John Shivers is one of the busiest soundmen on Broadway, even though he's not frequently there. He was associate sound designer for Aida, The Producers, and Hairspray, the sound designer for 700 Sundays, In My Life, and the new Tarzan, and also productions of The Producers, Hairspray, and The Lion King around the country and across the globe. In fact, when he chatted with FOH recently about Tarzan, the newest Disney production to hit the Great White Way, he was getting ready to go to Shanghai to relocate the Australian production of The Lion King, then check on that same show in Hamburg and London, perform a preliminary survey for a Tarzan production in Holland, then fi nally do preliminary associate design work/research on Mary Poppins by visiting the running London production before opening it in New York later this year with sound designer Steve Kennedy. Despite his whirlwind schedule, the talented Shivers seemed relatively relaxed when he sat down to discuss his recent endeavors, in particular the striking show that is Tarzan (with music written by pop hit-maker Phil Collins). You won't have to be a fan of the story to enjoy its eye-popping visuals and enveloping sound design. The opening sequence is pretty dazzling, in terms of giving the illusion that a couple and their child have fallen from a ship into the ocean and are swimming back up to the surface. The combination of a screen in front of the stage, actors hoisted up on ropes and Shivers' aquatic sound design create a truly cinematic moment for a Broadway show.
FOH: What new challenges did this show present for you?
John Shivers: This is the most sophisticated show that I've done in terms of sound effects and surround sound. I wanted it to be quite impressive from that standpoint. I thought that in order to create the jungle environment we were trying to depict I needed to put in a full-fl edged surround sound system like you would fi nd in a cinema. And then even go beyond that by installing speakers overhead–left-center-right in fi ve tiers–so you could really engulf the audience. I also wanted to do that without having to have any one source particularly loud. So I spec'd enough speakers to spread them out to make for a smooth and natural sonic environment. We also put left-center-right speakers in the upstage wall. They're pretty much exposed the entire show, so that I could use them as part of the surround to draw the audience into the set a bit more.
I noticed a lot of sound coverage, but it wasn't overwhelmingly loud.
Well, that's a matter of opinion. I think some of the press thought it was a bit loud. We eased it back a little bit since it opened because it was getting a little bit out of hand, in my opinion. It got to the point where, while still sounding quite good, we were pushing the envelope of what is comfortable. There were a lot of people involved with the show, a lot of people who know a lot about sound, and as you know, everybody has an opinion on that subject: Phil Collins, coming from the rock 'n' roll world; Chris Montan, the executive music producer for Disney; Paul Bogaev, who is the music producer and Jim Abbott, the music supervisor; then Bob Crowley, the director, and Tom Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatrical Productions, and Lon Bender, who provided sound effects for the show. So there was a big group of people with varying opinions about where the show should be, and Phil obviously had a lot of clout to that end. He wanted it at pop/rock levels, and I think that's where we ultimately ended up with it. Admittedly, as we got close to opening night, I was getting a little nervous about levels, and I eased them back just a little bit. Phil was still quite happy with that level.
What was it like to work with Phil Collins?
Just fantastic. I can't say enough good things about him. A true gentleman and completely involved, unlike some of the other major pop Broadway composers. We sat together on maybe a dozen occasions in house seats to be able to hear and discuss the shows.
Can other pop composers be more difficult?
Elton John was a lot less hands on for Aida. He wrote the music and basically said, "Here, do your thing." He did pop in once in a while during previews but left all the details of creating a musical to the on-site music dept. It was great having Phil there for Tarzan. He was completely open to suggestions, and knew that he was coming from a very different world.
What mics are you using on the cast?
We use the DPA 4061, an omni-directional lavalier. I am also a big fan of the Sennheiser MKE-2 Gold, also a great microphone. But I did quite a bit of comparison and I decided that the DPA was a better choice for this show.
In terms of the orchestra pit, one thing that I really paid attention to was getting things isolated because I knew I wanted a tight studio sound. To achieve that control in the house with a "rock band" in the pit, you need to have isolation, not only between the musicians but also between the pit and the house itself. To that end, the drummer is in a booth that associate sound designer David Patridge and I spent a substantial amount of time designing and constructing. The drummer is generally the benchmark or catalyst for what level is going to be achieved in the orchestra pit. It's the loudest instrument, and everybody else has to turn up to that level in order to be able to monitor themselves, so if you can get that under control everybody else can come down to a moderate level.
Our guitarist plays through a device called an AxeTrak, which is basically a little sealed gray box with an enclosed speaker and microphone. He plugs his amplifier in, as you would a normal speaker cabinet, and then you take a mic line out. It's not direct in the sense of a DI Box, which has a very sterile sound. In this case, the signal actually runs through a speaker and is picked up by a dynamic mic. But essentially, there's no external sound.
The keyboards go direct. There's an orchestral section, with brass, woodwinds and a cello, that we had to baffle a bit to maintain isolation, so the end result is that we do not have a lot of acoustic energy coming out of the pit, which often is very muddy. We are then able to put as much or as little of each instrument through the speaker system, where you have ultimate control and a cleaner sound.
Which mics are in the pit?
We use the usual complement of mics. I use a Beyer M88 on the kick drum as well as an Audix D6, inner and outer respectively. The inner microphone gives you a nice point of attack from the drum, and the outer microphone sitting on the outer edge of the drum gives you a lot of nice low end. A Shure SM81 on the snare top and an AKG 414 for the snare bottom, Neumann KM140s for hi-hat and overheads, Shure SM98s for the toms. BSS AR-133 Direct Boxes for the keyboards. Neumann U87s for the timpani. Sennheiser 906s for the brass. It's a nice, large diaphragm microphone. KM140 on the flute, and one on the oboe/english horn. A Neumann TLM 170 on the cello. So it's a nice complement of microphones, and ones that seem to suit the instruments nicely.
What board and processors are you running?
The front of house console is a Yamaha PM1D. This is my first foray into the digital world, at least on a major production. I did a little show called In My Life, and I used a DM 2000, in combination with a Cadac. I wasn't ready to delve into it completely, so I did half and half, but for this show went with a PM1D. One of the major factors for me getting into this was being able to negotiate a good mix position in the Richard Rodgers theatre. What I presented to Disney was that I would only kill half as many seats as a typical analog console by going digital, if we could get a better mix position. So instead of what would normally be a less than ideal position at the very back of the orchestra section we were moved slightly forward and sunk into a dugout so the mixer's head is just above the level of the seats of the row in front of him. This really gives him the ability to really hear the show quite nicely. So by limiting the size of our console we were essentially able to get ourselves a much better position for mixing.
You have a lot of background sound effects, too.
The idea was to have the soundscape help to establish time and location in the jungle. With a few exceptions set doesn't vary to a major extent. So to be able to help depict night and day, or dusk and dawn, or different locations in the jungle, we attempted to have a constant ambience running. Birds by daytime, and an owl, some frogs, and crickets at night, that sort of thing. It was a bit of challenge because sounds of this nature can become noise. There was already plenty of ambient noise in the theatre to contend with, with the inflatable wall and the moving lights and color scrollers. So to add another element of noise did not make any sense to me. We originally started with a lot of dense jungle sounds but in the end decided to thin them out and go with more specific or periodic birds, apes, frogs; something a little bit more well-defined. The other thing that I tried to do was to establish these ambiences at the top of the scene, and then tuck them under where they would not interfere with the dialogue and/or the music.
Do you use vocal processing on some of the gorilla sounds?
Yes, we're using an Eventide H8000 on Kerchak, the silverback ape. It's quite a good processor with a lot of interesting effects. In this case we used a pitch shifting program to embellish his voice when he roared. Originally we had a sound effect played back for these moments but it was not working well because it was so difficult to coordinate and make it remotely realistic.
Every orchestra reverb is done within the PM1D. We have a drum reverb, a guitar reverb, a guitar fl anger for the acoustic guitar, etc. There are eight different effects available there, so you can dedicate them specifi cally to sections of the orchestra and maintain a lot of control. If you want a gated reverb on the snare, you can have it while having other reverbs on other sections. That's another beautiful thing about the digital console, a vast range of possibilities on a cueby- cue basis. If you're changing EQs, changing noise gate confi gurations, compression thresholds, or just about any parameter, it can be done at the push of a button. That really makes the digital boards very, very powerful and very enticing to me.
For vocals we use a Lexicon 960, which along with several other outputs from the PM- 1D are routed into the LCS system, the nucleus of the system. We needed quite a sophisticated routing device and found that in the LCS. We utilized some 42 outputs from the LCS for the surround system.
I tried to make things as simple as possible in terms of cueing because of the sheer number of cues involved in this show, sound effects and otherwise. For example, when the sequencer is running in the orchestra pit, we would tap into the SMPTE timecode and that would then drive the sound effects. It is a blessing in the case of the opening sequence, which, as you can imagine, is quite complicated. The LCS has a 24-track playback capability called Wild Tracks, and that's where all our sounds are coming from. We often utilized all 24 tracks. So in order to manage all those things and fi re them at the right time, SMPTE timecode is a brilliant way to go about it. So whenever the sequencer was running, I would always tie into that.
What are you proudest of on this show?
Surviving. [laughs] I think the end result was quite good. I'm quite proud of the integration of the LCS surround system with all the elements in a rather sophisticated sound system. We pulled it off reliably and to reasonable success.
