My interest in Sound Design began years before I started in Radio – I used to search for videos on YouTube of Movie Sound Design and then discovered foley – it blew my mind.

In my teens, I began creating mock Imaging pieces to send to Radio Stations as “demos”. While, they are horrific to listen to now – I had one big problem.

Sound Design

Sound Design then was hard to come by if you were starting out, sending demos or producing for Internet Radio (which I did for four years). I was either hit with the problem of not having any money to buy a package for €100+ and there was little option of free sounds, other than really poorly produced Youtube.

When I eventually got working in Irish Radio – there was heaps of FX Packages but the problem here was that they were ALL crack copies, dodgy downloads. Totally unethical and quite sly. You are just a tiny step away from a law suit in doing that..

The option I was eventually left with was – producing my own! They were basically produced by splicing instruments and sounds together to make cohesive sounds.

After several years I launched my first album through my website, zFX. This was aimed at smaller budget stations who couldn’t afford a huge library, but would get something unique and different from others in their market.

The success was surprising, so I released a free version so even more people could discover it and more people would have access to a free package, where they just report the usage. That was probably the best idea ever – the orders came in every hour or so, and still to this day are getting regular downloads.