Brent Walker
After 36 years of leading one of Little Rock’s premier sound studios, Brent Walker announced Thursday that he is closing Soundscapes, the four-studio audio operation at 3422 Old Cantrell Road.
A voice artist and producer whose ads have promoted everything from Alaskan banks to East Coast car dealerships to “hospitals named for every saint in Christendom,” Walker said the business was eventually a victim of a shifting media landscape.
“After the financial collapse hit in 2008 and the recession followed, a lot of ad agencies saw their bottom lines severely damaged, so they started doing everything they could to make money on their own,” Walker told Arkansas Business on Friday. “One of those things was to bring all their production in house.”
Walker, an Oklahoma native who founded Soundscapes in 1981 at 26, said the business grew from one to four studios quickly and “had a lot of good years producing fabulous audio. But there are probably five or six studios around the country like ours that do real high-service, high-quality production, and that’s all dwindling away. I just decided to get out ahead of the game.”
Now 62, Walker plans to coach voiceover techniques, something he has done for years, but not for pay.
“I never felt like I could ask for money, because that would come with the implication that I would cast students for commercials I was making,” he said. “But I know how to teach voiceover, and to teach people who are already doing it how to up their game. So I intend to do more of that, and this time I’ll get to charge for it.”
Walker said he’s “ecstatic” about retirement, and plans to remain in central Arkansas, which he came to love after moving with his wife, Linda Walker, the producer of Hillcrest Honey, after graduation from Oklahoma State University in 1977.
“I’ve been behind the microphone since I was 15, but I’ve been working since I was 7,” he said. “I started at my dad’s grocery store, Walker Brothers Grocery in Tipton, Oklahoma.”
The old Walker Brothers store is now a senior center in Tipton, which has about 850 residents and is west of Lawton.
“It all comes full circle,” Walker said.
The 8,000-SF studio complex, which features eight offices, a reception area and a kitchen as well as the four studios, designed by Russ Berger Design Group of Dallas, will be immediately available. “They’re leasehold improvements, and I lease from Old Cantrell Road Partnership,” said Walker, who intends to sell the leasehold improvements to allow his successors to negotiate a lease with Guy Maris III of Standard Abstract & Title Co. of Little Rock. “It’s a great opportunity for somebody to work in some of the finest studios around.”
Soundscape producers David Greaves and Stephanie Nolte will form a company called Small Pond Audio, Walker said, and John Crowley will open a project he’s named Loudmouth Studio. All hope to serve former clients of Soundscape. Producer Angelynn Hardcastle is embarking on a new career.
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