Water for Elephants sound designer Walter Trarbach spoke with FRONT of HOUSE’s Bryan Reesman on the control setup for the complex Broadway production, a mélange of music, dialog in various languages and animal puppets, which loom large in the production and even have their own character arcs in the story.
Trarbach and his crew are running a DiGiCo SD7T Quantum for the show. “We decided to do Dante at 96k which was an interesting challenge,” McKenna says. “We have a bunch of MTP fiber between front of house and backstage to do all of our networking and our Optocore loop. We do all of our AV switching via the Autograph XDANTE-1. That was the first time I used that. PRG built us a little custom logic controller to help us do the switching. Ron was commenting how little analog cable we have between front of house and backstage. We’re almost entirely digital, all the way to the speaker in some cases.”
By splitting some of the inputs on the Quantum, there’s no need for a monitor desk, and they are running around 200 inputs with their split. All of the sound effects have their own cues. Sinko has script pages with green dots for normal cues and red dots for sound effect cues. Some pages have continuous dots because of all the cues, including 105 just for sound effects.
Trarbach says he, McKenna, and Sinko all worked with sound designer Steve Canyon Kennedy on the Ain’t Too Proud musical in this same theater five years ago. “So when we were doing the system [here], we added a starting point and built off what we had done previously,” Trarbach notes. That previous experience gave them a leg up in getting the mix passable quickly, and they’ve been finessing and improving it since then.
“It’s really a fun show for us,” Trarbach said. “It offers us a lot of opportunities to do conspicuous sound and great fun reverb effects. We put the band into the surround speakers, and vocals in the surround sometimes. We’ve got a bajillion sound effects. We get to do great songs, and we’ve got great singers with spectacular diction, which is so helpful to us. It’s a hoot. We’re just delighted to be part of it.”
From “Theater Sound” by Bryan Reesman, FOH, April 2024, page 30
