About

Dale Nichols is a composer and pianist, noted for his broad musical experience and emotive touch on the keyboard. His music has been featured in award-winning films, commercials, virtual reality pieces, mobile apps, documentaries, and dance productions. Dale has worked as a pianist in Canada and the United Arab Emirates, performing with singers and bands from around the globe, and has garnered over a quarter of a million streams for his solo piano releases.

Dale's latest score will be heard in the documentary When Hope Breaks Through, which premiered in September 2023 and has since won multiple Best Documentary and Best Documentary Score awards and nominations. Directed by Matthew Wagner, the film is the inspiring story of Mike Shoreman, a disabled professional paddleboarder and his journey of crossing all five Great Lakes, raising awareness and funding for the youth mental health crisis in Canada. In 2022, his music was heard in the two-part Discovery Plus documentary Covid-19: Dubai. Other recent scoring projects include the suspense-filled crime drama, Diamonds! (directed by Demian LeClair), the emotional family drama Remembrance (directed by Sahil Hameed) which screened at the Dubai 48-Hour Film Festival; The Norwegian film Flytande Væsker directed by Ole-André Rønneberg, which screened at the Creative Arts Film Festival and was nominated for "Best Experimental Short Film" at the Perfect Spirit Awards; and upcoming indie thriller Call’s Whisper (directed by Ryan Atimoyoo). Dale's score to the online mockumentary series Parallax, created by New York Times video essayist Adam Westbrook, helped propel the series to over 100,000 streams.

An adventurous collaborator in new media forms, Dale created ambient soundscapes to accompany the “virtual art exhibit” augmented reality app, IRL (Yumego), and working with France-based Compagnie Voix, he created an electronic cinematic dance score for the immersive mixed-reality dance performance Eve: Dance Is An Unplaceable Place, which was awarded the Laval Virtual Award 2019 Recto VRso (France) and the Kaohsiung Film Festival Grand Prize 2019 (Taiwan). The sequel show, Eve 3.0: Stories Of Our Extreme Selves, featuring Dale's new score, will commence performances in Spring 2023.  Dale also created music for the children's social justice app, My Rights, awarded Honourable Mention at the Middle East/North Africa International Mobile Gaming Awards.

As a pianist, Dale has broad classical and jazz experience and has performed over 1,000 shows worldwide, including a five-year stretch in Dubai which included residencies at some of the world's finest hotels and restaurants. Dale released the ambient piano album featuring his own compositions The End Of The Line in 2021. His cello and piano arrangement of Those Who Were (composed by renowned jazz bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen) was recently performed live at Expo 2020 in Dubai and streamed to a worldwide audience.

Growing up in Saskatchewan, Dale began piano training at the age of four and worked through the Royal Conservatory of Music curriculum as a child. As a teenager, he broadened his musical diet with jazz greats such as Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, and Canadian boogie-woogie pianist Michael Kaeshammer, alongside piano pop legends including Ben Folds Five and Billy Joel. Dale would often spend afternoons at the piano playing his favourite film scores by John Williams, Alan Silvestri, and Thomas Newman as he dove deeper into the world of cinematic music.

Dale is an active member of the Screen Composers Guild of Canada (SCGC) and the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN). He lives in Vancouver, Canada with his family.

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