Ian Parkinson started his music career back in 1992 after he’d graduated from Huddersfield Technical College with a degree in Music Technology and winning the grand price for best engineer that year.
Moving back to Hong Kong (his home since 1983) he quickly found his way into one of asia’s leading music production companies as an engineer recording and mixing material for their composers productions. For a number of years ian helped the other composers in the group with their compositions programming and playing drums. After a little while they saw his musical ability and said “hey you could probably do all this on your own” and made ian an in house composer as well as audio engineer.
After a few years of writing music and doing sound design for all the top ad agencies around asia, ian decided to open Red Door International. His mission was to keep things simple and flexible, which required the company to go fully digital and work in the box as well as have a paperless office. This would give us the flexibility to work on a corporate jingle for one client and a soundtrack for another client’s documentary even on the same day. Gone are the days of writing down what’s patched into what, where the faders and panning are, having to deal with sysex with all the synthesisers in the rack. it was reduced to a simple COMMAND-S (i’m a die hard mac man, so thats save on a mac), ready for recall with all sounds and setting as it was with no configuring or headaches of the past. This was essential for the type of work that red door would be doing, because we might be working on a reggae track for Virgin Atlantic one day and a classic orchestral piece for HSBC the next. having an hour to set up just to boost the vocal up 0.5db and a touch more reverb then do a mixdown, just wasn’t an option anymore. Now with all the midi, audio, virtual instruments and effects units in the box, sync with a quicktime video for frame accuracy, means that we were able to get off the phone, recall, make a change, and email an mp3 back to the client within minutes.
So now we are a Professional Music Composition and Sound Design company with nearly 20 years experience servicing big 4A’s advertising clients such as BBDO, GREY, TBWA, McCann with award winning pieces. Doing remixes and album work for Universal, EMI, BMG and international artists. Composing music for some of the worlds leading animations companies for their tvcs and film work.
