Smith and Western: The Story Behind the Sound

Based out of Redfern, Sydney, Smith and Western have spent the last decade producing some of the most iconic sounds you haven’t realised you’ve heard.

Smith and Western is the passion project of its co-founder and creative partner Nick West, and co-founder and composer Dan Higson. Comprising a “deep network” of freelance composers and sound engineers called upon depending on the size of the project, the company has positioned itself as a key player in the Australia audio-post landscape.

If you ask Dan, he believes their rise to the cream of the crop comes down to their hands-on approach to post.

“Nick and I don’t want to get to the point where we're not involved on a daily basis,” Dan says. “Composing or doing sound design in the studio, working with clients on voiceover recording, all that good stuff.”

Nick and Dan both have backgrounds in the music industry, but are just as busy these days with the business side. Still, Dan is insistent that you must never stop creating.

A full service audio house, Smith and Western do everything from a simple 30-second voiceover for a radio ad right up to sonic branding, a process that can take months to complete. A whole lot, Dan notes, for someone who started in the music industry on the other side of the world, in London.

“I did have a lot of fun and I did manage to make it onto Top of the Pops,” Dan says, recalling his days as a bass player. “I was in a band called Matt Bianco in the late '80s. Then, having spent about 10 years running around the music world trying to make a hit song, a friend of mine in the advertising industry asked if I would like to make music for an ad.”

Dan said this was the first time his eyes had been opened to an industry he could work in and pay the bills. The same goes for Nick, a former composer and a busker, who came to work in the commercial advertising world.

12 years on, and Dan and Nick are still running Smith and Western.

“I think with Smith and Western’s output what's important to notice is, yes, we’ve always been doing traditional audio post but we’re actually the original crafters of sonic branding in in the region,” Dan says, adding that a very close relationship with a motion design company called Never Sit Still is to that for the sharpening of their branding skills.

“We've got a 10-year relationship with them,” Dan says. “We were brought on very early in the brand design stages and now that’s really a big part of what we do.”

An early foray into the sonic branding field saw Smith and Western develop what remains the Kayo Sports audio logo, recognisable by what Smith and Western’s head of new business Abby Dorrian calls, “that ding ding.”

That ‘ding ding’ was a three month job for a three second logo. But, if high quality requires that kind of time investment, it’s because customer experience is fundamentally improved by good audio branding.

“There’s a science behind the effectiveness of sonic branding” says Abby. “It's not just great feedback. Data suggests that a 1.5-second sound alone can up brand recall by 38%, not the tagline, not the visual logo, the mnemonic alone. The power of audio is fascinating but when you think that we could hear and connect to sound from inside the womb, it makes total sense. Sound is our first sensory experience. Of course we connect to it so powerfully."

But big campaigns and big results don’t come without roadblocks. As Dan notes, everyone likes music. And if an entire team works on a project that ends up pitching a final product to a CEO or a CMO, the results can be disheartening.

“And they sometimes will say, ‘I came home last night and I played it for my daughter and she didn’t like it’. We have to put our foot down and say, ‘this isn't about what you or your daughter thinks,’ it’s about what the brand is.”

The brand pillars and the emotional pillars are the focus of Smith and Western client briefs. Far from just a sound stamp at the end of a project, the process of developing an authentic sonic brand seeps through all layers of creativity, and makes the brand cohesive beyond a single television commercial.

“We just worked with a company called Belong,” Dan says. “The agency brought us an idea about a thumb climbing up Everest, the idea being that your thumb does the same distance scrolling annually as a person climbing up Everest.”

The final sound design, including an audio logo, was ultimately incorporated into TVCs, OOH, and digital ads. And without it, the spot just doesn’t feel the same at all.

But it’s all in a day’s work for Smith and Western.

“Making music is just heaps of fun,” Abby says.