Christian Kjeldsen

http://www.rockstarsandiego.com

Christian Kjeldsen is a sound designer and electronic musician based out of San Diego. Chrisitan has been a classically trained pianist since the age of seven, and received a Bachelors Degree in Synthesis from Berklee College of Music. He has done sound design for a number of LA based film composers, and worked as a preset designer for Native Instruments. Christian left NI to do sound design for the acclaimed game developer Rockstar Games, who created one of the most succesful games of all time, Grand Theft Auto. Christian is known for his unique surrealist sound design and production. In addition to the surreal, his sound design palette ranges from the real to the hyper-real.

Hello. Thanks very much for taking the time out to have a chat with Camel Audio. Could you introduce yourself?

My name is Christian Kjeldsen. I was born and raised in Houston, TX, but I'm half Colombian and half Danish. I currently live in San Diego and do sound design for Rockstar Games.

The first thing that triggered it all was when I was about 7 years old. I was in Bogota, Colombia staying at my uncle's house with a bunch of my cousins. One night each of them took turns playing classical pieces on their piano. That year I started taking classical piano lessons, and it wasn't until my early teens that I started writing music on the piano. When I was 14, a friend of mine introduced me to groups such as Skinny Puppy, Front 242, Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. I was completely taken away by the variety of sounds I've never heard before, and how they evolved and interacted with each other. This painted an entirely new reality for me. Inspired by this, it took me a few years to save up and buy my first sequencer/synthesizer. This was when I started doing sound design.

Recently I worked on Rockstar Games “Table Tennis” which will be coming out soon on the Xbox 360. I am also working on an "Untitled Western" game that I'm really exited about, but that's unfortunately all I can say about that one. I also did sound design on Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition, which is one of my favorite games of all time. Before Rockstar I did an array of contract based work, from sound design for various L.A. based film composers to studio engineering to preset design for Native Instruments

I would have to say its unique sound and capabilities. There are so many synths on the market that have been regurgitating the same synthesis techniques over and over again. I love the way that Cameleon takes advantage of cross synthesis, and applies it to the functionality of a musical instrument with an elegant and easy to use interface. The way it uses a mixture of the harmonic and inharmonic content of multiple sources to make a completely new unique sound is guaranteed fun for all. And on top of that being able to morph through these sonic attributes is pure genius. I could go on talking about why I love this synth, but I'll stop by saying this is a ‘must have’ for any sound designer or electronic musician.

My first impression of Camel Phat was that I was very pleased with the variety of coloration it added to the sounds I was putting into it. I was flexible and extremely intuitive, as well as a great tool for expanding my palette of tone and timbre. Camel Space is great tool to create rhythms out of my ambient improvisations

In the next year, I plan to release a number of tracks that I've been picking at for quite some time now. I also plan on doing sound design and music for television commercials, in addition to sound design for Rockstar.