This year’s Tony Award winner for “Best Sound Design of a Play” is an unusual animal. Presented at Broadway’s Golden Theatre, it’s a play with music, but music performed by the cast portraying a ‘70s rock band that’s becoming unglued during the making of an important album. The cast features the quintet, which includes two romantically frictioned couples and two overwhelmed engineers. The tense tale emanates some Fleetwood Mac Rumours vibes as the group struggles to maintain unity while their controlling guitarist chases his singular vision and alienates them.
For Tony-winning sound designer Ryan Rumery, working on the show was a dream come true. Although too young to have been around during the time the show takes place, he’s a drummer who adores that era and its music. He loves the musicianship, vibes, sound, and the fact that one needed true talent to make it. No fixing it in the mix. While the show is mixed on a modern DiGiCo SD10 console and some MIDI sounds, there are real instruments on stage and vintage gear, including guitar pedals, a guitar amp, various analog mics to capture the band in the live room, and a Cadac G-type console which still has six functioning channels that they use.
Not the Typical Set
The stage set-up is unusual. The mixing room is in front with the Cadac sitting downstage center. A few steps up to the side doors lead to the live room in the back. The window is larger than any studio window and the live room elevated higher, but for theatrical purposes that was the best way to give the audience good vantage points of what’s transpiring there.
“The glass was certainly tough to deal with,” Rumery told FRONT of HOUSE. “Treating the room and the rugs was arduous, to deaden the room as much as you could. I’m trying to deaden a room that has glass. We accomplished it, but it was a lot of work. The walls are real studio walls. There’s a wall with six to eight inches of Owens Corning insulation, and then a wall back behind that, so it’s a lot of the same materials you’d have in a real studio today.”
The System
The Golden Theatre usually hosts plays — not musicals. This is the biggest audio system ever been installed there, and everything — from the line arrays to rigging hardware — was overweight on the first day of load-in. All d&b audiotechnik speakers are used for the P.A. Rumery previously used Meyer gear exclusively, but his instincts told him that d&b, with its warmer sound, was best for the show.
“I hardly used any EQ on the system,” he recalls. “We became infatuated with delay timing to make sure the delay felt really natural into the space, especially with the dialog. We spent a lot of time on those to make sure it felt really smooth and it didn’t felt like it was over-miked, which is a real tough thing to do.”
The actors’ dialog mics are all Sennheiser MKE IIs. Inside the live room, area mics and individual vocal mics pick up the cast when they speak. If it means someone steps away too soon during a line, for example, that’s just like real life. Live vintage mics are used on the instruments: the Sennheiser 421 and 441, AKG C414B, Shure SM57 and 58, Royer R-121 and more. There is no wireless treatment mic in the room for dialog.
“That was arduous and tedious to figure out,” Rumery notes, “but it is one of the cool aspects of the show, because it’s very specific to being there and experiencing that moment of being in the control room.”
As it chronicles an album in progress, Stereophonic includes playback moments. However, Rumery explained that any time the group is in the recording studio doing something or moving faders, it runs through the Cadac and Yamaha NS10 near-field speakers.
“A lot of people think those NS10s are just for show — but all the audio passes through them,” Rumery says. “Sometimes you hear them more than others, because the main system is shut down if they’re just listening to something in the space. At the end of the first act when they listen to ‘Masquerade,’ it’s actually real playback from the song. It starts playing in the NS10s, and then it moves up into the house and gets louder as the lights go out. I’m making use of all of those iconic pieces of studio gear for the show.”
The audio team utilized two Universal Audio UAD plug-ins that emulate ‘70s sounds. They pass them through the console application to replicate the sonic experience of sitting in a recording studio and hearing music right off of the tape. It’s all about sounding warm and fuzzy, something digital music fans may not be used to hearing live. However, the DiGiCo is necessary to maintain those old school sonic vibes.
“The DiGiCo is awesome because it remembers all of the headphone mixes because there’s all the music headphone mixes, and anytime they’re in a dialog scene and they have the headphones on there’s a separate mix for it,” Rumery explains. “We’ve got that console maxed out at this point [with 117 inputs]. If you look at the signal flow, Tom’s vocal mic comes to the DiGiCo, gets bused out to the UAD console app, goes through all the vintage plugs, then goes back to the DiGiCo, and then through the d&b rig. It’s one extra step than what a Broadway show would usually have. That’s just to get that whole warm, fuzzy ‘70s vibe. In the show, that’s important to me to have the audience feel that.”
Ready for Anything
When it comes to playback moments in the show, there is no pre-recorded playback. If something goes awry during a live studio take, there is no backup. A big exception is the playback for “Masquerade” at the end of Act One. “That’s literally the performance that’s played back, and we’ve got a backup of that,” Rumery says. “Then when Sarah Pidgeon, at the top of act two, is singing and tracking the song ‘East To Eden,’ we are hearing her takes through that. And if that would fail, we have a backup of that. We’ve got backups of that in three different keys. If Sarah is feeling fatigued, she can make a call at intermission — which key does she want to do the song in? We’ve got backup upon backups of that.”
During live performances, they have stopped a show if a guitar cable stopped working or there was a technical snafu, which makes it a bit nerve-wracking for the audio team. But that adds to the realness of the show and the live experience.
People have told Rumery how effortless things sound in the show, yet he stresses it “was wildly planned out to make it that way.” Picking up people in the live room was challenging, especially if any action was re-blocked by director Daniel Aukin. The music presented its challenges, as many of the cast had no experience playing an instrument before and had to learn for authenticity’s sake.
That Live Feel
Rumery pushed the drums and bass a bit higher because they are “the two things that make you feel you’re really at an event,” he states. “[At] so many shows you go to, you see a drummer bashing back there, and just hear these little tinky cans of nothing. I loved being able to push the drums out. How we’re treating the bass and drums is one of the coolest things I love about the show and the mix. You see them, you feel it. That’s such an important thing with sound. You want it to sound like what you’re seeing in front of you.”
Instincts Pay Off
Working on Stereophonic, Rumery learned about simplicity and trusting his instinct to pick the right mic for the right vibe. “Fighting for all that stuff is very important,” Rumery stresses. “I felt like that vibe helped and did pay off in the end on how people are hearing the sound. It’s also just a good thing for sound design in general. People are noticing sound design. There are so many sound designers that are working so hard on Broadway. It’s a really tough, thankless job, and it’s good that this show is getting recognized in a positive way. I hope that helps people who see theater to realize it’s really important to theater, and to shows and to live experience in general.”
