David G. Burns

David is Canadian composer from Ottawa Canada. David studied piano from the age of 6, following the Royal Conservatory of Toronto piano program through a private tutor. His grandmother on his mother's side was an accomplished pianist, performing at competitions in Quebec. Her living room piano was David's first introduction to the world of music. He would sit and play for hours, content to plow ahead and compose by ear. David acquired his first guitar at age 13 and that instrument became His world until the age of 20. David became really interested in recording while playing in bands in his teens through to 20's. He became fairly fluent around a studio setting, having learned on a cassette 4 track that was synced up to a Roland MC500 sequencer. That studio morphed many years later into a well equipped compose environment as one would expect from a TV/film composer. Ottawa has always been a hub for animation, and David got his first compose assignment writing for a show called 'The Untalkative Bunny' for Dynomite Cartoons. The bunny never talked, but the music was a cool cross section of 60's cool jazz lounge kitsch that secured a string of projects for a variety of other TV shows. Around the same time, David wrote the music for a cool show called 'Cook like a Chef' for Knight Enterprises. This show revealed the behind the scenes of a high end chef station and marked a radical new style in what we could expect from the Food Genre. That show went on to include well over a hundred episodes. Another notable show was called 'Junk Bros' which garnered enough attention in the US to have shows commissioned for the US market as well. Another string of shows included 'Me, My House and I', 'Design U' and 'Selling Big' for Tim Alp and Mountain Road Productions. 'Design U' had four seasons produced, as did 'Me My House and I'. David got his first start working in film with Derek Diorio and Distinct Features, notably 'House of Luk'. Other films which came later included 'Eddie the Sleepwalking Cannibal' and 'A Maiden Danced to Death', both for Michael Dobbin's Quiet Revolution Pictures. David did a brief stint working with Neil Bregman on a few made for television films such as 'The Stepson' and 'Another Man's Wife' for Reel One Entertainment. Ottawa has a large Franco-Ontarian culture, and the french language production community is entrepreneurial and hard working. Very early in my career, David met Marie-Pierre Gariépy and Martin Cadotte of Slalom Productions. Slalom has produced hundreds of episodes of television for the french language market, and he has contributed the music for shows such as 'Destination Nor'Ouest', 'Ruée vers L'or', 'Motel Monstre', 'Toi et Moi' and most recently 'Mehdi et Val' and 'La Malediction de Johnathan Plourde'. In late 2006 or so, Dave Cooper and Johnny Ryan created a short called' Pig Goat Banana Cricket' under the Nickelodeon shorts program. The short ended up across the desk of Executive Producer David Sacks (The Simpsons, Third Rock from the Sun), who saw the show get green lit and two seasons comprising forty episodes were produced. David was honored with a Daytime Emmy Nomination for his work on 'Pig Goat', along with Matt Ouimet. It was a blend of athletic orchestral music paired with high voltage heavy metal. Matt composed the songs and wrote the lyrics, David wrote the score. David has written music for a fairly wide variety of programming genres including animation, English and French scripted drama, lifestyle/Human Interest, documentaries, made for television films and theatrical films. He has been fortunate to have been the main composer on approximately 1000 episodes of television.