A Very Different Production
Designing sound to keep up with the fast-moving Our House in London
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The latest pop musical to open in London’s West End is Our House,
written by Ben Elton and employing the musical talents and extensive
back-catalog of Madness, one the most successful British bands
of the 1980’s. |
The sound designer for the show is Rick Clarke, whose previous credits
include 10 productions of Chicago and over 40 other West End shows.
“It was clear from the beginning that this would be a very different production
to work on,” Clarke explains. “Not only were the composers alive and in
the theater, but the script has sections of dialogue running through songs,
which is a real challenge to a sound designer. Normally, we would expect
to have a huge differential between dialogue level and a full-blown song,
but in this show there is no such definition. It also means that the board
operator has to commit everything to memory sections of the show are
so fast-moving that there’s no time to follow a musical score.”
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To cope with the exceptional pace of the show (there are more than 50 scenes in the script), Clarke elected to use a Yamaha PM1D digital console for front-of-house and monitor duties. “It’s the first time I’ve used the desk, and it has been an uphill struggle to learn it all in the middle of preparing a big show. I felt I had to explore what a digital console could do, and for a production like this with so many scene changes it’s a very helpful tool. It’s also very producer-friendly. We’re taking up much less space than we would with a traditional system. The audio passing through it is very clean, and I was happy with reports from other shows about its reliability record.” |
The PM1D, like the rest of the audio system, is supplied by London-based Orbital Sound, whose CEO Chris Headlam was an early adopter of the PM1D concept. “We provided the first PM1D in the UK for a theater show at the end of 2000, and since then we have used the consoles on a huge range of different productions.” Clarke concedes that using a digital console has placed an extra burden on him and the Orbital crew; “It definitely makes the job bigger in the design sense. There is a lot more advance work required for programming and configuring, and there’s a huge stress-factor during the early days in the theater, because you are translating a theoretical design that’s quite far advanced into reality. On the other hand, this has been going on in lighting design for years.”
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MINIMIZING CABLE RUNS |
“I’m using the LCS system for two jobs,” notes Clarke. “First, to perform
‘space-mapping’ (automatically calculating complex delay and level settings
to provide accurate imaging for key voices), and also to change the actual
acoustics of the theater to reflect the action on stage.”
This alternative to conventional synthesized reverb provides, according
to Clarke, a much more realistic environment for the audience. “It’s not
just something that’s been added to the PA mix the VRAS concept uses
separate speakers around the room, so if we want to create a very echoey
space, we can and it works for everyone. It’s even more surprising when
we remove the effect entirely for a couple of outdoor scenes it makes
the room feel much drier.” The VRAS system uses microphones placed over
the stage and in the auditorium to present eight channels of ‘live’ information
to the matrix; these are routed via TL Audio valve preamps.
To maintain the theater’s aesthetic qualities, Clarke has been forced
to leave some of the acoustic problems untouched. “There are a series
of arches in the Cambridge theater that seem to have been designed to
wreck its acoustics but as a designer it’s part of my job to work around
these architectural problems by using the right combination of speakers.”
However, there was one area where he insisted on taking the trouble to
modify the room’s response. He has introduced heavy acoustic draping to
the roof of the theater to deaden the otherwise cavernous space. “I knew
from past experience here that we had to address the known problems with
the sound in the balcony there’s no sense in putting in the finest sound
system without trying to sort out the room itself first.”
EVERYWHERE IN THE THEATER
Clarke’s “finest system” is, unusually, entirely from one source German-made
d&b loudspeakers are found everywhere in the theater. Notable among the
various models are ‘skeletal’ installation versions of d&b’s C41 cabinet,
which are deployed on the forward truss just in front of the proscenium.
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“These are great for the long throw into the balcony. It’s quite
a difficult space, but the C41 has good pattern control down to
500 Hz, which means that the vocals remain very direct. Interestingly,
the C41’s (which have no wooden enclosure) don’t sound any different
to the original C4’s but they are much less visually obtrusive
and weigh very little,” he says. Elsewhere, Clarke is using the newly-launched E18 loudspeaker for the LCS system outputs, C7 wide-coverage enclosures for proscenium speakers and E3s for front fills. In keeping with the overall concept of keeping the audio image as low as possible, Clarke has rotated the E3 horns so that the boxes cover 90 degrees vertically, and he has balanced the front fills with the proscenium system. |
Amplification is all from d&b, and this, says Orbital Sound’s Headlam,
helps enormously with the engineering of the show, since gain structure
is unified across the entire system. XTA DP224 and DP226 system processors
are used under the control of XTA’s AudioCore software to provide delay
and equalization.
The young cast of Our House are equipped with 30 Sennheiser 5000
series UHF wireless mics, fitted with a mixture of MKE Platinum, DPA 4061
headworn and 4065 headband capsules. “We originally wanted just to try
out the Sennheiser MKE capsules as an A-B test with the DPAs but we’ve
ended up using them as part of the system,” admits Clarke. “I wanted to
use boom mics throughout it’s such a rock’n’roll show that I felt they
would not look out of place but the designer and director didn’t want
any visible mics. In the end we compromised, and the principals wear booms
while everyone else is on headworn mics.”
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His concerns over miking were twofold; first, well-positioned boom mics can offer better and more reliable pickup quality than headworn mini-capsules, as the latter can be wrecked by sweat and make-up. His second worry was, with a loud band and inexperienced cast, the high level of amplification needed would be more easily achieved with boom mics. To supplement the on-stage cast members, a side-stage vocal booth has been constructed and acoustically treated under Clarke’s direction, which is used to ‘thicken up’ the chorus numbers in the show. |
In the pit, DPA mics are again being used; the 4061 with its grille removed
makes, according to Clarke, a very good, flat-response mic for violin,
while the bigger 4020 capsule is clipped to the saxophone bell. In addition
to the real musicians, the design incorporates some hard disk playback,
including various click tracks and a sequence, cued from the pit, which
is timecode-linked to video projection.
ISOLATING SOURCES
The orchestra, though entirely live, is almost completely encased in transparent
Perspex booths in the pit, with an inch-thick sheet of the same material
on top of the whole pit area; this has the beneficial effect of isolating
the electronic and acoustic sources (which include violin, trumpet, sax
and a full drum kit). “As a musician, you can’t play this kind of music
quietly and still give it the right feel,” says Clarke, “but as the members
of Madness were very precise about how they wanted the whole thing to
sound, I have to have as much control over the band as possible.”
On stage, the foldback system has been engineered to overcome the difficulty
of a very untypical musical set. “The set design is basically a four-story
house within a box,” he explains, “which means that the only real place
to position foldback speakers is on the lighting bars, so we have six
d&b E3s above the stage, driven from separate mixes generated by the front-of-house
desk.”
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The design for Our House serves as a good example of modern musical practice; however, another recent trend in musical design threatens to overshadow this work. Ever since the introduction of color-scrollers to theatrical lighting design, sound practitioners have been fighting an uphill battle with ever-increasing noise levels on stage and in the auditorium. The lighting design for Our House incorporates a large number of fan-cooled moving lights not only over the stage where their continuous roar is invariably picked up by all vocal microphones but also in the auditorium, where the audience hears them without any reinforcement. |
Worse still, four enormous DLP video projectors, required for the various
filmic moments in the show, are located under the theater balcony, directly
over the heads of audience members. Clarke’s design work with systems
such as VRAS require a degree of subtlety to convince the audience that
what they are hearing is natural but this risks being destroyed by the
incredible racket caused by the lighting and video rig.
The voices of young and inexperienced singers have to be amplified by
such a degree to overcome the noise threshold that there is a constant
risk of feedback, and the resulting sound
is a massive compromise. Lighting departments beware it may only be
a matter of time before theatrical “noiseboys” start installing loudspeakers
that throw light all over the place, just to teach you a lesson.
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A MATRIX-BASED INTERCOM “It’s the first time we’ve used a digital matrix system in a London theater,” says Chris Headlam of Orbital, “and there was a certain reluctance on the part of the crew at first. However, when they realize that we can change who they can speak to simply by a bit of programming, rather than rewiring the system, they love it.” |
While the Zeus system does not have provision for beltpacks at present,
the Orbital team was able to interface the matrix with eight 2-wire spurs
that allow the connection of BP325 beltpacks for stage crew, lighting,
followspot operators and sound personnel, in the traditional fashion.
For radio communications, the Zeus system is also connected to a simplex
interface for the show’s Motorola walkie-talkies, and an RTS BTR-700 UHF
station, which provides full duplex operation and allows up to four wireless
beltpacks to communicate with the system.
From his base in the UK, Mike Mann is a frequent contributor to Live Sound. He can be reached at mike@bigwords4u.com
March 2003 Live Sound International