Over the past couple of weeks I have had the pleasure of working again with Belmont University’s Musical Theatre department to present Little Women at the Massey Performing Arts Center in Nashville. This is my third semester working with the department, and the first show I have sound designed independently. The mistakes made and lessons learned were far to many to document here, so I’ll just share some highlights.
The show took place in Massey Concert Hall, in the Massey Performing Arts Center. Since the show was produced in house, all equipment came from the house. FOH mixing was served by the ever trusty PM1d, the house main, center and LFE positions were used, and all mics, RF, IEMs, and playback systems were house. We utilized 24 channels of ULX-D, using ULXD1 transmitters with a mix of Sennheiser MKE1s, MKE2s, DPA 4061s and a good number of Point Source EO-8WL. In addition, 8 stereo IEM mixes were fed to the pit via PSM900 transmitters. All sound effects were fired from front of house via MIDI on a redundant QLab system.
There was a lot of “new” to me on this show. First and foremost, using a console with the horsepower of the PM1d, I was able to structure my showfile in a way that made my job as a console operator much easier. The PM1d’s various libraries proved to be very helpful in programming and the entire programming process was much less of a headache than I anticipated. In addition, having 48 busses gave me great flexibility to run stereo subgroups for vocal processing (I used three, one for principals, one for ensemble, one for “story” characters, who come on as Jo is narrating her writings) while still having plenty of available busses for effects as well as my eight stereo IEMs.
Working closely with our costumer, I was able to use some new to me mic techniques on actors. We used a heavy combination of forehead mics, ear rigs (built with an aluminum floral wire I’ve grown to greatly like) and some mics integrated into character masks for some particular story characters. One character who proved to be particularly difficult was Rodrigo, who triumphantly removes her helmet at the end of the show and announces herself as the fair Clarissa’s sister. The big problem? Every time she triumphantly threw off her helmet, she ripped her mic off with it, and the single critical line she had in the show was lost while her mic element dangled by her side. Finally, after about three attempts to secure different rigs to her ear (a forehead rig was unfeasible due to other show responsibilities) we finally decided the smart move was to hide her microphone in the lapel of her vest, and suddenly we had her triumphant two words for the rest of the run. This was also the first time I got to construct a pre-built double rig for a principal character, which was very neat and ended up being useful when I encountered some RF interference on the A rig during a show.
The last thing I have thoughts about is the “design” side of things, which really manifested itself as a lot of production audio work. This is a side I have little experience in, but it was work I enjoyed immensely. Having worked as an A1 and an A2 provided context that helped me make decisions that made the show easier to load in, easier to tech, and easier to troubleshoot when things broke (I did say house system, right?). It seems like every time I try something new with color coding, labelling, file structure, patching, I have more and more opinions about the “right” way to do things, and I’m able to back those opinions with personal experience about why the wrong way is the wrong way. I think they call that education?
More than anything, the chance to sit behind a console and throw faders for three hours is what makes a show for me. To me, it’s not work, it’s artistic expression. It’s a challenge to connect the audience to the story the actors, other designers and creative team are bringing to the stage. Someone once compared the audio department on a musical as a magnifying glass or a telescope the audience uses to see the show. Our job is to bring the story to a scale it couldn’t have existed at in a purely acoustic world, but if the lens is smudged, or if the glass is cracked, and the audience notices they’re looking through a telescope, then we have failed. This show was a great opportunity to try, fail, and learn some new ways to keep the glass clean.