Video Transcript

Gareth: “I think over the last 10-15 years technology is got less in the way of doing what we want to do which is making good sound and we haven’t spend much less time worrying about making the technology perform, its reliability, setting it up, pressing multiple buttons and knobs in advance of doing something else so it comes out the right hole and things like that. It’s all got a lot more mobile and flexible and that means we can perform with it and it can become an extension of what we’re thinking and how we want to change the sound. So I think that’s a really important way in which has changed. There’s also digital networking audio over Ethernet systems. It’s something that’s become really massive in the last five years and it’s really opened up the flexibility and accessibility of sound systems in ways that we didn’t have before. We’re just beginning to sort of see all the benefits of how that technology can open things up and change what we do. So yeah I think there’s been a lot of really important changes.”

Gareth: “I think the listening experience is changing a lot at the moment. We’re seeing the way people consume media evolving quite rapidly. So you know people used to sit down and watch TV, now more and more people are watching it on their laptops or on tablets or phones. They’re watching it on the train to work. A lot of people are streaming it, and we’re encountering a lot of people who are listening consuming media individually with headphones on rather than listening to it from Vox on the other side of the room and that’s a really big shift both for film, TV, radio and I think we’re increasingly going to see theatre sort of embracing that. We’re seeing a lot of productions being filmed and broadcast in cinemas or broadcast on TV and I think we’re going to see theatre do that more and more as it strives to connect to new audiences to younger audiences. I think they’re increasingly going to find ways to get into that sort of tablet individual media consumption experience.”

Colin: “I also think it’s kind of a double-edged sword in a way because there’s a lot of people who will go to a gig to get that human interaction. You know there is nothing like standing in an arena with 20,000 people singing along with a band you know with a sound system that actually has impact at bottom end. Because everyone’s streaming, artists aren’t making a lot of money from selling records so you know they are all going out (performing). So I think it kind of it’s kind of good for everyone. I think what’s happening is people are getting better and more choices and some people like one thing, others like the other and there’s kind of room for everything in the market at the moment. I think that’s got to be good for the industry as a whole.”

Gareth: “I think there’s a lot of really interesting technologies coming out of XR, VR, AR 360 films and out of game audio. They’re the kind of industries where the most amount of audio development is happening at the moment and so I’m constantly sort of monitoring them and seeing what I can nick from those industries to use in my own. There’s a lots of really exciting things going on there and I think we’re going to see that impact on the other industries as those industries develop further and further. I’m doing a lot of work in sort of XR stuff at the moment and it’s a really interesting platform. It’s a different and new way to tell stories so you know as an industry it feels a little bit like cinema was in the 1930s 1920s where it was a new platform and it was still trying to find its language, what it was, the stories it was best at telling. So you know there’s a lot of interest for me in 3d audio and how we can use that to tell stories to connect listeners to have an emotional impact on them.”

Colin: “I think that will have a better chance of working in the theatre environment than in an arena or a stadium environment just from a practical sense. You know the distances are too big for most 3d sound systems as they currently are at least to work effectively but again I don’t think that matters because actually you know if you want size and scale and impact and that connection with people you can’t beat arenas and stadiums and actually if you want a more controlled environment with a more enveloping narrative then actually the theatre is the right place for it so yeah it’s very exciting times and room for everything I think.”

Video Transcript

Gareth: “So my name is Gareth Fry. I’m a sound designer and I work all over the world but particularly in the UK.”

Colin: “I’m Colin Pink I’m a sound designer and front of house engineer and we’re here at the National Theatre Studios in London.”

Colin: “Just after I left school in my first summer holidays out in the big wide world, I was with the National Youth Theatre that happened to be be run, the technical side was run by Yello Jones and Dave Bryant who ran Midnight Design and and Yello was the main sound engineer at the Marquee Club so he got me in there and my first gig there was Terence Trent d’Arby. I was assisting on that but on my second night, my second professional working date was assisting on Guns and Roses who were this little-known band over in the UK promoting their first album so I should have given them my card but there you go!”

Gareth: “Yeah I’ve always been really interested in sound and music and I used to make mixtapes you know at the weekends on my dad’s hifi. That’s what sort of got me interested I think in sound and was making those mixtapes and so I wanted to become a recording engineer. I went and trained in that and then discovered theater and it was doing this production of Amadeus which is this play about Mozart essentially that I sort of discovered the live connection that a play can have or theater show can have between an audience and music and language and it’s that connection between those things that got me hooked on theater and sound particularly.”

Gareth: “ I think the first theater show that I ever saw was the production of Miss Saigon in the West End and that was one of the shows that just sort of opened my eyes a little bit about what theatre could be. Previously I’d seen various sort of productions of Shakespeare at school and had been bored senseless and I saw Miss Saigon and when you know it can be quite anarchic and fun and entertaining and it doesn’t have to be so serious and people don’t necessarily have to die, well they didn’t die in that one but you know it was a really sort of interesting experience to sort of open my eyes my ears a little bit about what theatre could be and that it didn’t have to be Shakespeare.”

Colin: “Luckily enough at school we had a theatre. I had no real knowledge or interest in theatre. I was just walking past one day and someone called out saying you know we need to try and make a telephone ring onstage do you think you could help because I was quite good electronics and they just thought I might know. So I went in and made their telephone ring and just kind of found it an interesting environment and kind of stayed and Got into it from there, at which point my kind of understanding that there’s more to music than just playing it kind of came out of that. So yeah it was school really that got me into theatre and the audio side of it and the fact that you know you don’t have to be able to play an instrument to make one sound nice and so I went on from there. I went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama doing the technical theater course and it was great there because primarily it’s a music school so if you were doing a musical in the theatre there you had fifty in the orchestra because it suited them to have that amount so you know we were doing some great old-fashioned musicals with orchestras of fifty or sixty which is kind of unheard of on the West End or Broadway nowadays so it was a great kind of introduction.”

Gareth:                        “I’ve been working professionally since about 1996 which is when I graduated from doing a design course at Central School of Speech and Drama and the first professional job I did after that really was designing a play a place called the Soviet Playhouse which I like her was like a 50-seat theater and it was making the sound effects for that show and the whole show ran off a hi-fi and off two cassette decks so everything had to be put onto individual cassette tapes and then queued up for the stage manager to operate. So that was kind of my first professional gig, I think I got paid like fifty pounds for it maybe.”

Colin:              “ At which point Vaslav Havel our playwright became president of Czechoslovakia and he invited us over to do his plays. So yes it was amazing as our first little job we went from an ATC to theater to the National Theatre in Prague performing there two weeks after the Velvet Revolution so as a first experience that was that was amazing.”

Video Transcript

Gareth: “I think there’s no one path into becoming a sound designer particularly in theatre.  I think lot’s of different people have arrived there for different paths whether it’s coming in from the sort of music recording world or coming in from other aspects of theatre or from rock and roll or whatever is every everybody seems to have come in slightly differently which means there’s a real sort of diversity and vibrancy to the community of sound designers because that everybody does it slightly differently and uses the technologies differently and has a different sort of approach and different interests into what sort of work they’re trying to do which is really good. I think for anybody who’s interested in coming into the field the best advice I can give is to be nice to work with that there are loads and loads of really talented people out there. If you’re not a nice person to work with then people won’t employ you and so that’s the key to getting, to making a career in the industry is to be a good collaborator. Be somebody who’s nice to work with passionately, yeah it doesn’t mean don’t be passionate, but it means you have to invest that passion as somebody who is a good collaborator to work with.”

Colin: “The industry is full of very many different people and  as you say that’s a great thing and what tends to happen is teams are formed throughout your career. You know there are certain people you work well with and certain people you don’t, be it you a style issue or just a character thing and people form quite close-knit teams and then you get a whole shorthand that’s why experienced teams seem to get on very well and can work quickly together and therefore make a better product. It’s because they’ve all learned how to respect each other and each other’s views and I think the important bit to that is it’s important to know what you’re not very good at. We all have our skills and they’re sort of known but it’s really important to know what you’re not good at and what you should try and trust other people with or delegate to, and not be scared of that. I think when people start off in the industry obviously they want to prove a point and they want to be seen to be very good. Actually the older you get the easier it is to admit I’m really bad at that bit, you know whatever that is and that doesn’t matter because everyone’s a specialist and as long as you’re really good at something you know you’ll be fine and I just say do not fear being bad at things and admitting that because that way you end up doing the things that you’re really good at and you end up not doing the things you’re not very good at and that’s better for everyone.”

Colin: “ You know being easy to get on with is exactly right because most people you will want to work with have already established their teams. To be able to get into those teams you need to be easy to get along with. The problem for anyone up-and-coming is how do you get your foot in the door and you won’t get your foot in the door by being you know an opinionated rigid thinker. You’ll get your foot in the door by going I want to work with these bunch of experts and I’m going to bring the little that I know to that and I will try and get on and learn what I can from them. That way you get your foot in the door and then people start to get to know you that helps your CV so that other up-and-coming directors producers or whatever who haven’t formed teams go well this guy’s working with these guys therefore they’re probably worth taking a punt on.”

Gareth: “Those people come in on work experience and they’re able to demonstrate that they’re a nice person to work with that you know they’re able to keep relaxed in a pressurized situation and so when people are looking a new team member you know because somebody’s unavailable or whatever that is, then they will start looking around and because they’ve seen yeah they’ve experienced that person in the flesh and know that they’re a nice person that they will give that person a call over a complete stranger because there is that personal connection there there’s that knowledge that they’re a good person to work with so getting work experience is a really good way of being able to demonstrate your ability to work within a team.”

Video Transcript

Colin: “We needed to cover all of the genres of music which meant technically speaking we had a total of two hundred and sixty two inputs. Because it’s film score we did it in full surround 5.1. I say 5.1 using the Dolby term. It was essentially matrixed together so that we had PA left-right subs, fills and surround left, surround right in arenas. There was also some playback because obviously there’s lot’s and lot’s of layers in Zimmer’s music and the main problem that I foresaw was bleed from all of these instruments you know going into to the orchestral mics. So quite early on we made the decision and luckily the band who were very up for it, to try and make the stage as silent as possible, so all of the guitars were running through Kemper’s so there were no guitar cabs on stage. The bass ended up with a bass cab but at the frequencies down there it wasn’t such a problem. It was about as silent as you could get. Everyone was on in ears. We had a silent stage apart from drums obviously timpani.The acoustic instruments of Arlen’s violas etc and the choir and that gave us a fighting chance of getting some separation and control.”

“Mic wise the violins were all clip-on DPA’s. Drums Sennheiser all rounds, obviously lots of D eyes and it all went through we had SD 7 out front SD 7 at monitors and an SD 11 sub mixing the choir and orchestra, all on one fibre loop. What became quite interesting was the fact that because everyone was on IEM’s Gavin on monitors had 42 mixes to deal with which meant that he couldn’t take all the inputs because he’d run out of processing power so I was sending quite a few stems down the fibre loop to Gavin, so he was sending sub mixes to people which was generated from me because he simply couldn’t take that input count and frankly even if he could he wouldn’t be able to manage you know doing 42 mixes with 260 inputs. So that way it was all about trying to reduce workflow for everyone.”

“Talking of other bits of tech on the show itself because there was playback on every track to some extent, it was all on click but we had Q Lab being our master for the show which was basically generating timecode and MTC. MTC internally to drive streamers because we were using, for those that don’t know what streamers are it’s a virtual conductor. So on video screens we had you know bars and beats and wipes going across and that’s what the choir and orchestra mainly followed. They had IEM’s as well so they had click and bits but that was a freer way of syncing everything together than just relying on a click because again it’s that human nature, if everyone is just listening to a click there’s no real feel and your drummer and bass player will just go insane! That kind of gave us a bit of freedom and LTC was triggering you know Pro Tools which was playback main and backup but also we were sending it to stage because all of the keyboard rigs were running Cubase which was locking to our timecode as well so that we could do the program changes for the keyboard players.

“Lighting and video obviously took timecode and what it did was it enabled me as an engineer to concentrate on listening to things because what I haven’t mentioned is that timecode did all of my snapshot recalls. Because the nature of the medleys there were some very large musical changes going on you know like that so I automated all of that which meant that basically on 24 faders in front of me I had everything that I needed for that moment which again is quite a theatrical way of doing things you know when you’re doing a theater musical you don’t have your 50 vocal mics all sitting down here you just plonk the ones you need for that section in front of you on your VCS or DCA’s. We had the same approach on Zimmer because with that channel count you kind of needed to group it together in a structured way like that to make it manageable. You know at which point it ended up being a joy to mix because all the boring reset stuff that you normally have to do was just dealt with for you and I could just concentrate on you know just mixing these pieces.”

“I don’t think I’ve got a favourite mic as such because I’ve got different favourite mics for different usage obviously you know a vocal mic isn’t going to be you know appropriate for an overhead orchestral mic. I mean if you said you can only have one microphone in the world  I’d say a KM 184 because you can put that on anything and it’ll work. You know it’s a great vocal mic with a pop shield, it’s a great orchestral mic, it’s great for drum overheads.My favourite vocal microphone time is a U47 you know but at the end of the day if you put a 58 on a vocal or a 57 on anything else you’ll have a gig so it’s it kind of varies but yes the KM range is great.”

Video Transcript

Colin: “I think I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of people and favourite productions for me I think, working with Hans Zimmer is kind of the peak because you know the music’s great, the production values are epic, he’s a perfectionist and his band are the best in the world and you bring those factors together and it’s just it’s not work it’s just joy. I’m lucky, I do the Brit Awards and the MTV EMA’s as a designer and I love doing those simply because you’ve got 10 or 11 bands on each show who come with 10 or 11 audio teams and so I get to work very closely with over 20 of the top audio teams in the world. You just learn so much from them and that’s what I love.”

Colin: “I love I guess I love learning but I hated school no I didn’t hate school that’s a lie, but I love learning when you don’t think you’re learning. I mean going back to my days at the National my mentor there was a designer called Paul Groothuis. He was a great person to learn from because he gave you ownership of what you were doing and let you find your way and what I try to do with people is I will never tell someone how to mix something. I will let them mix it their way and then if I don’t like that I will try and steer their thought process as opposed to what they’re doing because I always think you know if someone’s just doing what they’re told you can probably get a computer to do it. I want them to do what they feel, so I just educate them on what I would like them to feel and that way you get the best out of them.”

Colin: “As for dream gigs well, I’ve done the Brits, I’ve done the MTV’s I’d love to do the Grammys whether that’ll ever happen or not I doubt. Obviously there’s some Union issues but that would be a great show to do. Going back in history I would have loved to have mixed Prince. He was quite a musical influence in my upbringing and I just think he would have been a very interesting man to work with.”

Gareth: “I’ve got a little band of directors now who sort of become people that I’ve worked with quite a lot over the years and who I really enjoy working with and quite often it’s because they really enjoy pushing what you can do with sound and challenging those boundaries so and I’ve really enjoyed working with those directors. We’ve done for example Simon McBurney who we did the encounter with recently which was on Broadway earlier this year and you know we did this amazing show experimenting with binaural sound and having the entire audience wearing headphones and things like that. We spent 5 years making the show together and travelling to the Amazon rainforest and doing things like that so that was kind of that was a bit of a dream gig in itself in a way. To have the time to experiment and explore and try out new things and obviously going to the Amazon rainforest and living with an indigenous community for a week is something you don’t normally get to do in your everyday life”

Gareth: “There’s another director called John Tiffany whom I work with a lot and we’ve just done Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in London and we’re in the middle of making that for New York. I’ve really enjoyed working with him, he’s got an amazing musical sense and he’s really very good at bringing teams of people together and letting them create and collaborate together and directing them to create these amazing shows. So that also was a dream gig in a way because it was such an amazing piece to work on and so fantastical and working again as Colin was saying with the top people at the top of their game which makes life really joyful and fun and not so stressful and you can all work together to create something knowing that you’re making good work in an enjoyable way. I think you were saying about you know coming to work every day and it’s a fun thing rather than a work thing and so those jobs where you can come to work and it doesn’t feel like work or always the best ones for me. Whatever the future brings really there’s so much exciting things to do and so many exciting technologies to come out coming out and so many interesting artists to work with you know it’s really exciting at the moment to have all these opportunities of emerging.”

Video Transcript

Gareth: “What do you think makes you unique as a designer?”

Colin: “I think my background in theatre coupled with doing more of the big music shows now is a really good progression. I think what makes me unique in the music world at least, is how I think theatricality or theatrically in that I tend to do lots of multi band music shows and if you think about the structure of those, rather than thinking there’s a band, then another band, then another band. If you think in theatrical terms of scene change, music, scene change, music, scene change, then you think about the global flow of things more than specific items being put together and I think on those shows what makes them work very well is when they’re planned as a whole and not as a bunch of individuals put together. In a theatre situation if an actor forgets their lines or something goes wrong technically everyone else gathers round to help out and it’s the same in the music world with these big shows. I always think and this is just how I plan things. that no person and no piece of equipment is going to do better than 80 percent, so I’ll actually spend very little time on plan A and everything on plan B C D and F and I  love the process when we’re putting a show together when all the engineers come in because that’s when effectively they’re checking my work to find the 20 percent that I’ve messed up and I think if you do that, what happens is everyone takes more ownership of what they’re doing and has a more global understanding of the project as a whole.’

Gareth: “ I think for myself one of the things that sort of has made me unique as a designer is quite similar actually, as it’s taking that sort of audience perspective into consideration and like I do a lot of creating sound effects for my work and but I’m really not interested in naturalism in creating this very detailed recreation of the world. I much prefer to create something very simple and course that has the emotional core of the story in it and that gives the audience the right feel rather than it being correct and it’s exactly that same thing,  it’s better to give the audience the right feeling than it is to be technically correct or technically anything. I think the emotional impact of sound is by far the most important aspect of it then whether it’s technically at the right level or the EQ is right or the mix is this or it’s a naturalistic rendition of that. That’s what sound and music is, it’s an emotional thing we have an emotional connection to it as listeners, so that’s the bit you’ve got to get right before anything else. I’ve got this big background in devised theatre which is you know quite often where we’re starting rehearsals without a script or anything like that and everything’s being generated in the rehearse room for improvisation, so you have to work very very fast in that and really find the essence of something and I think that’s become my speciality, finding the essence of things creating something very quickly that will generate that emotional impact and not you know create something very crudely and then refine it later rather than spend a lot of time coming up with a concept and executing that concept. I much prefer to respond and then refine it later if there’s time. I think you know getting that emotional core is the super important thing.”

Colin: “Absolutely if you over-think things you can just create something that is a technical exercise which I think comes across as boring.”

Gareth: “I think like you, I do very little work in the studio in terms of creating material. Everything I do is created either in the theatre or in the rs reherse room and it’s all about creating it in connection to that performance about making it work with that performance and create something that’s bespoke to that. It’s so easy to do stuff in the studio and you take it into rehearsals wherever and it just sounds wrong because you’ve created it in isolation from the performance. It’s so critical I think to create the things together so that they work together.”

Colin: “ Yes absolutely.”

Video Transcript

Gareth: “I guess the thing that keeps me up at night isn’t actually a sound-related thing it’s more to do the business side of things and all the stuff that you have to do around the sound designing and engineering of things. Which is the stuff that you don’t necessarily get trained on. There’s running your own business and managing your diary and getting your taxes done and there’s also all the political aspects of the job which you know as well as getting it to sound right you have to you know negotiate your budgets and negotiate to get the right amount of sound checking time in the schedule and there’s a lot of political maneuverings that you have to do. I think to get what you want and to get the right result when you’re in the theatre and quite often that in more stressful I think than the actual sound and performance. I think I certainly enjoy the pressure of a live performance and I enjoy knowing that things can go horribly wrong or horribly right, but the less fun things I think for me are actually dealing with all the politics. I think I’ve got quite used to it and got relatively good at working out how to get the things that I need and get the resources in place but that’s certainly one of the more sort of stressful elements of the job is you know having to step out of your shoes, step into the shoes of the producer or the promoter or the venue staff and work out how to get the things you need from them, whilst also keeping them happy and hitting their targets as well.”

Colin: “It’s funny as I get older less things keep me up at night. I think when you start out you don’t know what you’re doing and you want to know what you’re doing and that’s a frustration and that keeps you up at night because you’re thinking of how to improve. I think an important aspect of being an engineer is what drives you to be good is the fact that you don’t think you’re very good.”

Gareth: “I guess one of my big pet peeves is when sound isn’t localized to the performance and this is a particular thing with theatres where sound effects are rooted for the proscenium system or there is some disconnect between the audio and the visual and it’s something I’m really passionate about, is trying to make the audio experience feel really great for an audience and feel really connected to that performance rather than it being this thing that happens at a couple of speakers on the proscenium. So yes, that’s one of my biggest pet peeves when the performance is happening over there but the sounds coming out from a box over there.”

Colin: “I completely agree. I think I just think it’s disrespectful to the actors. I guess we’re where we are in our careers because you know we’re relatively good at what we do which is sound audio whatever and it’s all the other bits that frankly we’re not so good at which is the problematic areas. Yes dealing with negotiations is always a tricky one.”

Colin: “In a studio situation it doesn’t matter you can hit you hit stop you don’t even have to hit rewind nowadays. You know, you can do it again a thousand times but be it theatre or live events you are running to a set timeline and it will not go according to plan. It might once in your career but things are going to go wrong not necessarily wrong, they’re going to go different and if you’re not ready for that you’re gonna fail.”