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Nathan Whitehead came to music by way of a cassette player and a seven-passenger van. Growing up in a family of six in East Tennessee, Whitehead would periodically traverse the southeastern United States on family vacations. Accompanying these adventures was his parents' cassette collection: pop, rock, and country from the 60s and 70s as well as a few film music compilations. Academy Award Themes and Movie Hits Vol. 2 brought the music from Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, The Godfather, Top Gun and many more, while Jim Croce, The Beatles, and John Denver were played in the balance. As siblings occasionally bickered, the scenery whizzed by and the van usually reached it's destination. This amalgamation of music, sound, and life, along with a fascination for computers and gadgetry, formed the basis of Whitehead's musical adventures in the years to come.
Around the age of nine, Whitehead started deciphering familiar tunes by ear on the family piano and simultaneously began composing his own short melodies. The process of creating music sparked an exhiliration usually reserved only for boyhood dreams of flying or x-ray vision. A year later Whitehead picked up a guitar. The coming years brought increasingly diverse musical influences from Bad Religion, NOFX, and Fugazi to The Cure, The Doors, and the theme from Airwolf. At 17, Whitehead formed the punk-pop band, Spork, in which he played guitar and sang (badly). With the formation of his band came new experiences with recording and sound manipulation. Originally using headphones as mics and a cassette-based karaoke machine to make multi-track recordings, by the age of 18 Whitehead had purchased a digital 8-track recorder and was recording local bands in a storage building-turned-project studio behind his parents' house. Amidst many late-night hours in the studio, ideas of combining his love of movies, music, sound, and technology began to gel.
Whitehead moved to Nashville with his project studio in tow. Here he continued to record and produce local bands and he began to provide music and sound design for student films. Four years later, Whitehead graduated from Middle Tennessee State University with a B.S. degree in Recording Industry Production and Technology. The Nashville years brought clarification to Whitehead's musical ambitions and a year after graduating college, he moved to Los Angeles.
In 2002, Whitehead began working for Academy Award winning sound designer, Dane Davis, at his Hollywood film sound company, Danetracks. In 2006, Whitehead paired his experiential music education with some more traditional academics by enrolling in the UCLA Extension Film Scoring program. In the coming years Whitehead worked in sound editorial by day and filled his nights and weekends with music composition. In addition to contributing sound design and assistant duties to many feature films and video games, Whitehead has provided additional music for the films Lord of War and Pride and Glory.
Today, Whitehead draws on his influences and experiences to compose music that demonstrates his love of custom-designed textures and effects combined with electronics, computers, traditional instrumentation, and imagination.
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(Layout provided by Mike Industries, edited by NW)
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