Passing through the halls of Yale

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Updated: March 26, 2018

Over the course of April and May, both Mary and I have been working at Yale, both in the Electrics (Lighting) department. She has been hired on as staff/Assistant Master Electrician for the Carlotta Festival, while I have been contracted in as the Master Electrician for the Yale Baroque Opera Project, “La Didone.”

This means that while we are working for the same department at the same school, we are in different buildings/city blocks. But it’s been very nice, as we get to pass by each other in the halls and on the street between errands. I’ve been in and out of Yale lighting longer and know my way around, but she’s a regular employee with a much bigger key ring, so we’ve been pretty helpful to each other getting our shows lit. She especially saved us on our last day of hang/focus, taking over the board op duties while I grabbed the newly arrived second genie and finished focus. Score!

Mary’s show just opened last night. Mine is already now closed and struck. I don’t have the official photos yet, but here is a shot of the model, in front of the stage. The designer for my show, Steve Carmichael, had flown in from Santa Fe and had never been to the space before. So there had been months of preparation between us. I tried to get all of the advance work done from the Pain of Salvation tour bus in February, which suited him well – we are both pretty detail-oriented and knew there would be issues coming up later in the process, so might as well get as far ahead as we could! Great guy, great designer, and I look forward to the chance to do it again with the whole crew!

-brian

The sun will come out…

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Updated: November 20, 2017

…because it’s Spring in New England!  Also, because I just wrapped on a production of “Annie.” It’s a pickup gig that I do lighting for every year, with a small school theater that has little budget but a director whom I like working with a lot. Not every gig is with international rock stars and corporate brands. The sad reality is that with the smaller shows, no matter how much you like the people, you have to be able to turn them around quickly, due to budget concerns, but still maintain the quality you give the stars.

I’ve made working in this space easy on myself, having established a cue sheet, a patch list and drafting for the space, building on what I did 12 months ago for them. So when it came time to hang and focus, I was able to get to business quickly. Also, since their board is not something I want to use (Nirvana hadn’t blown up yet, let’s put it that way), it was another year of working with MagicQ, the desktop version of their lighting desk. They sent me a USB>DMX dongle a couple of years back for having the most horrifying tour story (that past Pain of Salvation story I hinted at last month).

MagicQ runs on a small PC that sits tucked away at my FoH position for a couple of weeks. Using remote login software Splashtop, I am able to give myself an RFU (remote focusing using) with my iPad/iPhone. Happy to report that it worked very well, and I used my iPad to follow along on my marked-up PDF of the script. (Longtime readers will recall my preference for digital prompt books, so that when I am working on several shows at once, I do not have to carry around binders of paper everywhere I go or risk losing them.) I could even make changes from home, using either the installation of MagicQ on my other computer, or just remoting in.

The end result was a super-fast execution, since I was able to prep much of my cue sheet on my first read-through of the script and then program my patch quickly and easily. More importantly, because of the streamlined workflow, I was able to get the minutea out of the way and just focus on a bigger, better design. Sadly, this version of MagicQ won’t work with outside protocols/triggers, so no Qlab this time around. But the sound engineer was new to using Qlab and wanted to try it, so I still got to share the joy of show programming and play around with it for him!

This month a much bigger lighting gig will be kicking into high gear, as I am Master Electrician for the Yale Baroque Opera. Pics to follow!

-brian

Pain of Salvation, North American Tour 2017, and progressive spreadsheets

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Updated: June 13, 2018

Years ago I did a tour with Sweden’s Pain of Salvation, as their tour manager and sound engineer.  It was brutal on all of us, and filled with stories that can be told elsewhere. But they are great guys, and we became good friends as a result. But after that tour, I was burned out and started stepping away from the music scene a bit.

Back in December I was doing an annual holiday concert that I do lighting for, and the music was good and I was dancing around behind the board to the music and getting very into it. (The other people in the booth were enjoying watching me work, because they could hear the bump buttons on the light board get slammed down in time to the music while I was also working the moving heads via faders. Was a good time.) I thought to myself “I have been doing all this sound in theatre, which I love because it’s clever and I enjoy the nuances of mixing theatre, but boy it’s been a while since I did some rock shows and felt behind the board the way I do now.”

On dinner break between shows, I saw on Facebook that Pain of Salvation was ramping back up for another headlining North American tour, and started talking to the band and their team about it – at least to say “Hi! Can’t wait to see you in NYC, blah blah blah.” Well, turns out they didn’t have a sound engineer, and the tour was just before some of my big contracts were to kick in early in 2017. Perfect! Moreover, I could work with a band I really, genuinely love and want to see do better, and just work on audio! I quickly booked some time with local venues to jump behind the board and warm up on some rock bands, just to tweak my ears back to where I wanted them, as well as picking up a studio client.

In the end, I mixed FoH as well as did some minor guitar teching for them (setting up everything on stage during the changeover; no amps – all pedals and models on this tour), and handling overall production, such as it was (working with the local lighting folks, manage load in/out and make sure things were consistent, etc.)

Spreadsheets rule!!!  Google Docs made this tour work so much more efficiently, since we didn’t bring any sound package. Different mixer every night. I pre-built as many shows as I could, but it was going to be hard to find consistency quickly as a result of different desks and no pre-production rehearsals. To counter this, I not only built the digital desk files, I also kept copious notes of my routing and settings, so that when we either got to a show where there was no offline editor available for Mac, or an analog environment, I could dial in a sound quickly before the band played a single note. If we tuned the room and got my basic channel settings dialed in, the band could start sound check pretty close to the mix sound, just compensating for gain changes, etc.

Now, this is pretty straight forward, and I’m hardly the first person to do this. But what I did differently, to keep myself in sync, was built myself a few different views of my sound plot. The full spreadsheet was the type you’d print out on a plotting printer – just massive.

A bit more than you’d want to “glance” at or carry around in your pocket.

I dynamically copied cell data into other sheets, so that it could be formatted for printing the pertinent information. Instead of squinting at tiny print, I used the same data in a new sheet that only displayed my channel name and EQ/Compression/Gate settings, for instance. It also allowed me to print out worksheets for the local engineers, to help us keep track of snake patches, etc.

A worksheet that is a little more friendly on the eyes.

We brought an in-ear rig, with an Allen & Heath IDR32, wifi router, and split tails, so the band could mix themselves via iPads and not interfere with the house system. So there was a lot to track and changes had to be made carefully so we wouldn’t lose our place. (Those split tails created A LOT of cable on stage!!) 32 channels, 10 subgroups and 8 VCAs/DCAs…

Because I was also setting up guitar rigs, testing all of the in-ear monitor feeds, and recording the show, the 15 minute changeover was a bit of a scramble for me. Is it any surprise that Qlab came to the rescue?!?! I already had all of my preshow music in a playlist in Qlab (featuring a few friends of the band and bands that were to be opening for us on other dates of the tour). Soundcheck was also a playlist affair, with my music loaded to go (every engineer has songs that they can use to hear how a system reacts) along with scripts to control Tone Generator (white/pink noise app). I added scripts to the top of my show file – Logic was loaded in the background, waiting to be triggered to start recording, and Evernote was prepped to pop up as the house music faded out, with a photo of that night’s setlist on one side (taken on my phone backstage, synced automatically to my laptop by the time I got to FoH), and my mixing notes on the other, so I wouldn’t have to rely on memory of what delays and reverbs happened on what verses and choruses.

All that happened with one button press.  So I could focus on, you know, mixing the show!

Looking back, I should have also added a script to automatically email the photo of the setlist to our booking agent, who is a huge fan of the band and wanted to keep up on what was being played every night. Next time! Towards the end of the tour I was also starting the band’s walk-on music, but I didn’t have time to add a script to trigger their on stage laptop from mine. So we just went with an old school solution of dead air, a stopwatch on my phone, and an inconsequential loop of music, so if I missed the very top it didn’t matter.

Pain of Salvation has now given me both one of the hardest gigs I have ever done, as well as one of my most enjoyable. Much love to those guys. Best wishes as they hit Europe!

-brian

We got to work with Mike Portnoy of Dream Theatre on our last night in NYC. His son opened for us, and he joined the band on “Ashes.” Turns out he is a friend of my brother’s.

 

Christmas Carol & Ming Cho Lee

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Updated: November 20, 2017

I am master electrician for a production of Christmas Carol this season. It falls just between a few of my other shows, so I have had to take it on in an extremely organized manner – the days I have allotted to it are all I can give them, with very little room for extra time. Luckily the LD is also the Production Manager, so he’s got a handle on what else is happening in the space and knows what he needs.  Spreadsheets and Vectorworks files are the order of the day, as is the coffee machine that sits outside the hall.

This show had it’s original 12+ year run at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ, and the set was designed by Yale’s legendary Ming Cho Lee – his last, as it turns out, before he retired. It is now being put on by New Arts, an organization that came about in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, here in CT.

The bedroom wagon, in particular, is loaded with all kinds of practicals and clever bits to make the ghostly apparitions more believable. Lighting is a thing I do, but normally doesn’t excite me as much as other departments. But I LOVE practicals and making all of the little bits work in this show! Lot of work to crawl around in small spaces with a headlamp and wire things together. The result is beautiful.

I work on a LOT of shows, and often don’t get to see them. This is one show I am going to be sad about missing. At least Mary and a friend of ours can take my tickets, and tell me about it afterwards.

-brian

I learned more about what kinds of heights I don’t mind and what kinds I hate.

Come to the Cabaret

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Updated: November 20, 2017

After last Spring’s insanity, we escaped to backpack in Europe for a bunch of the Summer. This Fall found me working on, among other things, NVCC’s production of Cabaret. I won’t get into how timely this show was with the political climate here in the US, but it was definitely the grounds for a lot of conversations.

In any event, I was the Sound Designer, and worked with our tech director on the video end of things. After “Godspell” in April, he designed the set to include projection, so I engineered the video production and designed the motion parts while he made up the stills. For the train scenes, I ended up using stock footage, but I really wanted to coordinate a video shoot with some friends we made over the summer while we were backpacking in Europe, who were from Czech Republic and could give us genuine Central/Eastern European footage. But, alas, the timing and the budget wouldn’t allow for it.

I did manage to use a bunch of period musical recordings for house music, that I’d been saving for a while. Cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/ is an amazing project – the sounds might have been a bit older than the period, but they were from the geographical area and might have reasonably been listened to at this time – certainly the songs would have been, if not re-recorded. In any event, the noise and warping inherent in the digital transfers of these old Central European songs was a great mood-setter. Any extra, non-period noise in the recordings added to what the audience would expect from period music – much like how a gunshot on TV doesn’t sound like real life but adds to the drama and expectations.

On the orchestra side, we finally figured out how to improve the sound in our space – the classic battle of the orchestra being too loud and installed systems with only left and right speaker matrixes being underpowered. By far the best sounding show we have done in the space. Very proud of my students and how they have become self-empowered to build the systems I’ve been specing out.

This week, I’m master electrician for a run of Christmas Carol, with the set designed by Ming Cho Lee. That’s pretty exciting. Then I’m designing video and lighting for some Christmas performances because, you know, December….

Luckily I’ve been keeping copious notes on that latter show from previous years, with drafting and spreadsheets, so I can turn it around faster in the limited time I have. And, because of Qlab, I can sync lights and video with the same Go button, and use the lighting board for manual/dynamic flash and trash. They have an old ETC Express board there, which I don’t mind at all – I can make it work with moving lights with some planning, and it is the perfect compliment to MIDI triggers. So the fact that they stopped updating it in, like, 1996, is not a hurdle at all! It is actually my favorite board to work on.

-brian

Yet another Wizard of Oz projection production

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Updated: November 20, 2017

I love working on the play Wizard of Oz, which is great, because productions keep finding me!  This time, Mary and I were both asked to work on some footage that was already shot (some green screen some…not), but the director didn’t have the time or know-how to make his vision work.  So we did it for him.

We ended up having three days before the show opened last week to work on it. No pressure! So we spent a lot of time in After Effects and taking nice long walks when rendering, since the weather had finally turned around and Spring actually felt like…Spring! Between one Mac and one PC both running After Effects and Dropbox, we’ve been able to meet any challenge and keep in sync.

Here is what we ended up with:

-brian

Dance Ensemble performance – #6 of 6

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Updated: November 20, 2017

Just as we were nearing the end of our over-the-top busy season at NVCC, disaster struck. Our electrical system for the main stage went DOWN. The short version is that the transformer on the roof had some serious issues and we had no reliable power for stage lighting. House lights and standard electrical wall outlets were unaffected. My carefully-laid plans to do new and creative video projections were tossed aside to deal with the crisis.

We ran a ton of cable through the scene shop and down the hall to our other theatre, which had power. The lighting design had to become minimal, as we rushed to pull some LED fixtures out of one theatre to the next (while not as bright, they use standard wall power).

We also had two concerts in three days before tech for this show began…

As time consuming as this was, I managed to get some live video capture effects up for the show. I used VDMX for the camera and effects, controlled and run through syphon and projection mapping laid out in QLab. Timecoded MIDI triggers meant my operator, who was new to this part of stagecraft, only had to work within one application and push “Go.” The extra bit of flash helped us compensate for the lack of lighting.

We made it, despite the odds! Video is below, followed by some photos.

-brian

“Rumors” & “Into the Woods” – Shows #4 & #5 of 6!

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Updated: November 20, 2017

Today we close on the 5th and final drama production of our academic year at NVCC – Neil Simon’s “Rumors.” I was the sound designer. Because of all of the other shows in this crazy month and a half, I had this one pretty much designed and programmed right out of the gate back in February/March, so come tech weekend, it was spot on, more or less.

I brought in my Digi003 from the studio at home so that we could run eight audio zones, in an attempt to make the set as believable of a house for the actors as possible. Toilets that flush in bathrooms, stereos and phones that make noise, kitchen disasters you can hear coming from the actual kitchen…that sort of thing. Brought in a spare stereo system I had, and learned to profile a lighting dimmer so that it would power up properly, not burn out the electronics, and turn off when the stage went to black.

You use the tools you have available, and that meant a lot of our playback was on small computer speakers hidden around the set, which was built in our black box theatre. Unfortunately, I had my show #4 (Into the Woods) in NYC overlap, so everything was really buttoned up tight before I left. My students had a really strong grasp on what was going on and troubleshooting, so I only had to remote into the show computer once to fix and demonstrate. I had created a script cue in Qlab to launch my screen sharing application, that they could run just in case this came up. (The sound op, never having used Qlab before this show, is going to get it for a show he has this summer. Yay!). Other than a solder joint blowing out during a dress rehearsal, everything went pretty smoothly.

Luckily it ran smoothly, because for “Into the Woods” in NYC, all of our color scrollers, which had been sent out for repairs and are the only viable means by which we can get color in our tiny theatre, came back on my hang & focus day, and didn’t immediately come online! Plus, we were short crew members, which eventually led to us bringing in a board op for the shows so that I could stage manage the show.

We are almost through! Strike “Rumors” at NVCC and start load into the other theatre across the hall for the end of the year dance show. We left a bunch of our networking in place after “Godspell”, so running the camera and projection feeds won’t be starting from scratch, and we’ll be re-using some of the audio plot that I developed, as I slowly re-design some of our main stage sound system.

-brian