ProSoundWeb: I recently fell into some sound design work for a university theatre department. While preparing for this role, I discovered that the world of theatre sound is as intriguing as it is hard to find information on.
For the first show, I relied on my audio fundamentals, classical music training, and some musicals I mixed in college with no guidance. It turned out well and everyone was happy, but it made me realize how much I had to learn about this segment of the industry. So I found a bunch of amazingly talented theatre designers, A1s, and A2s to create the starting guide I was looking for.
3 comments:
Learning the essentials of theatre sound is honestly not that hard in my opinion. I feel like this is going to go without saying but it is in the details where a good and bad sound designer is differentiated. Sound for theatre is in my opinion a lot harder to mix for than other live sound events. I think it takes a lot deeper of an understanding of systems and the mixing itself is a lot more intuitive. I also just think sound design in general is very intuitive and that intuition is something that is incredibly hard to train into something. The reason I think that is because as a sound designer you have to be able to pay attention and identity everything that throws your mix off or the ability to and sometimes those things can be incredibly miniscule that intuition helps a lot instead of trying to memorize a list.
Finding information and resources on theater sound operation and design is so hard for some reason. Most things you find online are for church or other live music events. I would mix musicals by using line-by-line mixing. As a high schooler this was pretty intimidating but I got good at it and sometimes I miss it. There would be points where the show was so ingrained in my brain, that I would hear a line, and without thinking, my instinct would be to turn the mic on. The other day I was watching a video of one of our old performances, and it was really funny how at the end of a scene, my brain instantly woke up on the line that I would use a cue. I would always tape face microphones on the jaw. I was taught that the sponginess of your jaw bone helps the sound of the voice.
This article is getting bookmarked on my computer. On the one hand, most of these tidbits feel really obvious to me, as someone who has worked sound for a while. But if you had given this article to a 15 year old me, it would have saved me SO much time and so many shows full of trial and error. It brings me back to a time before I understood line by line mixing, before I had to sit behind the sound board and listen to the shrill feedback as I frantically scrambled to bring down the leads faders. It brings me back to before I made my first ear rig (here at CMU), having spent my whole high school career with premade ones. I've never been a part of a show that used forehead mics before, and I didn't know why they were better, just that they were. I could go through every tip in this article and write how I learned it the hard way, or whose offhanded comment taught me that it was best practice, or how I eventually came up with the thought myself, thinking it was an original idea before finding out it was the industry standard and no one had bothered to tell me. While, at this moment, this article isn't all that useful to me, there was a time in my life where it would have made all the difference, and I'm sure there are other articles like it that have knowledge that in 5 years I will find obvious, but now would be earth shattering. I am thinking of emailing it to my highschool director to give to new sound recruits. Overall, I am very glad that there is someone out there looking out for the beginners in this industry, and I hope more articles like this come to exist.
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