McDonald has composed music for video games such as Ravenwood Fair, Skulls of the Shogun, and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Commander.

McDonald began his music career in 1994 with the release of Giant Ant Farm's Fortune on Vaccination Records.

[3][4]The album was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, with critic Mike Boehm writing "[i]n contrast to the overt expressions of anger and dread you get in most punk songs about the declining state of things, McDonald offers symbolic and metaphoric dreamscapes"[3] In 1995, McDonald made an appearance as a turntablist on John Cage's Europeras 3 & 4 with the Long Beach Opera on Mode Records.

[7][8][9] McDonald served as a stage manager at the 1997 Making Waves music festival in San Francisco, which featured multiple performers from Vaccination Records.

[11] McDonald's next releases came with the band Grndntl Brnds (pronounced Grand National Brands) with Communicating for Influence (2000) and The Great Dumbening (2002).

[15] In the early 2000s, McDonald began to change his career and looked into working on video game music and sound.

[33][34] In 2019, McDonald scored the full-length documentary The Edge of Success, which was shown at the Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival.

[35][36] McDonald was an adjunct professor in the new Technology and Applied Composition program (TAC) at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

[51] Collaborators include Josh Freese (Foo Fighters, Nine Inch Nails, Sting, Devo) and The Residents.

After working together on polyheDren, in January 2023, McDonald joined Josh Freese at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for a 50th Anniversary concert for The Residents, along with several other guest performers including Les Claypool (Primus), David J (Bauhaus), Ego Plum, Pamela Z, and The San Francisco Girls Chorus.