Sound Fundamentals — Audible, Clean, Without Feedback

Well welcome to lesson one in the sound basic course and this is where we're going to start looking at some of the terminology that is commonly used within a sound department. Now as we move through the other course you may hear some words or see some words used that aren't included here and I'll endeavour to include them as we go forward but this is just to give you a broad overview of the terminology that is used day to day that you might come into counter with. So the first of those they're going to look at some microphones. Now the microphones are the input sources of any sound system and there are a number of different microphones that you'll come across.

The first of those is called a dynamic microphone and they are mostly used for vocals and for singing and they are microphones that are very much unidirectional. So they go in one way. You then get condenser microphones or omnidirectional microphones which are used a lot more instrumentation and picking up a broader series of sound and a broader array of sound and they're used a lot for picking up instrumentation, percussion and areas where you might have multiple singers maybe a vocal booth. Then you have other inputs such as DI boxes or direct input boxes and what they do is they take a line level input from a guitar or a keyboard or another electronic instrument and they convert that into a balanced input that the sound console can see and sometimes they even take a mono signal and turn that into a balanced pair of left and right outputs which means you can get two channels of balanced sound in a left and a right from one cable coming out of one instrument and that can be really handy for sound engineers as well.

Another area in microphones that you might hear is RF and that stands for radio frequencies or radio microphones. Now I'm wearing an RF microphone today. This is called a DPA. It's a small bud mic. This is on a headset version. You might also have bud microphones that sit in a wig or in a wig cap and then you can also have the classic handheld microphone handheld wireless and that is also an RF microphone. Now all of these microphones have what we call capsules. On the top the capsule is the actual sound membrane that takes the sound and capsules are interchangeable between different microphones and they can range in different sizes and different shapes.

So the capsule on this microphone will be different to the capsule on a dynamic microphone for a vocal and it might also be different to a capsule on an omnidirectional microphone which is all designed to take audio from different areas. Next we're going to be looking at the outputs and some of the terminology you might hear in outputs things like speakers and fold back. Now speakers are naturally the big boxes that have drivers inside them. Basically a cone with a magnet that moves and the movement of that magnet within the driver moves the sound waves out of the box and that's what creates the audible sound that we can hear and those drivers come in a high, a mid and a low and we'll talk about that in a little bit later on in the course but that gives you the different frequencies that you can hear.

Now the frequencies that you can hear in the audible spectrum are very limited in the human ear there are spectrums high and low that are subsonic and supersonic that we can't hear that other animals can hear but in our realm we have a range of frequencies from about 100 hertz to about 10,000 kilohertz and that's the spectrum that we can hear. Similar to lights where you can see a color spectrum and there's bits on each end that you can't see audio is very similar in that regard. The next thing you might hear is a foldback speaker, a foldback speaker or an in-ear monitor. The speakers that are used to hear sound coming back to you.

So where a speaker system or a PA system is used for audience to push sound out, foldback speakers are designed to have sound coming back onto stage for performers, singers or band members. Now they also have in-ear monitors which are wireless in-ears and sometimes you might see a small speaker sitting in the ear of your favorite artist when they're on stage that is instead of having a row of speakers on the floor in front of them they now have a small speaker that sits in area and in that speaker like any speaker is a high and mid and a low driver or multiple drivers in each ear depending on the quality of their in-ear monitor and that allows them to hear a full range of sound and a customized foldback mix in their ears and they can move around the stage and hear everything wherever they go. The next series of terminology we're going to look at will then be that of the console in front of house.

Now we're going to be talking a bit about consoles in another section of this course and that's going to be talking about things like inputs and outputs as we discussed. Inputs are your microphone and sound sources. Outputs are where they go towards speakers or foldback sends. We also have things called inserts, matrices and equalizers and all of these topics we'll talk about in the audio console course but the equalizer basically gives you the adjustment to change some of those frequencies we spoke about. So from 100 hertz to 10,000 in our high-med and low bands the equalizer gives you a little bit of flexibility to tune those areas depending on the room.

Now tuning a frequency of the room can be a pretty daunting and difficult task but by using an equalizer you have control over those. We're also going to talk a little bit about some of the roles in the sound department. We'll start at the sound designer who deals with the design of the sound from the placement of the speakers, the selection of microphones and the way that the show is heard by the audience to the front of house engineer who actually operates that show night to night and day to day and keeps that consistency of the sound design through the whole theatrical season. We'll touch briefly on monitor engineers and whilst not specifically in the theatrical world a monitor engineer is very very important in live sound and we'll talk about their role and then your sound technician is your technician that needs to run around and do all of the patching, all of the chasing, all of the miking and all of the troubleshooting.

Now if you are interested in the sound being able to troubleshoot and follow cabling is a very crucial part of that and having the ability to think outside the box and come up with solutions to get sound out of a pickle quickly is a great attribute to have. So now let's look through the list below in our lesson one which is our terminology and have a little look and then we're going to move on to lesson two. See you there.

Now the fourth and most important member of the sound crew is the sound technicians themselves, all the sound crew workers. Now the role of the sound crew is to make sure everything is working 100% because they really are the eyes and hands of the front of house and monitor engineers during show. Because those operators are stuck behind their console and can't leave, they need someone who knows the system inside out and can troubleshoot any problems. So part of being a great sound technician is to be able to troubleshoot really quickly, really efficiently, and also be really tidy in your work. Now we're going to talk a little bit later on about how to mic up a pit, and that's a really crucial part of working in theatre.

But also you can take those same principles and apply them to working into any other aspect of audio. Whether that's in a broadcast event, setting up a band on stage, working in a festival, working in a sound environment, or working in a studio. All of these fundamental practices of being tidy, labeling your cables, knowing what microphones do what, and figuring out how to do some sneaky tricks like removing ground loops and ground hum and things like that can all make you a really advantageous sound technician in a sound crew. So that's a little bit about what a sound technician does, we'll have some more below, but now let's move on to our next section.

Welcome back. So in this topic, we're going to be talking about the role of the front of house engineer. Now, as I mentioned in lesson one, the sound department starts with the sound designer. Like a lighting designer, a sound designer is the creative head of that department. But under that, we have a head of audio. And the head of audio is often also the front of house engineer. And what that means is the front of house engineer is the operator who operates the sound console in the auditorium every night of the show, every rehearsal, and every tech run. Now, the role of the front of house engineer in a theater sense is predominantly to maintain the sound designer's overall picture and overall view of how he or she wants the show to sound every night.

That involves mixing the dialogue, mixing the orchestra, and making sure the balance of the show is consistent and rides the emotion that the designer's intent was throughout the performance. Now, you might not know it, but if a sound designer and a front of house operator are working in conjunction seamlessly, you will be moved to tears by the effect that the audio has on you and you'll leave seeing the tunes and with a very positive attitude. By doing their job correctly, the front of house audio team can really drive the energy of the show. Like a lighting team would drive the visual impact, the audible impact is just as important and can be even more subtle and complex than otherwise seen on stage.

What you hear can be a real trick to the mind. We can start to play with things like surround sound, sound effects, mixing the dialogue differently, adding effects, adding reverb and space to a mix, and really making it seem like an out of world experience if we need to. So that's the role of the front of house engineer. We're now going to look at the role of the monitor technician in our next lesson.

Alright, so now we're going to talk a little bit about the monitor engineer. Now whilst not always seen in the theatre show, monitor engineers play an absolutely crucial role in every other aspect of audio and that's why it's really important to talk about it now. Whether you're doing a live show, a broadcast, a corporate show, a touring show or a band, you'll often have a monitor engineer looking after the artists and the band on stage. Now unlike the front of house engineer and the sound designer who worry about what the audience hears, the monitor engineer's key role and responsibility is to worry about what the artist hears.

Now this is important for a number of reasons because if the artist can't hear what they need to hear, they could be singing completely the wrong note, the wrong tune or be completely out of time. Now when the olden days are used to be rows and rows of front speakers on the front of stage called fold back and they would project sound back to the artist but they'd also be speakers on the side of stage called side fill and they would also project a different sound or a different mix. Now the monitor engineer has moved slightly into a more high-end technology these days by the use of using in-ear monitors which means that everyone wears wireless packs and speakers in their ears.

Now what this means on stage is that it's really quiet. In the olden days the front of house engineer would have to fight against the monitor engineer's volume because all of the microphones on stage that are picking up the instruments would also pick up the noise coming from those fold back speakers and those side fill speakers. So now that everyone's wearing the speakers in their ears, the stage can be quite silent apart from maybe the drums and guitar amps which is amazing for isolation for the front of house engineer and the designer but can also mean that they need to hear some specific things added by the monitor engineer.

Now if you're wearing in-ears as a monitor engineer, you can't hear anything else except those in-ears so you now need to build that space of the room around you and that's done by using a couple of different microphones placed around the room that are mixed into your monitor send and your monitor mixes to really give the artist on stage the sense of the crowd, the sense of where they are on the stage and you can do things like, for example, bring the keyboards that are on your physical left just into your left ear and the bass player that's on your right just into your right ear so as you're standing on stage, you know where they are visually but you can then start to hear where they are in that world of space around you. And that's part of the role of the monitor engineer and it really is a crucial one. A lot of monitor engineers will argue that it's a lot more fun on stage because you get to deal with the band and explore those things with them whereas the front of house engineer is stuck out the front with the audience and has to worry about all of the audience members who think they're sound engineers but if monitor engineering is of interest to you, check it out and we're not going to talk about it much more in this course because as I mentioned it's not really a theatrical component because during the sound design process a lot of that on stage sound is controlled from the front of house engineer as well so that's not to say that the front of house engineer can't mix monitors sometimes they do but in more complex systems the front of house engineer and the monitor engineer work in conjunction with each other.

The next thing we're going to talk about is our audio control and this is really where we start to see our layout start to happen because this is where we start to implement the second stage in our audio system. We've got our microphone and now we need to connect this microphone to our audio console and what this audio console is it gives us the ability to turn the sound up and down on and off and add different things and manipulate that sound as we require. Now in the simplest of setups the microphone goes into the audio console and the audio console sends a signal to the speaker. That is the most simple of any audio setup so you can find.

One microphone plugs into a console and from the console goes to a speaker and from there understanding that principle it really is just a matter of multiplication because sometimes in an audio setup you might have one microphone, 4 microphones, 8, 16, 24, 32, 96, 106. It really is exponentially increaseable from that point and the process is all the same. It's just at that point your audio console start to go from being small and compact to bigger and bigger and bigger. Now there is also a point where audio consoles have moved from analog to digital and that's a really important thing to understand.

An analog console means that the audio signal comes in and on the console itself you only have a small amount of analog control. In the olden days we used to two massive long consoles which had 96 channels of analog control and on that you would have the large sheet of knobs in front of you and you would see the sound engineers and designers tweaking all the knobs and that would be adjusting different things like their frequencies, where the sound was going, how it was being routed, was it going to the left speaker or the right speaker. But now in the world of digital a lot of that is done on touch screens and a lot of that has been condensed to have one surface of operation where you can assign different channels to be used with those one set of buttons rather than having consoles with multiple sets of buttons that all did the same thing per channel and it really has turned into just something of an efficiency that audio designers and audio console designers have created.

The great thing about digital consoles is you can also start to save information. You might have one scene where you need a singer or a group of singers doing one thing with a certain effect and then the next scene where they're doing something different or the different members of the orchestra are playing different instruments and by having digital consoles we now have the ability to store that information and recall it again and again and again and have all of those settings saved exactly as we wanted it. Whereas in the olden days on analog consoles you would literally need to have a piece of paper and you would say okay in scene four I need knobs five seven and nine to be at one o'clock and knobs three two and four to be at three o'clock and then in the next scene I quickly need to change them all and you'd run through the console and you'd do all that and it really just was a bit inefficient.

So that was the main reason that audio consoles went to digital formats and that was for efficiency and for the massive amount of processing power that they could increase on that because one of the main concepts with audio consoles is you want to have as little delay as possible. As you start to add things to the audio chain from the source to the speaker everything in the middle can add small amounts of delay to an audio system and that means you might see someone talking but not hear them at the same time and that's where audio design is really important. You want to have that picture brought to you at the first in the first instance so it all sounds like it's coming from what you're watching no matter where you are in the theater or the arena and so being able to process things quickly really reduced that time it took from the sound to get from the input of the microphone to the output of the speaker even though it might be running through hundreds of meters of cable going through a console being adjusted and equalized and filtered and having effects put on it and then sending it to the speakers that time was reduced and therefore audio consoles became a lot more efficient.

So that's a little bit about audio consoles and now set up we're going to be looking at just the smallest and simplest of audio consoles we're looking at one strip where we have gain where we have equalizing and where we have volume and then that's all we need to know for now and as we move forward in our courses and in our design we'll start to talk a little bit more about those digital consoles and go from there but from a systems point of view the sound comes into the console we can adjust the gain which is its sensitivity we can adjust its equalizer which is the high-mid and low the amount of frequencies which are adjustable and let through to the speaker and then the volume with a mute button mute cuts the signal out completely unmuting releases it and then our volume fader allows us to mix different inputs at different levels to then output to the speaker and we're going to look at outputs next in our next topic

Welcome to lesson three where we're now going to have an introduction to audio systems. Now audio systems can be very simple or they can be very very complex. We're going to start simple and we're going to talk a little bit about the complexities as we go but for the most part I'm going to keep it really straightforward. We're going to start this topic by talking about the input sources. Now that's where the sound is captured and that's the most important place to start. An input source is actually a microphone or it can also be something like a pickup on a guitar, a DI box for a keyboard or something that converts digital signals coming out of a computer or or a software program into something that that audio console can receive.

The most simple way to think about an input source is something that captures the sound. That can be a microphone like I'm wearing here. You might see microphones around instruments, singers holding microphones, wireless microphones, cabled microphones, hanging microphones for a choir. There are a number of different microphones out there. A DI box is called a direct input box and that's where you take a jack lead or a guitar lead and you plug it into a box on stage and instead of an amplifier this can convert the signal. It can send it down the multi-core to the front of house console and the monitor console and at that end they can then take your signal from your guitar and turn that on out into the speaker system and that's called a DI box and there's two types of DI boxes.

There's an active box which is self-powered, might have a small battery inside it or there's a passive box which needs voltage sent back from the sound console to give some a small amount of 48 volt power to the box to give it some juice so it can actually function and work with those instruments. Now that's all part of the DI world. You can also get different DI's like USB DI's which plug into a USB port on your computer an AV DI which take things like RCA cables which are the red and white cables that you might see in an old DVD player or VHS player or CD player and convert that to signal. The role of the DI box really is to convert signals of different types into a uniformed balanced XLR signal and you would have seen in the terminology page the type of connectors and one of those is the XLR and that is the main type of audio cable used.

From there we're going to start looking at the next type of input source which can be types of playback. Now playback is very important for theater shows especially because it can include things like soundscapes, sound effects, reverbs, different effects and other things that the sound designer wants to include. It can also be partly used to reinforce the sound on stage by bringing in some pre-recorded audio from a studio or a rehearsal that bolsters the sound of the ensemble and makes it sound like there are more singers on stage than there actually are. It's also very useful for using in times of high-energy dance numbers or choreography when the cast might actually be too puffed to sing in full volume so while the leads are singing and the ensemble are dancing you may bolster some of that audio of pre-recorded sound and singing to really help the dancers on stage.

It means they don't have to do everything at once. Now some of you might call that lip syncing but it really is part of the whole overall audio design because we can't expect our ensemble to be dancing and singing at full volume while doing a full tap number sometimes that's just a little bit unrealistic. So that's part of the sound design and why playback is really important.

And in topic three of our introductions to systems, we're going to be looking at the outputs. Now we've spoken about the audio coming in, the audio console or controller in the interface in the middle, and now we're going to be looking at the speakers on the other end. Now there are a huge number of speakers on the market, all of which have different personalities, different attributes and different components. And in our interview hub, we're talking to a lot of sound engineers about their preference of speaker. And designers, front-of-house engineers, monitor engineers and sound technicians all have their own preferences of their type of preferred and favorite speaker box, because every speaker box sounds a little bit different.

But in essence, whether it's a high, a mid or a low speaker, every speaker responds to the same way. Electrical signals from an amplifier will move a magnet which sits in a driver and vibrates it on and off, which makes a cone move back and forward, which sends the sound out of the speaker. Now in a high speaker, those drivers are small and tight and called tweeters, because they move very fast and create a high pitch sound, but whereas in a sub, or a subwoofer, those are the low tone producing speakers and they are big cabinets because they need a lot of room to move because they're producing those low tones and those low frequencies, and so they need a lot of air to move around.

The more air you move, the more volume you get, and therefore the speaker has the capacity to send sound over a short distance, a long distance, or to be controlled and steered in certain ways depending on what you want to do. Really intricate sound designers and sound engineers work super closely with system technicians who set up PAs day in and day out. Using a whole bunch of computers and spectrum analysis, they can actually pre-forecast and pre-predict where the coverage of the speakers is going to be as part of the sound design and make sure that every seat in the theater or the stadium or the auditorium get the same level and volume no matter where they are, and that might mean hanging speakers in different positions and orientating them slightly differently, but that's part of the design and it's part of thinking about the outputs of a system.

And that's the PA. We also spoke a little bit about the fallback system. Having on stage sound there's a different need entirely because you might send different things to the cast that you send to the audience. For example, you might not want to put any vocals on stage, you might just want to have orchestra there or sound or playback or special sound effects. So you can really isolate what you send to what output through the audio console. And that really is where the advancement of consoles has come into its own where you can now manipulate sound to come in and go out in a whole bunch of different ways and you can split the signal and repeat the signal and send it out to multiple outputs so you really can hone in your design that way.

So let's talk a little bit now about equalizing and EQ. And that's a really important thing to understand about how that works. So as we know, sound is made up of different frequencies. And depending on the position of the speakers in the room, the type of microphone you're using, the number of microphones you're using, and what you need to do with those microphones can affect how we hear sound. Now I'm sure you've all heard that really annoying, high-pitched squeal that we call feedback. Now feedback is when the speakers are loud enough or positioned incorrectly enough that the microphone starts to pick up the speaker sound.

And therefore we have a loop of the speaker coming into the microphone, the microphone being put back out into the speaker, and we get the feedback loop. And that's what caused those squeals or hums or low notes. So the ability to change and adjust the equalizer really means you can find those notes that are being maybe repeated or looped, whether it's high or mid or low, and start to fine-tune them out of the system. And there are a number of ways that we can use an equalizer. We can have an equalizer on the input, so as the sound comes in, we might have a guitar that sounds a bit clanging or a bit twangy, so we want to reduce the highs in the mids and increase the lows a little bit.

That allows us to adjust the EQ and the sound of the input. But what we can also do is adjust the EQ on the output. So in a certain room, you might have acoustically a couple of frequencies which bounce around the room and just cause a lot of headaches with feedback. By using an equalizer, we can find those frequencies and that's where a lot of being a sound designer comes in that you are used to hearing those frequencies and you learn them by being on the job. It's very hard to be able to show you what someone hears in that situation, but you hear the frequency and you can tell, "Oh yes, that's five kilohertz, that's a higher pitch frequency," and you can tune out five kilohertz, and you put a little in the sound wave, you put a little dip at five kilohertz, and that will assist in removing that feedback loop and that hum and that ring that you hear in rooms.

By doing that, you can actually effectively tune your PA to tune the room and that means that your inputs and your outputs then sound balanced and full, even though you might be having to tune the room slightly to change how the sound operates and is manipulated in that space. Understanding the process of EQ will become a lot more crucial later on as you become a sound designer and as you start to think about how the systems go together. We will also be talking a little bit about the analysis of sound and going to a theatre show and hearing sound, and that might be something you want to comment on.

You listen closely for whether the voice sounds full and present or if it sounds like it's teetering on being a bit tinny or ringing or you sounds like it might take off a little bit. That is all elements of feedback and is all elements of potentially a poorly designed room or a poorly designed system. You can't really point fingers at anyone because every room behaves differently and that's why we do sound checks and especially on touring shows you do a sound check before every show to trim these different things and make sure you get as consistent a sound as possible. In a theatre once you've done the EQ and once you've set the balance it really is sort of a bit of set and forget, you don't have to revisit it much, but it really is something to consider in the system process the concept of equalising.

They say you're only as good as your last gig as a performer but sometimes you can do a great show but no one can hear you and if you're in a theatre of two or three thousand people and no one can hear you that can be a bad thing. So part of doing a good audio design and a good sound design is making sure that every word and syllable of dialogue is crystal clear. Now dialogue is the easiest thing to get wrong but is also one of the hardest things to get right but if you can nail the dialogue and nail the clarity of your sound design then all will be forgiven. You can have wrong notes from an orchestra, you can have sound effects that aren't loud enough but an audience will always complain if they can't hear the dialogue and if they can't hear what's going on on stage.

Just like a lighting designer's biggest sin is not lighting the actor on stage, a sound designer's biggest sin is not being able to hear what's going on on stage. Making sure people have a great experience in the theatre often comes down to whether or not they can hear every line of dialogue and that does come down a little bit to the front of house engineers whose role it is to mix every line of dialogue and I've put a video below to show you some of the complexities of just of just mixing a small school show that we did with our sound engineer Conrad Hendricks. Now he designs a show and mixes it himself and you'll see his fingers moving every line of dialogue and every group of people is all brought up at an individual time.

If you would have just turned on all the microphones at once anyone on stage who would whisper or murmur or run off stage and talk in the wings could be heard so you really need to follow the script immaculately and only turn on the microphones of who's talking at that time which can mean that you have other complexities with dialogue such as does everyone who has a line have a microphone and that all comes down to talking about things in your sound design. So that's one thing to consider when you go to a show. Can you hear the dialogue? Was it clear? Was it muffled? Were there things you would have changed?

What else would you like to hear? You need to explore those things as a sound designer and as you're reviewing sound of your own.

So, welcome to lesson four. We're going to start talking a bit more specifically now about the way in which theatrical sound is used. Now, the first part we're going to look at is the areas of coverage. Now, as we've started to speak about throughout the lesson so far, we know that we have a PA system, which covers what the audience hears, and we have on stage sound or fold back, which is what the cast hears and what the orchestra hears. But the areas of coverage are a bit more different and a bit more complex in a theater because you have so many areas and so many seats that you need to cover. Now, being a sound designer means that everyone in the theater gets the same experience no matter where they sit.

And in some situations, this can mean there's up to 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 seats that you need to consider. Now, you're not expected to go and sit in every seat. But part of thinking about being a designer is the areas of coverage that you need to cover. And you may need to be able to turn different areas on and off depending on how many people you have in the theater at one time. So let's say, for example, we have a stalls area and we have a dress circle and we have a grand circle. Now, the grand circle is on a steep angle and the stalls are very deep and the dress circle is sort of halfway in the middle.

It's got a little bit of an angle, but it starts halfway in the stalls. So that means that now you've got these different areas that you have sound moving around. You've got the main area of the auditorium, which is a big cavernous space that sits over the main part of the stalls. But then you've got a small letterbox of space that has maybe 500 or 600 people with a roof and a floor because they're sitting under the grand circle that you need to get sound into. And you have the people in the stalls who are now under a roof that may not get the speaker sound from the front of the room. So being able to think about these areas of coverage means you may have to implement different types of speaker systems.

Now, there's other... Now, obviously, you have your speakers that are at the front of the proscenium and they're called the front of house PA and that might be a line array or a distributed system of speakers. But then under those little areas and nooks and crannies, you may need to have little delay speakers or speakers maybe perhaps mounted in the seats themselves. So every person in those seats has an audible experience and no matter where they are, there are some venues in America, for example, with Cirque du Soleil's show car, where every seat has a left and right speaker built into the headrest.

Now, that's a lot of areas of coverage and that's a lot of processing power. But it goes to show that a designer didn't want to sacrifice anybody's audible experience no matter where they sat in the venue. So areas of coverage is a really important thing to think about because you may need to then implement different rigging positions somewhere to hang your speakers. How do you get signal there? How do you control those speakers? What type of speakers are they? Are they a full range speaker? Are they a subwoofer? And then you also need to think about in those areas of coverage, are you getting a full range of the frequency spectrum in all of those areas?

Do high pitch frequencies travel differently to low pitch frequencies? Yes, they do. So how do I get all of the low pitch frequencies up high to the people in the back of the room? Do I need more subs there? All of these different types of things start to play a part when you think about your areas of coverage in the theatre.

Now we spoke briefly in our section about fold back about the on stage mix, but I just want to talk a little bit more about what that means. Now, as we mentioned, the stage manager, for example, needs a clean mix of dialogue and a clean send of the orchestra. But what is that on stage mix exactly? Well, that's what the cast and the orchestra hears. Let's focus for a moment on the orchestra in the pit. Now, most of the orchestra's fold back is controlled from front of house in a theatre situation. In other bands, you might have a monitor engineer, but in theatre situations, more often than not, once it's set, it's set and forget.

And that term means you don't really have to adjust it much during the show. You always have the flexibility and the ability to adjust things, but once it's set, you can normally forget about it and it just does its thing. But you need to think about what each person needs. The conductor will need their own send. Often the keyboard players one and two and three, which are the crucial band members, will need a different mix to someone like the rhythm section, who might get a broad mix shared amongst three or four, or a string section shared amongst five or six, or a horn section, or a brass section.

So these are the sorts of mixes that you need to think about. Now, a mix is just a mixture of different inputs. For example, a drummer might want to hear his own drum kit and the bass guitar and the guitar. That's his mix. The stage manager might want dialogue and piano and a little bit of bass, but no horns and no strings. That's the stage manager's mix. The conductor might just want dialogue and keyboards one and two. That's his mix or her mix. So the mix is just what elements of the sound input sources you manipulate on the console to send to that place. That could be a speaker or that could be any device.

Another thing that some orchestra pits have now is what we call personal mixing stations. Now these come in a variety of brands, a really common one is called an avium system, and that is a small device that sits on the music stand, which gives the individual performer the ability to mix his or her own headphone send. So that might mean that flute player number one has a mix station and they mix in a bit of keyboard and a bit of dialogue and a bit of flute. And then flute player number two doesn't want to hear flute number one so they turn flute one down. They turn flute two up because that's them and they want some drums and some keyboard and some dialogue as well.

But then the guitarist might only want to hear himself and the drums and the bass player but want no flute and no strings so they can just turn those elements down. That's very common in tight knit orchestra pits because that means everyone's on headphones, everyone's happy because musicians will often complain if they don't hear what they need to hear so by giving them a personal mix station you can solve a lot of those problems by just letting them mix what they want and then everyone has their own personal mix and the front of house engineer doesn't have to worry about them. That really is the set and forget method.

You just give them everything and they mix what they want to mix. Of course, all of the mix that they hear is controlled by the front of house engineer and the front of house console in terms of how it sounds, the sensitivity of the microphones, the mix stations that the orchestra have are purely just for mixing volumes and making their own sub mix of the main mix from the console. But then you also need to think about the mix on stage and I spoke about designer's choice perhaps sometimes not wanting to put piano or vocals on stage but wanting to put just orchestra. That's also an on stage mix consideration.

Do you want dialogue and orchestra? Do you just want orchestra? Do you need more piano? Do you need more drums? Do you need more guitar? Things like that and that's often in collaboration with the stage manager, the musical director and the principal cast as to what they need in different areas. So that's a little bit about the on stage mix.

So we're now going to talk a little bit about fold back and we're going to focus primarily on fold back in theatre. Now there are a number of different things you need to think about with fold back in theatre and a lot of sound designers I've worked with do things slightly differently. Some are adamant that they only want orchestra fold back on the stage for the actors. They don't want to send the vocal mix back to stage because it starts to get a bit messy and you can have some real nightmares with casts of 30 or 40 people all with radio microphones that then the microphones start hearing the vocal mix coming back through the fold back and you can have a real trouble with some fold back and some feedback issues.

But other designers I've worked with really like to have a bit of that presence of the vocals on stage to help the cast feel like they're talking to other people. Sometimes if you're talking to two cast members on the other side of stage for the cast member it sounds like they're talking to someone far away but if there's a bit of the vocal mix in the fold back which is designed to be an all-encompassing sound on stage it makes them feel like they're more part of the production. So it really is down to the sound designer's choice as to what they send to stage but nevertheless it's really important to have fold back on stage for the performers, for the dancers, for the singers, for the actors.

Now normally we have we definitely at a minimum have elements of the orchestra sent to stage and when I say sent to stage it means the signals and the mix are sent to stage. Now you also have to consider areas of coverage on stage. You might have a down stage, a mid stage and an up stage fold back send or a fold back mix. You might have areas of set that get in the way of different speakers so you need to rig some speakers on the side of stage pointing across stage or on the rear stage pointing down stage. That's all part about thinking about where the actors are going to be, who needs to hear what and what they need to hear.

There's also other elements about fold back on stage which you might not have thought about which is for the crew backstage. They also need to hear what's going on. One of the most important aspects of that is the stage manager's mix. The stage manager needs to hear every line of dialogue that happens because they're following a script for their cues. They also need to hear every piece of music because often in an opera or a musical theater production they're following a score so they can do cue timings as per the score. Most stage managers can also read music so whilst they're following a written script of dialogue they're also following a musical score at the same time.

So having an independent clean mix with no effects is really important for a stage manager but you might also have crew that are running around with props or scene changes and they need a music cue or a dialogue cue to know when to go as well as a call from the stage manager. So it's really important to think about your offstage mix and your offstage coverage as well. Now more often than not the sound coming from on stage file back will flow into the wings and that'll be more than enough to hear but depending on what the situation is you might need to have some small speakers positioned around or give some of the crew in ear monitors so they can hear something or you might have an orchestra member who appears on stage to do a live piece of the performance with them they may need to have their orchestra mix from the pit given to them separately to what the cast is they might have a click track.

A click track is a 1 2 3 4 click click click click timing component of some orchestras which keep them all in time and it's a click that the audience can't hear but they can all hear in their file back. So you might need to consider how to make these things work. So on stage file back can be a really crucial component. It's a really important component to have not only for your cast but for all of your crew and performers as well and so it's definitely something to consider as part of your audio design. Another important thing to think about maybe when you go to a show is can you hear the file back coming from the stage into the audience.

That's a crucial balance. You don't want the audience hearing what the file back is because you want your PA in your front of house system to be slightly louder than your fold back system so they hear what you want them to hear not what the cast are hearing and that's a really important thing to think about as well. So that's areas of coverage on stage for fold back.

Well, welcome to lesson 5 where we're going to touch briefly on the importance of sound effects and the importance of balancing those sound effects within a production. There are hundreds of different sounds in our world. If you were in a movie, you would spend months with a person called a Foley artist who would replicate and manufacture sounds from what we see out of objects that we might not necessarily think about using. For example, a horse cloping along a gravel path will be used like the old Monty Python bits of coconut shell because it sounds just like hooves on a cobblestone path. But sometimes in theatre we need to have different sound effects that we use all the time and that might be gunshots, telephone rings, door slams, car horns, rain, lightning, thunder, ocean noises, soundscape, birds, nature, water, beach, whatever it might be.

So whilst the orchestra can play a score and the cast can sing a song, having that extra layer of importance in your sound design can be a really powerful thing. Sometimes you might not notice it's there, sometimes it's really obvious and really comical. But that's part of the sound design is role to source all of those sound effects and use them and balance them into the mix of the show as required. Next time you go to a show, have a listen for any sound effects that you might hear. Is there a drone in the background of a really important moment? Is there a soft violin song playing on and some wind and some rain during a sad scene?

How do those sound effects really make you as an audience member feel? Often the use of sound effects is crucial in portraying different emotion or different moments of energy or action during a show. So how does that sound effect or the use of that sound effect affect the dramatic composition of the scene? What if you swapped out that sound effect for another sound effect? Would the scene that you're watching or wanting to have have a different result? Have a look below at some of the free sound effect resources that I've provided for you. Sound effects are available online to download. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of resources available from old school telephones, any sort of gunshot you can imagine, explosions, horse and cart, people running, people talking, people typing on computers, all of these different things that can help really build the scene that the audience sees and fill the space with different energy and different ambient sounds.

And sometimes that's the most important use of a sound effect to fill that ambient space. So have a look below and that's a little bit about sound effects.

Alright, well welcome to lesson 6 and now we're going to talk a little bit about the pit. Now the pit is a wonderful and magical place. If you're a sandy or a muso, the pit can sometimes be the most exciting place to be. I started my career as a lighting engineer and then moved into sound after that and for me setting up a pit is one of the most enjoyable experiences of my time working in theatre. There's just something magical about a pit that you can't really explain, you just have to be there. But being able to set up a pit cleanly and efficiently is one of the most important things about working as a sound technician in theatre.

A messy pit is a dangerous pit, not only because it can cause trip hazards and people, there are so many people and there's so much equipment down there, but also it can be a nightmare for trying to troubleshoot during a production. Imagine this, during your pit set up you've got space to move, you've set up all your cabling and you've got it all ready to go. But then you bring in 20 musicians and I promise you that the musicians will move and shuffle everything you have done until they're comfortable. So my tip for setting up a pit is to always allow some flexibility in your setups and then go in and tidy it up later.

Give yourself one or two rehearsals for the musicians to jostle for space, position themselves so they can see a conductor, allow themselves to get comfortable and then go in and tidy up all the cables properly for a long installation in a season. Because if you tape all your cables down first and set it all up and it's all beautiful and it's just how you like it, the musicians are just going to come in, they're going to move mic stands around, they're going to adjust things slightly, they're not going to ask you, they're just going to do it during rehearsal and you'll go down a few hours later and all of your hard work will have been for nothing and you'll have to redo it. Now suddenly there'll be cables that are too tight, there'll be stands that are in the wrong spot, there'll be things that you need to adjust.

And that's just the wonder of setting up a pit. But setting up a pit the correct way is what we're going to go through in the next couple of topics. We're going to use some still images and in time I'll add some videos and some content about setting up a pit and we will film the marking up of different instruments so you can understand how to mic up instruments the most effectively. Because there are different tips and tricks that we've learnt over our years of setting up pits and there's different ways in which we do things that you don't normally do in a concert environment or a symphonic environment because you need to capture sound differently.

Also in a pit you have the added element of a roof and walls in a very tight space. Now some pits are acoustically treated, they've got carpet or curtains or foam on the walls but more often than not a pit is an elevated platform that drops down to reveal just a cavernous concrete space. So suddenly you have all of these hard surfaces for sound to bounce around so we have to look at different ways as a designer that we can isolate different sounds if we've got a soft harp or a soft string section but then right behind them is a full row of trumpets and trombones. How do we stop some of that energy from the trumpets and the trombones being picked up by the string microphones or the drum kit or the bass guitar or the amplifiers.

So there's lots of different nuances that are in the pit but that's part of the wonder of the pit that is so fascinating and so wonderful about being in musical theatre that you look down, you peer over and there's a whole bunch of musicians in there and they're playing beautiful music but just what is the technical mastery behind the pit. That's what we're going to look at in this lesson.