FILM SCORING
Reed has contributed musical backing to a wide range of film, television, and video projects. He composed and recorded powerful scores for numerous episodes of “We Do the Work,” a series of PBS documentaries covering working-class struggles and issues. (This series included “Not in Our Town,” a piece on community reaction to racist hate crimes in Billings, Montana, which inspired communities across the nation to set up similar human-rights watchdog organizations in their own hometowns). For several of these films, Reed (occasionally paired with a guitarist) was asked to come up with musical themes right on the spot - in the studio, with (editing-related) deadlines approaching.

Along with his frequent collaborator, talented musician and engineering and sound expert Jim Reitzel, Reed scored the video version of “Making the Grade,” a local PBS special about a sort of “cultural exchange” between an elite, suburban prep school and a decimated inner-city public high school.

One of Reed’s specialties is adapting familiar songs to new lyrics, specific to the needs of a client. For several years, he recorded (from scratch) parodies of various hits for orientation videos for Mervyns’s employees. Given a sample of the song-to-be-adapted and the new lyric with the appropriate company slogans and catch phrases, he put together Mervyns’s-themed sound-alikes for everything from Born in the U.S.A. to Beat It, from I Will Survive to Take This Job and Shove it, from ABBA's Dancing Queen to The Macarena (adapted as the "Mervyrena" - please understand it was the client's idea, not his). He has done similar work on in-house projects for AAA Insurance and for Safeway, as well as for special personalized tributes for birthday and retirement parties.

He has also composed and recorded music for Michael Pritchard educational specials, for Dr. Suki Munsell’s “Dynamic Walking” exercise program, for an anniversary film on Sutter Home Winery, and for a children’s video about steam shovels and bulldozers.

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