orchestra

I recently did a major musical, and when I say recently I mean it closes tomorrow.  Well to save money, we decided to not hire any musicians and rent the computer genterated track from real-time music solutions.  Sinfonia. Oh the bain of my life for the last 4 weeks.

Sinfonia is what i call Sibalus for beginners, only you can't program the music into the computer. Sure you can control tempo's and keys and even repeats and vamps. You can also control individual volumes on instruments as well as muting them. Sinfonia is supose to be a orchestra suppliment, meaning you have 3 or 4 musicians in your pit and the computer plays along with them. We didnt do that.

I'm glad we didn't. While the orchestrations are nice, the issue was volume with the tracks themselves. Example, when you open the program for the first time all instruments are at 100. If you think of it like a soundboard 100 actually is 0, 0 would really be -100 and 200 would be +100, Understand.

So lets start the first song.

Oh thats sounds nice, wait where did the music go?, Oh there it is, HOLY CRAP WHY IS IS SO LOUD.

No joke that was the first 2 minutes of the first number. Now imagine having to sit down and edit every song and every point where the music could be at a more constant level. I'm not talking equal volume the whole show, I mean barely anything showing up on the sound board sensors to everything peaking in the matter of a measure. 

So for 2 weeks I edited and fixed and worked on everything. Then load in occured and we went into the theatre.

Everything I had mixed and edited was trash, but the problem was the show didnt sound right at all. I called Sinfonia and they didnt know what the problem was, in fact they still don't.

While our audience likes the orchestrations and they sound good, my suggestion, ude at your own risk first. It may make your life a lot harder as a sound designer.  I didnt get a decently sounding run thru until the night before opening, and after rehearsals it would be the director and myself in the parking lot working on 2 to 3 hours of notes on just sinfonia.

Welcome

Welcome to the first post of my new blog. I'm a senior theatre design major with a focus on Scenic, Lighting, and Sound. Last semester I was the lighting and Tech director for Shrek the Musical and Scenic and Sound designer for Other Desert Cities. I'm currently the on call TD for Jonesburough Repertory Theatre, basically anytime they need tech questions or a last minute designer or help with something I come in and do what I can.  Over spring break this semester I will be lighting designer for Spring Awakening with Glasgow Theatre Company. This past week has been a busy week on the phone with the JRT and with a friend in Florida who just bought the same board that JRT had purchased over the summer.

I think its a beautiful board called the Behringer x32. A completely digital board with automated sliders.  The x32 has the ability to take in 32 inputs and output a lot more than that.  At the JRT I have it set to take 14 wireless mics, 2 keyboards, guitar, and a bass. The Outs are set as L and R mains and mono stage monitors hung inside the upstage side of the proscenium. With a full band on stage I have 3 more monitors on stage digitally patched to take the same feed as the stage monitors.  The awesome thing about this board is that with it entirely digital setting up each of these is a a 5 minute job. Just plug and patch and play.

The x32 has a lot of interesting features that makes it much more user friendly.  There is an iPhone, iPad, and iPod app. This app actually runs the bus sends which is how I set up my monitors and what I have spent the majority of my time working with this week.  With a bass, guitar, and 2 keyboards sent to bus send 1, its a routing or patch to whatever output I need it to be at be that a 1/4 inch cable or a XLR cable.

The x32 also has many effects built into the board.  It has a massive processor built in that you can patch into each individual channel or on a bus send and route each channel to send to that bus send.  During Shrek and USO I had 3 different processors running at one time on separate bus sends. The board also has the ability to record directly from the board, so you can save a version of your mix to use later or record a cue to hold for use in a show later. It can play each one back but I wasn't a fan of the interface to do that. Instead I use MultiPlay software.

The best and easiest feature that I found wad the cue system Behringer has created. The ability to save levels and patching and mutes and even labels on each fader, the board can hold 100 cues, but you can save more on a flash drive and load a new show on the flash drive. You can also run the board from a computer mess with levels and save all from the computer. This is one of my favorite boards to use. However the only big complaint that I have is that I wish it was available in a full size instead of the compact version were only 16 of the 32 channels can be seen at a time.

-photo credit from the Behringer website-