Radio Opera
This past week I was asked to be in two opera pieces as a Foley artist this past weekend which was just a ton of fun! The pieces were called Mutt by Matthew Welch and I Need Space by Jason Cady and Ann Heppermann both were part of the Experiments In Opera: Radio Operas. Sadly there were only two peromances, but we are recording them tomorrow and Tuesday at WNYC to be streamed by Q2 Music on demand during a “special week" in March. As I know more details I will post them on this blog. In the mean time there was a nice write up about the show in The Wall Street Journal.
Designs on Designs on Designs
October has been a good month for me in the city. Spent most of it assisting Bruce Odland on Grasses of a Thousand Colors by Wallace Shawn at The Public Theatre. Which was time well spent because the Times loved it! And I have to say I really enjoyed working on it. Every time I work with Bruce it’s like a master class in acoustics, sound design and composition all rolled into one. I learn a ton and really get to hone my ear on his shows.
The rest of October I’ve been designing three shows almost simultaneously and they are all about to open next week. They are Wink by Jen Silverman, directed by Jessi Hill, Tranquil by Andrew Rosendorf, directed by Lucie Tiberghien and finally a production of Oresties at Columbia University directed by Scott Ebersold. All three productions are fantastic and I’ve really enjoyed working with the various production teams on them. I have written original music for both Wink and Tranquil so those pieces them will be appearing on here soon, but for the full experience you should really see them in person! For the specific details please check out the new Upcoming section of my website!
There is more to come in November and December so please check back here soon!
Happy Halloween!
PS How do you like the new design of the site? Post on my Facebook page whether you like it or not! Thanks!
Ogres, Ableton, QLab! Oh My!
For the Yale Summer Cabaret season of 2012 I had the pleasure of designing a show called Of Ogres Retold. In fact I've posted pieces and pictures of the show to my portfolio here. The piece was an interesting challenge it was a wordless dance and puppet piece based on Japanese folk tails. In rehearsal we were using some prerecorded tracks and some original music but all of it had tempo specific edits that were required a little more finesse then pressing go and executing the cue instantly. Instead the cues changes were much more musical, some even required a seamless tempo change.
QLab, my default choice for playback, cannot do this kind of cuing very well alone. Usually this kind of thing would require a musically orientated board op who can focus just on the sound. For this particular production the Stage Manager, the endlessly talented Alyssa Howard, was also the light, projections and sound operator, she already had enough to deal with. Therefore I chose Ableton Live as my playback engine with QLab as my user interface. This enabled a multitude of benefits for me as the designer. I could change tempo seamlessly, I could use AudioUnit/Ableton Effects (and adjust them live), I could cue musically, and Alyssa would have the familiar interface of a giant GO button! But my favorite benefit was allowing QLab and Ableton Live to share the same audio interface. I could play content back through either QLab or Ableton or both simultaneously! I ended up using QLab for preshow and Ableton for the show content.
Linking these programs together is incredibly easy. All I had to do was turn the IAC bus on in Audio/MIDI Setup. Then I told Ableton to look for MIDI Notes from the IAC bus. Told QLab to send Notes MIDI via the IAC bus and pow! Cross application messaging. It is really quite powerful and "just works." The next step was to assign the MIDI messages Ableton was seeing to useful things. I assigned the MIDI Notes to all kinds of things like clip play, all stop, effects on and off, and faders!
The faders were quite interesting actually. as soon as I started fading Ableton's channels I noticed how much smoother and more natural they sounded. Fades that would take me a lot of trail and error and finessing with QLab, sounded good either the first or second time I tried them in Ableton. If you get a chance to compare them I highly recommend it, because that reason alone is making me seriously consider using Ableton as my playback engine in all shows, whether they are straight playback or tempo based.
But my favorite discovery was MIDI controlling the Tempo Nudge buttons. There was one piece, called Funny Little Woman, where I wanted the sound cue to slow in tempo gradually as the puppet controlled by Ethan Heard, started running in slow motion. You can do this with trigging dummy clips but that was more complicated than I needed. Instead I figured out if you send a MIDI Note that triggers the tempo nudge Ableton will turn the Nudge on. Then the same MIDI Note sent a 2nd time will turn it off, which was perfect because the Funny Little Woman puppet jerks back to normal speed in the dance piece.
Ethan as the Funny Little Woman
The only disadvantage for using QLab and Ableton together is the large amount of system resources Live and QLab need to run simultaneously. However as more and more machines have Solid State drives and multiple cores this disadvantage is quickly become moot. I ran Ogres, which was 108 tracks, many many effects like Altiverb and multiple instances of instruments like Absynth on a Mid 2012 Mac Mini with a solid state disk drive and never had a hiccup (touch wood). By the end of tech I was starting to run into RAM limitations. but that was only when I was making adjustments and cues were also running. If I had the down time in the space I would have optimized the resources a little better; like turning effects and instruments off when I was done with them and freezing tracks that no longer needed adjustment, but in runs I never felt I was pushing the computer to the danger zone.
Looking back on the process this production was a huge experiment for me. I've never really designed a dance show before, and without Ableton Live, I don't think I could have. The flexibility it provided and the ability to use live effects was exactly what I needed especially because this piece was constantly evolving in big ways up until the first and only preview. I would not have been able to iterate or execute the vision that was required of the production without it. Making QLab my control system was the glue that held the chaotic sound machine together. Ableton gave me great flexibility content wise but QLab gave me flexibility in trigging and executing cues. The cue stack modality of QLab allowed me to reorder cues as needed adjust fade times and fade curves quickly and efficiently instead of eyeballing it with automation in dummy clips, I could type a number in and thats how long the fade would take, its exact and quick. Combing these two programs removes a lot of the draw backs each has and increases the advantages of both. Overall I say it was a resounding success!
But don't take my word for it. Head over to my portfolio, check out some of the examples I posted from the show and judge for yourself!
Lunch with a Personal Hero: Abe Jacob
Yale is a crazy place. Not only do we get to learn from great artists like Ming Cho Lee, David Budries, and Jennifer Tipton, but those artists also bring in their friends and colleagues. Today David brought Abe Jacob to talk with us.
He talked about many different subjects ranging from his work on the Tony nominating committee, to working as Jimi Hendrix's sound man as part of his work at McCune audio, to working with Bob Fossi on Pippin and Chicago.
But what really stuck out to me was his thoughts on theatre and the audience. Back in the 60s and 70s the audience was there to see the piece of theatre. They were there to hear the story of Pippin, of A Chorus Line, of Les Miserables, they were there because they wanted to be told a story. Now the audience comes to see a spectacle or celebrity they already love. I think we need to start selling the audience on the stories again.
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