Douglas Morton

President and Founder, Q Up Arts

“Developing audio content is a labor of love. My hope is you will be inspired to create enduring, beautiful music with these sounds for years to come.”
– Douglas Morton

Douglas Morton is the President and Founder of Q Up Arts, and a pioneer in the world of digital audio production. With a career spanning over four decades, Douglas has helped shape the modern sample library industry, creating innovative sound content for music producers, composers, and media creators around the globe.

Douglas began his career at the legendary E-Mu Systems in Santa Cruz, California, and later at Optical Media International (OMI) in Silicon Valley. At OMI, he produced Universe of Sounds, one of the first CD-ROM sound libraries—revolutionizing the way musicians accessed samples and marking a major milestone in audio history by enabling hardware samplers to access vast digital sound collections for the first time.

In 1993, he founded Q Up Arts in Santa Cruz, California, with a mission to develop high-quality, artist-driven sound libraries. Since then, Douglas’s work has been featured in hundreds of films, television shows, and video games—including The Patriot, The Sheltering Sky, Portlandia, and The X-Files.

Beyond the screen, his immersive music installations have captivated millions at world-renowned venues like the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California and the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium in Utah.

Today, Douglas continues to produce and design audio content from his studios in Los Angeles and Park City, bringing timeless sounds to life for the next generation of composers and creators.