When I fell into my first proper job as an engineer, I knew very little about what I should actually do. I was asked to mix a theatre show which a director I knew was putting on at the local Theatre Royal. I turned up full of passion and with a patchy knowledge of an old Allen & Heath analogue desk and the most basic of signal path from mic to speaker. I was confronted by a Yamaha LS9-32 and 12-ways of Trantec S5.3 radios with Sennheiser MKE-2 lavalier mics. Oh and a 10 piece Orchestra…

Fortunately for me, the venue was pretty small and the nature of the old theatre meant that micing the orchestra was unnecessary; I just had to keep the mics (firstly) audible and (secondly) natural sounding. I fumbled my way through the week long run learning by trial and error, as to how I could get the vocals sounding remotely warm and natural. I’d never used lavalier microphones before so I didn’t know that their omni-directional pick-up pattern meant that I would be met by plenty of phasing issues between actors, which wouldn’t go away unless I line-mixed or at least dipped the offending mic, as appropriate, during dialogue. Finding myself in the deep end also taught me quickly how to EQ out the most offensive frequencies.

Before this show I had mainly mixed bands at college. The combination of poor playing, a reflective room, a long-unserviced console and a small PA meant that learning EQ techniques was very difficult (read as “impossible”) as there was so much reflection (or plain unpleasant noise) you rarely heard anything worth attempting to EQ. That and the constant fight with the guitarists (i’m allowed to say this, I WAS one) to turn their amps down on the matchbox sized stage.

As I was studying music at college, part of my course covered recording technology which covered DAW’s, signal flow and basic micing & mixing techniques; there was, however, no Live Sound module and so everything I did in the theatre that week was either an educated guess, based on what I might do in the studio or just plain luck.

The show went alright. So ‘alright’ in actual fact, that a few months later I was offered a job mixing a bigger show on tour. I can’t help but feel though, that it was pure passion that got me through that week and left me standing at the end of it. The knowledge for me, came second to passion and I continue to learn on every job I do and every book I read. I like to admit that there is still an awful lot I don’t yet know and I always look forward to getting back off tour and working with hire companies & venues or in warehouses preparing the rigs and building racks in an attempt to enhance my knowledge of patch, build and system design. It’s an area which is all too easy to gloss over by having an experienced production engineer or sound designer on hand with the flow diagrams…

How might things have turned out it I had the knowledge but no passion?

When you go to see a show do you want the sound design to make the show feel totally natural, so you forget there is any reinforcement at all, or do you want to be aware that there is a mic on every member of the cast and orchestra?

Being predominantly a musical theatre engineer, I have occasionally found myself being asked by members of the public to turn the orchestra down. This always comes as a great surprise to me (unless they are sat on the front row over the orchestra pit) as i’ve often had the sound designer telling me that I’m mixing his show too safely (probably due to receiving these requests!) and to decrease the difference between the band and vocals. Agreed with the designer, I do mix rather vocal heavy for theatre shows but I find that most of the time i’m forced to in order to keep the public and producers happy.

My gut feeling is that the general public don’t know how to ‘listen’ to things anymore. We are being desensitised by an ongoing ‘loudness war’; a phenomenon which can be tracked back to around the 80s.
With digital mastering came the challenge to ever increase the loudness of records by increasing the compression ratios and EQ to maximise the level of the entire track which removes the dynamics and therefore the emotion of the piece. This has unfortunately been transferred to television, film and now to live theatre. Add to this the volume at which many people have their television set, just to watch the news for example; everything is shouted at you. As a result, I feel many people cannot focus on picking out parts (such as vocals) within a mix unless it jumps out and bites them in the ear.

Reasons To Be Cheerful: 1, 2, 3…
Part 2

2. Kara

Our week at Hackney Empire was one which Graeae Theatre Company thought to be particularly important for the future of the production and budget was found to hire in a system. Reasons’ is a show which is billed as ‘part-gig, part-play’, so we needed a system which would really rock when the band kicked in, but had to be able to convey the story in all it’s anarchic spirit, energy, emotion, grit and grandeur.
After much discussion between the Production Sound Engineer, the Production Manager and Myself, we went for the KARA Line-array by L-Acoustics, which I have used on a few occasions in the past and knew that it was a system which would fill the 1,200 cap venue nicely. Inverting the rigging frame allowed us to ground stack the Kara boxes on top of the subs, and adjust the rear angles to fire up, underneath the circle balconies which form the four tiers of the Empire. We also added a centre hang of the Kara, with a further two SB18′s, which flew out on an advance bar to cover the top two tiers of the theatre. To bring the image in from the wide left and right ground stacks by the proscenium, we added a small fill of 3 more boxes which sat on top of a pair of B2′s in the centre of the auditorium.
(more…)