About Me

My name is Tim Nielsen. I’m a Supervising Sound Editor, Sound Designer, Re-Recording Mixer, Sound Effects Recordist, and Sound Librarian.

Most of my 25-year career has been spent working with Skywalker Sound, where I have worked on films such as Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Avatar, Finding Dory, Moana, SOLO: A Star Wars Story, and the series Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. You can see my complete credit list by clicking the IMDB link at the bottom of this page.

I have made multiple appearances on the Tonebenders Podcast and in Soundworks Collection profiles and lectured on recording and film sound in multiple countries and online.

I’m the creator of the Universal Category System (UCS), an industry-adopted system for categorizing and organizing sound effects for media.

I’m an avid nature recordist under the artist name Wild Echoes, with over 20 albums available on all major music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal.

I created the Slack site ‘Echo’ for the sound community to be a place for anyone to gather, ask questions, meet others, and learn. I’m also active on the Field Recording Slack and UCS Slack groups.

Inspired by the Ambience Isolation crowdsource project run by Al Sirkett in England, I ran and hosted the ‘My Home’ crowdsource. We gathered 615 recordists from 62 countries to build a massive ambiance sound effects library to raise money for charity. The project raised over $75,000 for The Water Project (https://thewaterproject.org). I have also contributed to many additional crowdsource libraries, helping to raise thousands more for charity.

During the pandemic, I hosted a series of four free Zoom classes, attended by over two thousand people around the globe, on the recording, mastering, and organization of sound effects. I plan to expand this into a more complete and polished class on the technology and artistry of sound effects recording, mastering, and databasing sound effects.

Someday.

In the words of The Buddha, “The trouble is, you think you have time.”

I hope Sonofex will become the culmination and home of these various projects and become a place to share information, teach, and inspire. In addition, it will allow me a space to sell my tutorial series on Soundminer and Radium, along with my sound effects libraries.