James MacDonald, Sound FX

James Macdonald worked for Disney for 40 years at Disney as a one man band sound fx engineer who also ended up being the voice of mickey mouse when Walt Disney passed away. Macdonald died when he was 84 on a Friday in Glendale with heart failure. He has used over 1,000 instruments for sound and many of them were handmade. He did sound FX for snow white and the seven dwarfs. Because of his ability to create sound that led him to a career at the Disney studios where he first visited in 1934 with his band to record a Mickey Mouse sound track. His first major credit for sound design was snow white and it required preparation before its release in 1937. Not only did he make the yodel sound he also designed the waterfalls the whistles and the sneezes. Macdonald credited his engineering studies--through a correspondence course--for much of his success, citing in particular the time that he used clusters of duralumin to simulate the tones of the Western chromatic scale. This was to reflect the sound a spider makes when spinning a web. He once was asked if the spinning of a web could really make a sound. "When Walt Disney said it could, you made it have a sound," was the reply. He used such mundane hardware as a wooden berry basket that he crumbled to get the effect of falling timber, springs in a box mounted on roller-skate wheels (a railroad car) and dried peas in a wooden keg (rain). If he was not inventing the machinery he needed for his novel noises, he found it in strange places--he once blew through a condom to provide the buzzing of bees. Not all his engineering worked as planned, Macdonald once tried to create a series of creaks for a film called "The Old Mill." What he got was a perfect foghorn. "That's the way things happen," he said. "I discover them en route to something else."

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