Local boy makes good: Bruce Hanifan Productions strikes a chord with film, television, commercial and corporate clients - Audio Today & Tomorrow

Post, Sept, 2002 by Christine Bunish

LOS ANGELES -- If it wasn't for Bo Diddley, Bruce Hanifan's music career might have taken a different path. While walking with his high school band mate, young Hanifan passed a man digging in his front yard. His friend asked, "Aren't you Bo Diddley?" The man nodded, "He was a big, warm, friendly guy," Hanifan recalls. "We told him we had a band too, and he said to bring them by." Perhaps Diddley didn't expect a knock on his door the very next day, but he invited the band into his early Ampex-equipped home studio to rehearse.

"We became good friends," says the LA-born-and-bred Hanifan. "Bo gave me the keys to his studio so I could come and go as I wished. I learned a lot about recording techniques and ended up playing piano on one of Bo's recordings at Golden Star Studios. He taught me that music isn't just about technique; it's about soul and your own personal energy."

The multi-award-winning Hanifan parlayed Diddley's wisdom into a successful career as a composer, music producer and sound designer working in a wide range of styles, including classical, avant garde and world music. He often combines ethnic or high-tech elements with traditional orchestral styles.

Hanifan's company, Bruce Hanifan Productions in West LA (www.brucehanifan.com), offers feature film, TV program, commercial and corporate clients a complete array of music and sound services, including film and video sweetening, music recording, voiceovers and VO editing, ADR, sound effects design and editing, full automated mixdown and layback and CD mastering.

Hanifan showed an independent streak early in life. He started classical piano lessons at age seven; both parents were pianists. But after a few years of lessons the pop music scene exploded and Hanifan rebelled. He gave up piano for guitar and began playing in "one series of bands after another."

At 18, Hanifan moved to the West Side of LA and went solo, playing acoustic guitar at clubs around town. In college he "fell in love all over again" with the keyboard and began a period of intensive practice. As he watched his piano teacher tune the piano, Hanifan felt he could master that skill. He studied and swiftly became one of the hottest piano tuners in LA in the early '70s.

"Members of The Band used to ask, 'Why are you tuning when you should be playing and writing music?'" Hanifan reports. "I went back fulltime to music school.

"At first I thought I'd be making records but I realized the recording world is such a crap shoot," Hanifan says. So he hung out his shingle as a composer and arranger and began to grow his business from some early radio spots.

Today, his Bruce Hanifan Productions (BHP) boasts a control room outfitted with a 64-track Digidesign Pro Tools/24 Mix Plus with a full array of plug-ins; a Mackie 112-input console; Kurzweil, Korg, Roland and E-mu synths and samplers; Lexicon, UREI and Yamaha digital sound processors and Neumann U87, Sennheiser, Shure and AKG mics. A live room for overdubs and voiceovers is adjacent with a Yamaha C7 "killer" grand piano.

Hanifan sees a trend by TV and film producers to select small digital mixing studios over larger, more traditional-style facilities in the interest of cutting costs while not compromising quality. "Some producers are still locked into the big, all-under-one-roof houses, and for some projects that makes sense," Hanifan acknowledges. "But many producers don't need a room with a console stretched 60 feet. I have everything here that a big facility has -- just as many channels, as much automation, quality playback, Genelec speakers and a big-screen monitor."

CLIENTS

About half of BHP's clients are mixes. "A lot of mixing clients don't know me as a composer," Hanifan says. "Next thing you know, I'm contributing music to their projects."

Hanifan mixed the indy features Abracadabra and Family Fundamentals; Showbiz Is My Life: Tales of the Cabaret, which will air on Lifetime cable; Top Secret Beaches and a series about Las Vegas for Travel Channel; and the CBS documentary Breaking The News, which aired last fall. He also mixed Love Her Madly, a direct-to-DVD feature by Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who scored the picture with Hanifan. Hanifan is now playing on songs for the new, upcoming Doors CD.

Although BHP is not permanently set up for 5.1 surround, Hanifan can reconfigure the room with 5.1 speakers as required. He composed orchestral music with operatic singers, plus a very techno track, and did the surround mix for a Lexus HD presentation for a Detroit dealer's show.

Hanifan has gained a reputation for composing music for sports, beginning with The Extremists, an extreme-sports series that was syndicated locally for a number of years. His cutting-edge rock, contemporary pop and techno music for that series "set the tone for a lot of projects to follow," including the venerable Wide World of Sports, Pro Ski Tour and Hawaiian Thopics specials.

He used his familiarity with the music of Tibet for Into the Tsango Gorge, a one-hour kayaking adventure special which aired on NBC in May. The program's producers initially brought the show to BHP in the hope that Hanifan could fix the location DV sound, which was poor quality. "I told them it would have to be replaced." he remembers. "So I created white water loops from a deep rumble to trickling streams and splashes and looped the tracks across the entire show. Then, watching the film, I used my automated mixer and played the faders to bring the sound up and ride it for believable effects." None of the natural sound made it to the screen except for the paddlers' voices.