Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Sound Designer Ken Travis Continues to Dazzle Broadway Audiences with Big, Cinematic Sound DPA Microphones
ETNow.com: For the past 15 years, Ken Travis has been impressing theatre audiences with his innovative sound designs for some of Broadway’s biggest productions and national tours. With a distinguished Broadway resume that includes Newsies, Jekyll & Hyde, Scandalous, A Christmas Story, Memphis, Barefoot in the Park and Steel Magnolias, Travis continues to rely on a selection of microphones from DPA Microphones to create a big, cinematic sound with the flexibility to capture all of the grandeur of the great white way.
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2 comments:
What a cool sound designer and an interesting article. I’ve never hear of a DPA microphone when I began reading this article. Also… what a distinguished Broadway resume! Newsies, Jekyll & Hyde, Scandalous, A Christmas Story, Memphis, Barefoot in the Park and Steel Magnolias oh my! I’ve never heard of subminiature microphones… but I’d imagine they’re quite small. I actually had to look up what the d:screet 4061 looked like because the article did not have any images of this microphone. I have to applaud Travis for the fact that he had the opportunity to design the sound for every global production of Aladdin. Isn’t that insane? You’ve gotta be doing your job super right to be given that task. What’s odd about this article is that they writer frames it in such a way that this sound designer is one of the only designers in the industry who uses the DPA brand of microphone.
DPA microphones have infiltrated and taken over so much of the audio world. They are so often the choice for theatrical purposes, and when working in Japan they were often the choice for a classy jazz club as well. At Bluenote Tokyo, DPA mics can often be seen on the stage from the strings section to the Piano, and all across stage. They sound really well, and pickup just where you want them to (with a talented use of placement of course). However writing about these mics here, and reading about them on the article, feel somewhat disappointing. I find it difficult researching mics without using them, often articles about audio are very bland. They lack the wholeness and special quality of expression sound has, which maybe can’t be as well expressed through writing. I wish there was a better system for describing sound, or if people who wrote/spoke of them would say more interesting things then how great they sound.
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