First time mixing at Yale – (“Music Man” #1)

I’m back at Yale this week, mixing an alumni performance of “Music Man” (I will be doing this same show with 8th graders later this Spring…might be a little different…) This is exciting, as I’ve not mixed FoH here before.

It was supposed to be a staged reading of the play, with just some mics at music stands. But of course, being Yale, it became so much more than that. There are foley sound effects coming from a couple of places, and a 30 piece orchestra that the sound designer has thoughtfully close-miked and used Y-combiners, so there are almost double the number of mics on stage. It’s been…interesting.

Anyway, I was told by the Stage Manager that this was the clearest mixed show that she’s heard in a long time. So that’s good!

Because this is Yale, I had a lot of cool toys at my disposal. I’ve worked with Galileo units in my drive rack before, but never had to configure them (the problem of being a tour mixing guy – while everything is already done for you as requested, there are some things you can end up not ever having to do yourself). Having now programmed a Galileo (via the much easier LAN interface) I love them and want to buy like five of them…if I had the $7500 sitting around for each one!  Anyway, with thirteen audio zones, soundcheck is more than just “does it work?” So I built a cascading set of cues to automate my sound checks, which is a great thing computers are good at – duplicating repetitive tasks. The scripts (Applescript & OSC) turn on and off different channels in the Galileo, use text to voice features in OSX to announce what zone was being tested, and then play a wav file of white noise that I had cued up. So I can hit go, and listen to “Zone One, Orchestra Left” followed by white noise, and it continues through the rest of the positions. (Actually, for speed, I don’t have the labels detailed – if there is a problem, like when I first set it up and had an error, I just go back and check that missing zone number manually.) This helps remove the chance that I’ll miss something, while double-checking the computer’s work by running sequentially.

Bonus: they’re feeding us dinner this week in the dining halls. Combined with the snow, it’s like we’re at Hogwarts.

Bigger Bonus: my friend Alex (lighting op) pointed out that the role of Mayor Shin, who had a very familiar voice, was being played by Mark Linn Baker, who played Larry on Perfect Strangers in the ’80s!

-brian