Audio

Twice Emmy-nominated (okay, okay, Daytime Emmys*, in 1990 and 1991 but, still, let’s see your Emmy nomination, huh?) sound engineer, producer, and voice artist Nick Selby has what must be charitably called the weirdest career ever. He currently keeps his hand in as an engineer working on tape syncs and field recordings - learn more at tapesync.pro including a look at his enviable gear collection.

Nick was the voice, executive producer, and lead writer of the Trail of Bits Podcast in 2022, and has been the co-host with Chris Swan of the Tech Debt Burndown podcast since 2021. From 2017 to 2018, Nick was co-host with Peter Moskos of the Quality Policing Podcast, where in 2017 he reported, produced, voiced, and edited the long-form report, Divert to Where? Mental Health Policing in America

In the 1980s and ’90s, Nick mixed live sound at venues from Lincoln Center to CBGB; worked in the studio as everything from a tracking engineer for Def Jam artists to a studio gofer. In 1987 he was assistant sound designer (to Slash Werner) for Penn & Teller at the Ritz theater on Broadway, where Nick proudly stopped Mofo the Psychic Gorilla from feeding back. A career high balanced by the sheer boredom of a full time, multi-year gig mixing music** and pulling boom cable for the CBS / P&G Productions soap operas As The World Turns and Guiding Light, with weekend stints at CBS Sports.

Nick co-owned from 1988 to 1991 a NYC recording studio with a 2-inch Ampex MM1000 16 track-recorder, a 24-channel Sound Workshop Gold series console and a whole bunch of cool digital gear like, LOL, an AKAI S-1000 with 32MB of RAM, and a bitchin' MIDI-studio based around an Apple IIe computer.

That Guiding Light gig? It was three years sitting in a 7-foot-by-7-foot booth working with a persnickety music director who told him when to bring in the music and make it louderlouderlouderlouder. Truth be told Nick liked her quite a bit and she tolerated quite a lot from him, too. Also at that Guiding Light gig, Nick got to work with musician, composer, and music director AJ Gundell.

In 1991 he worked as one of the first producers on Warsaw, Poland-based Radio Zet, where he also was a sometime-morning drive-time DJ. He served as a creative director and production manager for an international ad agency before it fired him unceremoniously. Recently Nick has been working on a range of tape syncs and field production for podcasts, museums, and radio stations in the US and Europe.

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* ‘Live and Tape Sound Mixing and Sound Effects for a Drama Series’ on Guiding Light. If you know, you know, but this is substantially less of a big deal than I think people might imagine.

** ‘Mixing Music’ using a literal cart machine (see image, right) that looked like something out of Captain Video and his Video Rangers, but again, still. *