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 | | | | Jan31Written by:Bruce Richardson
Monday, January 31, 2000 6:00 PM  Sound design for theater was once very clean cut. Either you were working on a musical, which had songs, or a play which had only sound effects. Now, directors want a sonic experience on par with modern film scores. Audiences are accustomed to a full-bore listening experience, and the day of the mostly-bare soundscape in theater is long gone. It's a huge job.
Before computers, you went in with your sound cues, and worked with the stage manager and board operator to coordinate them with the play. When something didn't work, you went back to the studio and tried again. A play usually had 50 or less cues. It was not possible to do many more than that. There was just not enough time.
Enter DAW
The computer-based DAW has certainly helped along this revolution in theater composing and sound design.A Christmas Carol weighed in at a healthy 84 music cues, mostly components of scene-length sections. A play is a living object that changes and grows from night to night. So the music must be broken down and constructed in logical chunks that can shrink or grow with the performance, yet retain musical form and sensibility.
This is where the DAW really changes things. Used as a tool in technical rehearsal, the DAW allows us to interactively adjust the music as the show itself develops, and to allow the music itself to develop through the tech process. This is a huge creative layer, tantamount to bringing the studio itself into rehearsal.
We would often be in headphones constructing music to the action on stage in realtime. By using this rehearsal time that would normally be spent taking notes, we were able to work more efficiently. The result? An almost seamless film-quality score for A Christmas Carol - in less than three weeks.
The DAW was critical, and had to be rock solid. We used a machine built by Sound Chaser (the Mad Max), with software apps by Sonic Foundry (Vegas, ACID, Sound Forge, CD Architect, XFX), Cakewalk (Cakewalk Pro Audio 9), Native Instruments (Reaktor), and Nemesys (GigaSampler).
Our work followed a carefully designed production flowchart - we composed in Cakewalk using GigaSampler orchestral libraries. Then when things began to firm up musically and we had made the most significant timing adjustments, we captured the individual GigaSampler tracks and mixed in Vegas. In places, we used ACID to build ostinato structures and fed this back into the mix. We used Reaktor as a sound design tool, especially its granular synthesis component. Until moments before opening, the music remained in a fluid state, changing as the rehearsal process informed the timing and construction of each piece.
Each music cue had its own directory, with all its components from the ground up archived there, along with the current mix. By carefully establishing our naming conventions, we were able to build a set of cue discs in CD Architect that simply updated themselves as we did remixes. Whatever we had accomplished when it was time to burn the day's rehearsal discs would be updated. When you're dealing with thousands of component files, this kind of discipline is essential for success.
Needless to say, backups were also a critical component of the production process. The show was written to three separate drives at the end of each work day.
The other, absolutely huge, part of the technical arsenal that made the project possible was the library material we used in GigaSampler. From the outset, the director wanted an orchestral sensibility with nothing that sounded electronic. Other than some of the supernatural events, our palette was firmly grounded in traditional instrumentation. Even the supernatural effects were constructed from acoustic sources.
We used several GigaSampler libraries to achieve this, including The Miroslav Vitous Symphonic Orchestra Libraries, Peter Siedlaczek's Advanced Orchestra, the Peter Ewers Symphonic Organ Samples, Gary Garritan's GigaHarp, the EastWest Bosendorfer and Steinway GigaSound Libraries, the Nemesys GigaPiano, the Denny Jaeger Master Violin Library, EastWest's Symphonic Adventures and Scoring Tools, and several of my own samples for GigaSampler - including some made on the fly as needed.
The sheer volume of work made this project an exercise in efficiency and sleep deprivation. We started composing and scoring music on November 3. Technical rehearsals began fifteen days later, where most of our days were spent in the theater, so all the major musical components had to be composed and at least rough-mixed in that two week period.
I would not have survived this gig without the tools we used. Something would have snapped. Since "the show must go on," that would have meant pruning away at what the director desired until we arrived at what was do-able. Even at that, the sleepless night count would have done us in. But given these marvelous tools (that we almost take for granted nowadays), we were able to give the director everything he wanted in very high style.
So, here's a look at the libraries we used to create the score for A Christmas Carol, along with a look at one of the best DAW machines I've ever used. First up, the Sound Chaser Mad Max Live Audio Workstation.
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