Production values have come a long way, baby. Just a few years ago, the thought of producing a Broadway show with a flying car sounded ludicrous, but the Tony-nominated New York production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang incorporates Caractacus Potts' titular, gravity-defying vehicle along with lavish sets, pyro and even live dogs. It also has an incredibly high-tech sound system run through a DiGiCo D5T that incorporates seven PCs, four mice, two 24-track Mackie digital recorders and Akai samplers, not to mention a plethora of racks backstage. The brains and fingers behind this hub belong to live engineer Scott Sanders, a seasoned Broadway vet who worked on Les Misérables for six years and whose recent credits include Never Gonna Dance and Fiddler On The Roof. Sanders certainly knows to juggle things, but after doing 1,500 performances of Les Mis, it's not likely that he's easily phased by anything. After one of Chitty's typically extravagant performances, he took FOH backstage to discuss mixing sound for this larger-than-life production, which features the famous characters of quirky inventor Potts, his lady love Truly Scrumptious and the creepy Child Catcher.
So you're running a DiGiCo D5T?
Scott Sanders: Yeah, the latest and greatest. Andrew Bruce was part of the designers for the console. He worked with DiGiCo in developing some of the software updates, and he's constant with them. He's the designer for this show, so he knows this machine in and out. This is my first show using this. In the past, I've almost exclusively used Cadac.
How does this vary from Cadac?
The operation is about the same. It's just getting around the different layers. When I sit there and operate it, it's still the same as if I were sitting in front of the VCA section of a Cadac, but it allows so much more to happen in the background–per-cue EQ changes, per-cue level changes–that unless you have a lot of automation on a Cadac, you really can't touch. Plus the digital end of it–we have two fiber optic cables that run down to the basement, and everything is patched into two MADI racks down there and one up here. You've got a lot less copper involved.
It's been great. It was a learning curve certainly with the programming, but they designed it a lot like the Cadac software, which I was familiar with, so that made the transition pretty easy. Then having Andrew here…there are a few idiosyncrasies that you have to know when you're in a live update situation, so that's why I have all these little sheets up there that remind me what I have to do if I'm making an alteration to a cue, which I still do on occasion here and there. I make slight adjustments, trying to balance out the vocals and stuff. We're using all our inputs, about 120.
How many cast members are there?
There's a cast of about 50, and we use 47 wireless body packs plus five wireless link systems. They're essentially wireless speaker systems. There is one in the balloon that stays there, then there are four others that float around the stage.
How many racks do you have downstairs?
There are six seven-foot racks. Andrew likes them big.
What do they house?
Amplifiers for all the different systems. There are two racks of XTA EQs, and at the bottom of the XTA racks are the two MADI racks that connect the fiber optic information. That's all of our copper lines from the pit, from the wireless rack and output lines from the computer out front to the amplifiers. The MADI racks are just slots that can be either inputs or outputs, and we have digital cards, so we're direct digital. We stay digital until we hit the amplifier. We come out of the XTAs analog.
You have a wireless set up in the blimp that goes by overhead. Where else?
The sweet machine, the food machine. The Sweet Factory has a speaker, although that's a wired speaker. The Baron's car, Truly's motorbike. Chitty, of course, has six speakers– four in the hubs, one that's mounted on the front, one underneath and a monitor speaker inside. They're projecting sound on stage mostly for the Chitty sounds.
You have prerecorded sound effects for the blimp and other moving props. You're triggering everything?
I am triggering everything. That was the other hard thing to get used to. Typically with a Cadac, you have a go button, and everything is automated off the go button. This show could be done the same way, but Andrew lately had started adding a second go button for the sound effects, and that was very hard to get used to, because I put them right next to each other. So remembering which one to step on…
The nice thing is one does all the D5 cues, and the other does sound effects. Therefore, in production, it was very handy because you could readily step through your cues as you were programming things and not have to worry about firing a sound effect by accident. To step through cues with the Cadac, you always had to disengage your MIDI to make sure you didn't fire any sound effects.
I fire the five pyros in the ship chase. There's a guy backstage and a dead man's switch, but my trigger is essentially the go for those pyros. The second I hit the pyro, it goes and I have a boom. My heart stopped the first time I did that. It's amazing how quick the response was.
I'm assuming you have one mic on everybody, but more on the leads?
There are three on Potts. He wears two on his head and one on his side for whenever he wears the bowler. I switch back and forth. It was different with the understudy because their hat movements were different, so I had to go back to paying much more attention to the stage. It happens. I never expected him to put it on the way he did, but those things happen in live theatre.
Truly wears two, Grandpa wears two. The Child Catcher wears two, plus he has a different one that goes on his disguise. We have three backstage people, and they're busy the whole time moving wireless mics around to the various prop speakers that make noise as well as maintaining all the backstage people, with 50 wireless on people. What's nice is I don't think about backstage. These guys are fabulous. They're one of the best crews I've ever worked with.
Do you think automation has made live engineers lazy, particularly with all the programming involved?
The programming in my mind is only computer–assisted. I've never done a show where all I did was step. Although all the faders on the DiGiCo D5T could be motorized, we've disengaged the motors on the control groups. I don't want to feel the motor. Not only am I adjusting one voice at a time, but I have a gas pedal over on my far right that is the orchestra and the orchestra reverb. I also have a vocal reverb fader there that controls the level of how much reverb I bring in. Then I have eight other faders to my left that are control groups for sections of the orchestra–kit, rhythm, strings, woodwinds, brass–and I make presets for each numbers, then that gives me the capability to adjust individual section levels. So there are constantly those adjustments, then there are places where you're bringing the gas pedal up and down, building the orchestra up and down during beginnings and middles and ends of numbers.
You have to keep track of muting people who are going offstage, which must be a challenge here.
I only bring up a mic just before someone's about to speak or sing, then take it out just as they're done. I'm constantly moving a fader in time. Even if there are four or five people onstage, I will only try to bring up one mic at a time. Although I do a cheat a little bit–what I call cheating–in the car during the ship chase, because I'm firing so many sound effects with my pinky. I've got four mics up, so what I'm trying to do with four fingers here is keep a wave effect. As somebody speaks, I bring their mic up a little more and drop everybody else below them, but I don't take them all the way out. In most every other scene, I'm getting rid of that mic completely and bringing the next one up. With the Boris and Goran scenes, I taper them or feather them way back as much as I can throughout their whole number because you get a better sound and less phasing between the two microphones. That's what I was taught when I started out–if you can, one mic at a time.
We saw Rick Hilsabeck, the understudy for the Caractacus Potts role tonight. This the third time he's been onstage. It must be tricky not having him too much.
It's about body memory. So much of what of I do is finger-ear coordination, and a lot of it is motor memory. I get used to how far I throw the fader for each pickup. You have to just guess first, and then immediately adjust if you've guessed wrong, either by pushing back up or backing it up. "I didn't go far enough," or, "they're really strong today, I have to back up."
Half of this whole business of mixing a show is about having a premonition about where they're going to be tonight.
