldn't be myself.
But then I took a class in post-production audio. And one of our earliest assignments was to mute the sound from a movie scene, and recreate the entire soundscape from scratch.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Playing with Ideas]
Dallas: And I just, I was like, "Whoa, this is the ultimate." It's nerdy. No one knows how effective this is. It's this pocket of the world where you can kind of tell anybody and they'll just glaze over, but you know, and you have that sense of pride. You know how, you know, a footstep or a sound can change a tone in something so distinctly, and it's so malleable.
Dallas: And so I brought so much musicality and compositional skills here.
[downbeat]
Dallas: So I feel like I'm creating these, like, orchestras with sounds. I loved it. So that was it, and I was like, "I found my, my thing." And then from there I was like, "Where do I find a job doing this?"
[music designed out]
After I finished recording school…
Dallas: You know, I'm doing odd jobs. One of them is I'm working at the Wyndham Hotel in Arlington, Texas, and I'm working the front desk.
This particular Wyndham Hotel happened to be about a half-mile away from the major league ballpark where the Texas Rangers play. So all the visiting teams would come and stay at our hotel. But not only that, the television crews working the games also stayed there. As someone who loved baseball growing up, this was super exciting.
Then one day…
[lobby ambiance in]
Dallas: This guy walks in and he's carrying this weird-looking bag, and it has knobs on it, and I say, "Is that an audio thing?" And he goes, "Oh yeah, I mix the field sounds for ESPN's baseball show." And I say, "I really wanna get into audio. I'm trying." And he says, "Oh, actually, do you wanna hold a parabolic dish on this baseball game this weekend?"
Dallas: He's like, "A parabolic dish is basically this big, giant, clear cup with a little microphone in it that can pick up sounds from really far away. We have three in the outfield. We have one that's already fixed at home plate, so nobody needs to hold that. And then you have one on third base and one on first base."
Dallas: Nowadays, they don't have people doing this. But back then, you had real people doing it. So I was like, "Yeah, I wanna do that!"
[music in: Wesley Slover - First Wing Flaps]
Dallas: I show up. I walk into this back entrance, and I see a series of these giant tractor trailers, and inside them are the most mind-blowing electronics I've ever seen in my life.
Dallas: There's robust audio boards. There's tons and tons of video monitors. There's multiple trucks. There's a billion cables. This whole new world exposes itself to me. Overwhelming right away.
Dallas: And he's like, "I'm gonna put you on first base." And first base parabolic dish I'm pointing it at a guy who was, like a baseball hero of mine, Rafael Palmeiro. So like I'm pointing it at him the entire game, and then right next to me, like literally where I put my left arm is where the water jug is for the dugout. I am within arm's reach of any baseball player who's coming to get water. I'm literally in the dugout.
Dallas: So much is happening, and I thought the entire time I was gonna ruin it, by accidentally tapping the microphone or something. The great news is I didn't, and it was just one heck of an experience, and I finished it, and it was great. And he was like, "Everything was great! Sounded great!" I mean, all I did was just point to a microphone, but it was wonderful.
[music out]
Suddenly, I realized there was this whole world of audio jobs that I never even knew about.
Dallas: That little credit allowed me to get an internship at the local TV station, Channel 5 NBC in Dallas.
[clip: NBC 5 Dallas]
Dallas: The internship was just to hold a camera and point it at a news anchor in the studio. But like, why would I point a camera at a news anchor? Well, it was because I knew that it was news, and there has to be an audio board somewhere.
Dallas: So I took it, knowing that maybe I could have an audio person show me the audio room. And I could understand it from that angle. But my hunch was correct.
[music sneaks in: Wesley Slover - Just Facts 07]
Dallas: There was an audio board nearby, and there was a guy who was the main audio mixer named Benny Benavidez, who saw my interest and immediately, like, latched onto it.
[downbeat]
Dallas: And so Benny Benavidez must've been in his late 50s at the time, and he was just the nicest, coolest man. And he just took me right under his wing, taught me the value of preparation. Because when you're doing live shows, live TV, you don't have the luxury of making any changes once it starts. It's all about like, “Did you do your checklist? Did you prepare? Did you make sure that your batteries are changed? Did you make sure that there's a backup microphone underneath the desk just in case it slips off or something happens?”
[downbeat]
Dallas: And the thing is, is like everyone started cheering me on. They were like, "Okay, this dude is young, you know, 21, 22, coming into this broadcast world.” So the director started to get super hyped, and they were like, "Oh, why don't we give him a shot on a segment? Like, why don't you step out for a second and let him mix it?" and Benny was just like—I mean, he taught me just everything inside and out of, of everything.
Dallas: And it's something that I've noticed about the audio community even to this day. We're often pitted against each other for jobs by giant corporations. But we don't let that actually get between us. We are competitive, but we're also incredibly kind, sharing of knowledge, building the community. Because it's something that's invisible and that no one appreciates for the most part, but your audio community does.
Dallas: And so there's this beautiful balance of care and love for the craft, and when you find someone else, you're like, "What? You're my best friend now."
[music out]
The news station I worked at was an NBC affiliate station. And my next big opportunity came when NBC bought Telemundo late in 2001.
[clip: Telemundo logo]
Dallas: And Telemundo is building a robust studio on the other side of town, and they need an audio person. And they're saying, "Oh, you know how to do this. It's gonna be the same board, same process. It's just all gonna be in Spanish." And I don't speak any Spanish at all. But I take the job, because I just find that saying “yes” and figuring it out later is the best operational aspect. If I get an opportunity, I will just say “yes,” and I will think about it later, and I will figure it out.
Dallas: So I say “yes,” I go over to Telemundo, same board. I realize it's actually easier in some ways not knowing the language, because all of the anchors and all of the people spoke such clear Spanish, especially following a teleprompter. I could read it perfectly.
[clip: Telemundo segment]
Dallas: But I didn't even have the burden of knowing what they're talking about. I could just focus on the craft of what I'm doing.
Dallas: So my brain just does another massive mind expansion through this time at Telemundo. I knew I wanted to go even further. Again, I'm, I've always wanted to just keep expanding out. So I transfer from Telemundo in Dallas to Telemundo in LA.
[clip: Telemundo LA intro]
Dallas: Telemundo in LA is legit. Telemundo in LA was in the NBC Studios in Burbank. And in this massive hallway you have the Telemundo studio. To the left of the studio, literally in the same hallway, is "Days of Our Lives," the soap opera.
[clip: Days of Our Lives Theme]
Dallas: To the right is NBC 4 LA.
[clip: NBC 4 LA]
Dallas: You walk down the hall and at the time you had The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
[clip: Tonight Show with Jay Leno]
Dallas: It was also back when California, I think, was the only state, or one of the first states to ban smoking anywhere near a building. And I remember walking down the hall once kind of near Jay Leno's studio and smelling cigarette smoke. And I'm just like, "Who in the world is doing this? It's–it's about to go down."
Dallas: I look over and the person smoking is Slash from Guns N' Roses.
[clip: Guns N' Roses - It's So Easy]
Dallas: And I was like, "Oh, that makes perfect sense. No one's gonna tell Slash not to smoke."
Dallas: The other thing that I learned there is, that studio in the hallway had the entire history of the NBC chimes on it. So the “Dong, dong, dong.” That—I didn't get those pitches right, sorry.
[clip: NBC chimes]
Dallas: But it had the whole history of the chimes from the very beginning of being in radio to announcers played it between to make these changes, and patches… And it also had the visual logos that went along with it. So the entire history of the NBC sound and radio leading into television was in this beautiful mural.
Dallas: I also get a job over at Fox on the Bundy lot out in Santa Monica. I was still doing live audio. I'm doing news, I'm doing sports, I'm doing entertainment. There was a national show called Good Day Live…
[clip: Good Day Live intro]
Dallas: Now I’m bouncing between live shows at Telemundo, live shows at Fox.
But while my career in live television was going well, I still really wanted to get into post-production audio. And I guess I put that desire out into the world enough that someone at Telemundo picked up on it.
Dallas: She's the graphics operator. Her name's Vanessa. She's awesome. We became good friends. She was working between Telemundo and G4 doing live graphics.
If you don’t know G4, there was this moment where it was the coolest TV network ever, and it focused entirely on video games.
Dallas: But over at G4, she was working on these shows called Attack of the Show! X-Play… These just amazing video game shows.
[clip: X-Play]
Dallas: And I'm a–I'm a huge gamer too. Through this entire process, I just love video games.
Dallas: But, I remember she talked to somebody, 'cause she came back to me and her story was, "Oh, hey, I put in a good word for you over at G4." And I remember saying something like, "Oh, like 'Attack of the Show' or 'X-Play' or one of these live shows?" And she was like, "No, post audio."
Now at this point, I haven’t done any post audio professionally yet. But that's not what Vanessa told the people at G4. The way she put it…
Dallas: Basically they said, "Oh, but, he's doing live over at Telemundo. Does he know post audio?" And I told him, "Yeah, you know post. You're the best at post! You know, you've done so much post." And I go, "Wow, this is my foot into post." I didn't know what I was doing professionally. But I go in saying, "Yep, I will figure it out."
[music in: Wesley Slover - Shore Gloss]
Dallas: This was my first step into post-production audio, and it was a brutal job. I mean, it was in the epicenter of a lot of fun things, but it was like a race, race, race. We were turning around promos in an hour. We were doing, like, full 30-minute shows in three or four hours, that were very expansive. We were doing full episodes of all sorts of things day and night. It was just white-knuckle all the time.
Dallas: I tried to fake it through that first week. I have a hunch they did know that I was trying to fake it, but my excitement and enthusiasm is what kept them helping me. 'Cause they were so cool, they wanted to see me succeed. They needed help. I wanted to be there.
Dallas: And so that first week was just a nightmare. You know, I go back home and I'm practicing on Pro Tools on my personal computer. I mean, I don't know if I slept that first week, 'cause I was just crash-coursing post audio.
[music out]
Eventually, I get the hang of working at G4. The fear fades and I’m having a great time. But having mastered one thing, now I’m looking for the next level up… High level scripted television.
Dallas: And so I get an interview at this post house called Wildwoods, and I meet with the owner, Derek. At the time, I believe, they're mixing Survivor.
[clip: Survivor]
Dallas: There was a show on Fox that was a dramatic one called Heroes.
[clip: Heroes]
Dallas: But they were doing all the top-level reality shows, and they were now doing a lot of these like high-end, dramatic things. Larger post teams where you have dialogue editors, sound effects editors, re-recording mixers, which is the final mixer in the chain.
Dallas: So this was the dream. I went to LA to work on movies or TV, and now I have the opportunity right here in front of me to do scripted television.
Dallas: Simultaneously to getting this interview, I also saw that there was a full-time senior sound designer position in Silver Spring, Maryland, which I had never been to the East Coast meaningfully before. So I didn't even know if I had a clear picture of exactly where Maryland was.
Dallas: But there were two opportunities that came at the same time: Wildwoods, right down the street from where I live. LA-based, my trajectory, everything I wanted, I, I was in LA, I wanted to stay in LA. I loved LA.
Dallas: But then there was Discovery Communications on the East Coast. This was back when MythBusters was on the air…
[clip: Mythbusters US]
Dallas: ...Dirty Jobs, Man vs. Wild… It was the heyday of Discovery. Discovery was a private company then. It wasn't Warner Brothers Discovery. It didn't have all of this stuff wrapped into it. It was just Discovery Communications, and it had Discovery Channel. It had The Learning Channel back when it was very educational. It had Animal Planet. It had Travel Channel, all of these just great channels.
[clip: No Reservations intro]
Dallas: And there's another big giant pull happening here. I love edutainment. I always have. I learned about life through edutainment.
Dallas: And I remember just viscerally being attached to that. “Oh, I can go do post audio and be in a meaningful place.” And I love G4 and video games, and video games are also valuable. But I don't know, some of them got, like, real sideways in, in ways that I thought, "You know, am I, am I making the world a better place? Am I teaching people things?" But Discovery provided that opportunity.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Into the Light]
Dallas: So, I go out to Silver Spring. I do a tour. Everyone is, is a bunch of—It's like the people there were like scientists meets engineers meets, audio community… The facility's beautiful. It's massive. There's like 60 edit rooms. It's incredible.
Dallas: So the audio supervisor at the time, Mark, offers me a job. I fly back to LA to go interview at Wildwoods, which was like two days later.
Dallas: Now, I've got a job offer in Maryland at the Discovery Channel. And now I'm sitting in front of Derek at Wildwoods, who's now offered me a position. "We'll get you in the loop here. We'll get you s- to start mixing these big shows." So the dream hit in that moment.
Dallas: But while I'm talking to Derek and after he says, "Okay, we'll get you in the rotation," I said, "I need just some personal advice. Two days ago, I was out in Maryland and I got offered a senior sound designer position at the Discovery Channel." And he interrupts me in the middle of it and he says, "Take it." And I'm just like, "Well, no let me tell you more about it." He's like, "Take it. That's exactly what you should do."
Dallas: And I was like, "Well, you just offered me a job here. Why would you say that?"
Dallas: And he said, ”Look, If you can do this level of work not in LA, do it, because you have an opportunity to see if it works. The reality is, is you go out to Discovery, your value in LA is gonna go up immensely because of being in this other world that's also highly respected.” He said, “LA will always be here."
Dallas: And those words have really been my safety net all the way up until this day, “LA will always be here if you need it.”
[music out]
Dallas: And so we packed up everything, went to the East Coast, started working at Discovery. I loved it. The thing is, is yes, I'm kind of in a dark room, but I'm in a dark room in a facility with 60-plus editors, hundreds of support staff, the tape library, you know, gosh, six other sound designer mixers, open office right outside my door. Like I'm bumping into people. It's so social. I'm having a ball. I love it.
Dallas: So I start working at the Discovery Channel, remixing a lot of their biggest shows for the UK. All day, I'm sitting here mixing MythBusters, but with a new narrator that's British and awesome.
[clip: Myth Busters UK]
Dallas: I worked on When We Left Earth, which was kind of like the next, like the big space program.
[clip: When We Left Earth]
Dallas: I worked on just the most beautiful, educational, poetic, edutainment in all of history in the moment that it was happening.
But early on at Discovery, I noticed that some of the most amazing projects weren't being mixed in-house. They were going to external vendors who could always say yes. So, I started picking up extra work in my off time, and mixing in my basement.
I started calling this little one-man-studio Defacto Sound.
[music in: Wesley Slover - One Sec]
Dallas: So a friend of mine and I always had a dream to do a record company before we realized how difficult it is to make money in music.
[downbeat]
Dallas: And he was really good at making up names, and one of them was Defacto Records. But a few years later, when I decided I wanted to make a company about sound design, I asked if I could call it Defacto Sound. And he said yes.
For me, the idea behind the name is that Defacto Sound is setting the modern-day, new standard in sound. It's not tied down to the ways that studios have done things in the past.
Dallas: Even though when I started it, I was working at these major companies, on the side, I was building this company that was much more forward-thinking in the way that sound design and mixing was being achieved. For example, at some of these companies, it might take a year just to get an approval on a plugin, but as I was building the company, I could just buy anything that came out the day before.
Dallas: So I always thought that the term Defacto Sound to me meant not only on the bleeding edge of technology and talent, but very, very much future-focused.
[music out]
At this point, I’m busy, I’m happy, and I feel like I’m on the right path. But in 2008, Discovery restructured into a publicly traded company.
Dallas: And almost overnight, TLC turned into “My 10,000 Pound Aunt," or "Honey Boo Boo."
[clip: Honey Boo Boo]
[music in: Wesley Slover - Breach of Trust]
Dallas: It turned into everything that Discovery was being cheapened for the fastest attention span.
[downbeat]
Dallas: That was a heartbreaking loss that I still feel so sad about. Where we are with those networks doesn't have to be this way. But in order to always make the stock market go up, you just chipped away at every little thing until like, what's the point?
Dallas: And so I'm seeing all of my friends, I'm seeing friends get laid off who are in these really, you know, the Discovery Education division, and like all of these things that like were all this beautiful thing that was working, that they're paying all of their bills, they're educating the world…
Dallas: You know, I left what I loved out here to go all the way over here to make a difference with a company, and now I'm seeing all this writing on the wall that's going, "That's not the vibe anymore. We're in service to stockholders now, not viewers, not education, not just doing the right thing.”
Dallas: So of course, I left Discovery. What I've learned about my life and my satisfaction is I wanna work on things that are important. “The edutainment, the stuff that I lost from Discovery. If I can't find it, I will make it.”
That's coming up, after the break.
[music out]
MIDROLL
[music in: Wesley Slover - Breach of Trust]
It’s 2009. I’ve quit my very stable, full-time job at Discovery as a Senior Sound Designer. I’ve gone from a 60 edit room facility with hundreds of support staff to… my basement. But now, more than ever, I want to lean into that feel-good edutainment that inspires me.
[music out]
So, as a one-man studio called Defacto Sound, I started pounding the pavement, and building out my client base. One of these was National Geographic.
Dallas: It felt like the new version of Discovery, because a lot of people who really cared deeply about that mission moved over to National Geographic, which is in downtown DC, right down the street from Silver Spring, Maryland.
Over the next few years, the jobs started piling up.
Dallas: I mixed… gosh, I probably mixed 200 episodes of "How It's Made" on the Science Channel, which is just a delightful show.
The narrator of How It’s Made in the US was actually a video editor I worked with at Discovery. His name is Brooks Moore, and he’s a friend of mine.
[clip: How It's Made Intro]
Dallas: Now I'm mixing shows for the History Channel… There was the Smithsonian Channel that was also in that area. Beautiful work that the Smithsonian Channel does as well.
[clip: Smithsonian Channel - The Sphynx]
Eventually, I have so much work that I can’t do it all myself. I realize that I could hire a few other mixers and sound designers to work with me. So, I rent a studio space in Silver Spring, Maryland that's walking distance from my old job at Discovery.
Dallas: At this point, you know, I'm hiring freelancers. My wife became our very first project manager. It was the most beautiful thing.
Dallas: My wife and I are celebrating our 25th anniversary next month. She's the unsung hero of everything. She's never appeared on the podcast. I've never talked about her. I've had all three of my daughters on it, but she's been the one that's been right next to me the entire time, being my cheerleader, building me up. She is the spine of this entire throughline.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Searching the Garden]
Dallas: Defacto Sound. You know, that's rolling along. I'm having a ball. I'm working with my wife. I'm building a company. I'm traveling to meet people to try to get more work, because I feel real—I'm really good at what I'm doing.
Dallas: I restrict the urge to be super humble about it because I–I'm just very proud of how much I care deeply about post audio, the emotional impact of these things, sound design, bringing it all together with mixing.
Dallas: I'm that first chair trumpet player in post audio. I know it because I'm–I can hear it. I'm a classical trumpet player slash orchestrator who's now mixing sound. It's like a marriage made in heaven.
[downbeat]
Months turn into years. The team grows. Defacto is mixing trailers for huge games like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. We mix a documentary that overwhelmingly wins Sundance. It feels like the sky is the limit. But in 2016, something happened that almost brought the whole thing crashing down.
[music sputters out]
Dallas: There was one whale client that I had that was feeding us so many promos. And I connected really deeply with the owner of that company. And he saw my hustle. He saw the poor kid coming out of the Delta of Arkansas building something for himself.
Dallas: The cool thing about this guy is that he is sharp on business. I learned so much about business and bidding and how to put things into perspective from him. Takes me under my wing and really starts to lift me up.
Dallas: But there’s so much work coming that the leverage shifts so strongly to this company that I start to make desperate decisions like, "We're gonna move in with this company. We're gonna take some space off in the corner, because I just don't want them to go away," which was starting something that was not healthy.
Dallas: There were also little comments of like, "You know, if you're not kind of nearby, I might, you know, I could just put, get an audio person to do this for me.” It's like little, little things that started to go, "Well, I've wrapped up my entire life into effectively being a–an employee for this client."
So against my better judgment, and basically out of fear, I move Defacto into this client's space. But soon after, the owner sells his company to some of the employees.
[music in: Blue Saga - Slow Rhodes]
Dallas: And now the entire parameters have changed, and I'm living in this marriage that I didn't agree to. And they have different preferences on who they wanna work with
Dallas: So now my whale client is now sending work to my former employees while I’m in their space, who now have other jobs and who are fine. And I'm literally, that's how I make a living. So I'm seeing the walls closing in. And I'm going, “I'm becoming irrelevant.” My health is getting worse—the anxiety, the severe chronic cortisol that's happening.
Dallas: I’m scared. I’m in like a fight or flight place. I've gotta take care of my family. I have a new baby. I have five or six employees. Everyone left some place far away to work for me in Maryland. And now I'm seeing, “It's going away.” Like, “There's no way that this is gonna be sustainable.”
Dallas: I don't know. It's like–it was just like, it was a very stressful time, and I couldn't be the best boss or collaborator that I wanted to be. But to give myself some slack here, it was rooted in a lot of things in my past, and the pressure, kind of like that panic attack of the trumpet playing is this pressure is on my shoulders.
Dallas: And it's not just pressure to play a good solo; it's the pressure of keeping people employed, and myself being able to pay my rent, or my mortgage, or food, and now with my new baby, and a second on the way.
[music out]
In the midst of this mounting anxiety, and as our paid work was slowing down, I remembered something I had read.
Dallas: I read a lot of business books and one quote that came through one of these books was that great companies know how to capitalize off their waste. And I thought, "Where's the waste in Defacto Sound?"
Dallas: The waste is people who are on a salary sitting on their hands not doing anything when we don't have work. So I go, "I need to fill that time with something to keep them creatively engaged and passionate to where, one, they don't leave, and two, we can build something for ourselves. How do I do that? How do I make something that keeps them busy when I'm stressed?"
Dallas: Because the worst thing as a business owner when you have employees is when everything gets quiet and you don't have any work, and everyone's like, "Hey Dallas, what should I work on today?"
Dallas: And so everything is just cloudy. It's walls caving in. All this is happening. So this is all the soup of negativity that's happening when I go, "I'm gonna start a podcast."
Okay, so the podcast idea wasn’t totally out of the blue. I’d been toying with the idea of a show about sound for a while… At first, I wasn’t sure if it would be a Youtube series, or a podcast. But to me, telling stories about sound through sound just made more sense to my brain.
At the time, as a podcast listener myself, I had two North Stars. One was Radiolab, because of how Jad Abumrad sculpted these stories with his music and sound design…
[clip: Radiolab]
The other was 99% Invisible, because Roman Mars made design feel romantic.
[clip: 99% Invisible]
Dallas: You know, I would listen to every episode, but there was a time where I started skipping everything that wasn't sound in 99PI. ’Cause I didn't have time for everything, so I was just like, "You know, is it about sound? Nope. Is it about sound? Yep, I'm in it." And so it got to a point where, like, I was only consuming the sound shows in 99% Invisible, but then I was like, "Gosh, this could be so much bigger."
Around this time, I actually got a chance to meet Roman in San Francisco. I got to tell him how much I appreciate 99PI, especially those sound design episodes. And I very nervously ask him, "How would you feel if I made my own show that's directly inspired by 99PI, but focused exclusively on sound?"
Dallas: And he's like, "Heck yeah, you can do a show about sound! Please do it. More the merrier." He was very encouraging.
But as much as I loved podcasts, admittedly, it was a weird solution to my business problems. Making a show like that takes a ton of time and money. And people weren’t shy about pointing that out to me.
Dallas: My wife was like, "What? You're a podcaster now? What? That sounds like a terrible idea. Why don't you just go get more jobs?" My team is like, "We're gonna start a podcast? Like, I didn't come here to be a podcast studio." You know, in the most endearing way possible to say this, literally no one believed in this other than me. I saw the vision.
Dallas: And I'm not saying that to be mean to anybody. I think every single person would agree with me on that who lived it. The only problem is that I had to be the voice of it. I couldn't afford—It would be dumb to hire a voice artist for a podcast. And I had to go like, "Ugh, I've gotta be that person."
I didn’t really know where to start. But I did know that 99% Invisible was part of a network that I loved called Radiotopia, which Roman had founded.
[sfx: Radiotopica logo]
Dallas: And they were doing this thing called Podquest.
Podquest was this open call and search for new podcasts. The top four entries would get ten thousand dollars to produce three pilot episodes of their show. So I decided to enter.
Dallas: You had to make a two-minute trailer, and we made a two-minute trailer for it, hoping that we would just kind of win Podquest and join Radiotopia.
Now, while going on a deep search to actually find this audio, I realized technically, it wasn’t a trailer… It was more like a two minute proof of concept.
Now I have to tell you that apart from our team from ten years ago, and the Radiotopia judges, no one has ever heard this before. And while I’m proud of it because of what came after, it is so cringey for me to listen to. You’ll be able to hear exactly what I mean about how bad of a narrator I was, and you can literally hear my lack of confidence.
So, it’s about two minutes long, here’s what I submitted.
[clip: Podquest submission]
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. I'm Dallas Taylor. This is the story of the voice that launched a thousand apps.
Siri: I'm Siri, your virtual assistant.
Or rather, voices. I'm
Siri: Siri, your virtual assistant. I'm Siri, your virtual assistant.
It's a fun toy. Siri, beatbox for me.
Siri: Boots and cats and boots and cats and boots.
Siri: I could do this all day.
But it's so much more than that. Having a smart computer you can talk to anytime can be kind of comforting. Siri, I'm sad.
Siri: I would give you a shoulder to cry on, Dallas, if I had one.
So where did she come from? To find out, I spoke with...
Siri: Susan Bennett, the original voice of Siri.
And her first interaction with herself wasn't so pleasant.
Susan Bennett: I said, "Uh, hi, Siri. What are you doing?" And she very disgustedly said, "I'm talking to you."
When she did the Siri recordings, they didn't tell her much. They just gave her some strange scripts.
Susan Bennett: Like, "Say mug wump blue egg today."
But how do they use that to make words or make sense? I called...
Andrew Green: Dr. Andrew Green, director of text-to-speech research
for Nuance, a leading company in the field. They actually created Siri, but...
Andrew Green: I can't really comment on anything specific.
They'd record a phrase.
Andrew Green: And then we'll pick that apart to get the sort of l, w, k sounds.
In the future...
Andrew Green: We want to move away from recordings and move to the generation of sound. That's where we want to be.
But where we are now compared to where we were even a few years ago is pretty amazing, and here's one last interview to prove it. Can you tell us your name?
Siri: My name? It's Siri.
What's it like to be you?
Siri: Hey, Dallas. Hey, Dallas. Hey, Dallas. Hey, Dallas. That's kind of how it feels.
So yeah, there you have it. Siri, take us out.
Siri: Kick it. Some of the busiest lines ever made by man are going into this mic. Written by this hand are coming out of this mouth. Made by this tongue, I'll tell you now my name is Siri.
Twenty Thousand Hertz is presented by Defacto Sound, a sound design dedicated to making television, film, and game sound insanely cool.
More at defactosound.com.
Siri: Set your timer. Can't do that.
[Podquest Promo out]
So, that’s what we submitted. A few months went by, and we did… okay in the competition.
Dallas: We make the Podquest trailer. We–we make it through these deep cuts, and then we don't make it to the final round. Ear Hustle wins. Good for them. And it’s a great show.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Friendship Will Return]
But that little mini story made the podcast actually feel real, and I wanted to keep going. So together, as a team, we set a goal. We said…
Dallas: "We're gonna make two podcast episodes. One's gonna be about the voice of Siri, and one's gonna be about the NBC chimes." And I'm like, "Find somebody to interview for this. See if you can get Susan Bennett, 'cause she was the voice of Siri. And then see if you can get somebody who can give us a history of NBC." So I think the team kinda went back and started building these things out. And I remember they had, like, Post-It Notes all over a–a whiteboard.
Dallas: And so while I'm stressed out over here, something magical was happening. My team were coming together to make something, and build out the beats, and find the person, and start to kind of put things together.
But those first couple of episodes were a huge struggle.
Dallas: Took us a year to make two of them, ’cause we don't know what we're doing. And these episodes are microscopic. If you go back to them, they're like 10 minutes, maybe?
And as we’re polishing those first two, we’re already kicking off the next batch.
Dallas: We had kinda planned out 10 episodes. So we had these 10 that we were putting in the pipeline. All my finances are dwindling into this project, and I have to make it work or it's a massive failure.
Dallas: It cost me like fifty grand in personal money that I did not have to kick off Twenty Thousand Hertz, 'cause I wanted to make sure every single person was paid: my whole staff was paid, any writers that I had were paid, because I was using people who I worked with in TV.
[music out]
To make our podcast icon, I worked with a branding agency. That original icon is the artwork you can see on this episode. The D in the corner is Defacto Sound’s logo, since I used to start the show with…
[20K original intro]
On November first, 2016, I finally hit Publish.
Dallas: I post episode one. That was “The Voice of Siri.” I think I got two hundred and… got couple hundred downloads, 'cause I posted it on Facebook to my friends. Posted episode two, the uh, NBC chimes, and I think I had saw 312 people listen to it.
Here's a clip of that episode. Now, as a disclaimer, I later went back and rerecorded our first eight episodes, because, like many of us, I hated how my voice sounded back then. But what you’re about to hear is the original version that you can no longer hear on our feed.
[clip: NBC Chimes - original]
After that, I also emailed Roman, in case he wanted to listen.
Dallas: But in between the second episode and the third episode, exactly right in between, I go to Third Coast, which is a podcast convention for kind of NPR types of people. Uh, highbrow podcasting, if you will. I'm seeing all of my podcast heroes. Roman's there. He's a superstar. I think Ira Glass is there. Like, everyone in the room defined podcasting after that, that whole podcast boom.
Dallas: You know, I'm kinda down, 'cause I'm a nobody, and I had a podcast with these, a couple hundred listens. I walk out to go get a bite to eat late at night, and Roman is coming back to the hotel.
I wasn’t even going to ask him if he’d listened to the episode I’d sent. I just thought he was one of those people who were super, super busy and could never do that. But before I could say anything, he just starts talking.
Dallas: He says, "Great job on Twenty Thousand Hertz. Can I play it on the next episode of 99% Invisible?" Immediately, he's just like, "Hey, loved what you're doing. I'm so proud of you. Can I take ‘The NBC’ Chimes and put it on my feed next week?"
[music in: Wesley Slover - Searching the Garden]
Dallas: And I'm just like everything that I've worked toward just combined, 'cause I knew he played other people's shows. I never thought what I did would be good enough.
Dallas: He believed in it. He was my hero. And I was like, "What, what improvements should I do? What, what did you hear that's, that's better?" And he said, "I'm not gonna tell you that." He's like, "I could nitpick all of this stuff, but that's not what matters right now. What matters is a body of work. The episodes will come and go and they will fade, but you will build a body of work that's meaningful and that's what matters."
True to his word, Roman ran our second episode, The NBC Chimes, on the 99PI feed.
[clip: Roman introduces 20K]
Roman Mars: My love of sound and story is why I was excited to find the new podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, which tells the stories behind the most recognizable and interesting sounds. And I’m pleased to present one of their episodes today.
That one act of generosity seeded the entire Twenty Thousand Hertz audience and everything that came after. Each episode’s downloads grew from three hundred, to three thousand, to fifty thousand, to a hundred thousand plus. People I admired in that world of edutainment started knowing who I was, and wanting to work with Defacto Sound. Advertisers started booking with us. Now, I could climb out of debt and actually pay for this show. I started to get my sanity back. I felt like we were making a difference in our little corner of the world. And I finally had a voice.
And then, it all came to a screeching halt.
[music abrupt stop]
Dallas: So I'm at the beginning of 2025 in the most depressed state, and I realize I've gotta end the show.
That’s coming up, next time.
[music in: Wesley Slover - New Package]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of my sound agency, Defacto Sound. Hear more at Defacto Sound dot com.
Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Katie Clark Gray, and Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Joel Boyter, with original music by Wesley Slover.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel, Dallas Taylor dot mp3. Over there, audio experts around the world take me inside their creative spaces to show me what they do and how they do it. That includes sound designing Rocky's voice for Project Hail Mary, triggering the music of The Price is Right, showing me the hidden mics on the court of an NBA game, and so much more. You can also find short versions on Instagram,TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn under that same name, Dallas Taylor dot mp3.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]
