Musicals

By their nature, musicals involve a lot more effort and skill as a sound designer than your average production of Shakespeare for example. There are often multiple vocal parts which need to be amplified as well as a chorus and band to deal with.

Principals, Radio Microphones
The Chorus, Amplifying the Stage
The Band
A Word On Mixing a Musical

West Side Story!

Principals, Radio Microphones

In larger venues and for big shows, it is usual for the principal actors in musicals to wear a radio microphone. Often, there is a band to compete with so amplification of their voice is necessary to ensure the audience can hear what is going on. Exactly what radio microphones are is dealt with by the sound equipment page, here I shall deal with the practicalities concerning their use.

The job of the radio microphone capsule is to pick up the wearer's voice, so it needs to be positioned in the best possible place for doing this. Common places are either on their clothes (although this does run the risk of the capsule being obscured by material), behind the ear or at the top of their temple with the wire running back through the hair and down the neck. A little cunning is often required to find the best position for the capsule, whilst keeping the wire as hidden as possible. Hair grips, micropore and plaster tape are always in my toolkit when I am working on a musical! The transmitter pack is then secured somewhere about their person, maybe in a pocket or using a special pouch around their waist. It is a good idea to talk to the costume designer about where is the best place to conceal the pack, as they may be able to build something into the costume for this. The receivers and aerial systems for picking up the transmitted sound may then be positioned in the theatre to give the best reception. All of the better radio microphone systems use a diversity system - there are two aerials which can be positioned in different places, and the receiver uses whichever one has the best signal. You should always make sure you have time to walk around and check that you can get audio from everywhere onstage with the radio microphone.

The Chorus, Amplifying the Stage

Solely having radio microphones for the principals without any consideration for the other parts will create a very unbalanced sound, this is obviously quite undesirable. Some consideration must be given to the rest of the vocal parts and the ambient sounds onstage - in fact it is often better to have a really good sound coming from the stage than to give as many actors as possible radio microphones.

When placing microphones onstage, the two most commonly used types will be floats and shotguns (see the Equipment Page for more on these microphones). These are then positioned around the stage to give the best coverage possible. Float microphones are best placed along the front edge of the stage, this gives good coverage of anything downstage. However, for larger stages it might be worth placing some shotgun microphones, either in the wings or hanging above, to help boost vocals in the upstage areas.

The Band

Quite what is done with the band will depend on the instruments involved, it's size and the size of the theatre itself. If the band are placed inside an orchestra pit at the front of the stage, there may be no need to provide any microphones for them at all as they may sound fine, only a knowledge of the venue will determine if this is the case. If the band are located onstage, then there may be a need to provide some reinforcement to help the sound carry out into the auditorium. Certain instruments however always need some sort of sound reinforcement. Electric pianos, guitars, bass guitars might need to be run through the PA, this gives the sound engineer much more control than if they use their own amplifiers. After that, you may need to provide spot microphones for the strings and quieter woodwind. Again, this will depend on the size of the venue and where the band are situated. Normally, condenser microphones will be used for instruments due to their much flatter frequency response. Lastly, if there is a drum kit, then there may also be a need to provide some microphones for this, although this might depend on the style of the music. When dealing with a drum kit, the kick and snare are the most important parts and would normally have their own microphones. After that, you can either use a pair of overhead to pick up the rest of the kit, or provide each drum with it's own microphone and rely on the sound operator to mix the sound.

Cabaret!

A Word on Mixing a Musical

So, you have your principals, stage and band all with microphones. This is good, but can lead to you falling into the trap of over-amplifying things. When I am mixing a musical, I have found that sound reinforcement is a much better approach than going for overall volume. That is, leaving the sound as it is as much as possible and only boosting weaker parts to try and keep it sounding as realistic and natural as possible. Only experimentation with the sound desk will help you to get the best sound that you can, but be aware that a lot of people have fallen into the trap of completely killing a performance by having the radio microphones turned up to such a high level that the chorus cannot compete and are lost in the mix.