Ian Wheaton is a veteran of touring theatrical comedy. After eighteen years, many of them spent happily mixing front of house for Victoria Wood, he finds himself at a quite different mixing juncture. Providing sound for the sensational new stage hit Little Britain does present some changes to what he’d have experienced with Wood. It is a show composed of TV sketches, and transferring those to the stage presents its own peculiar challenges - but it’s the rather alien looking desk he has out front that first catches the attention.
“In fact I’ve got a new PA system as well,” he began, “along with the Yamaha M7CL mixer it’s all supplied by Sonalyst, and it’s all fantastic! In my experience PA’s just keep getting better and better, and when I started mixers often looked like they had cooker knobs for control – this is so much sleeker.”
Sonalyst is a new sound company founded by renowned sound engineer Rory Madden, the operation is based at the ML Executives building in Crayford, Kent.
Madden has invested heavily in new equipment; Yamaha’s latest digital consoles and Meyer’s compact line array systems, Mica and M1D. It isn’t difficult to get Madden started! ‘Part of the thinking behind all of this was my desire to make the break from constant touring’. ‘Thirty years of tour busses, airports, hotel rooms and missing my family was a really good catalyst to look at broadening my horizon. I have been really lucky, working with acts right at the top of the game.”
“In 2004 I was invited to design the sound for ‘Tonight’s the Night’. The Rod Stewart/Ben Elton musical in the west end. There was a Yamaha PM1D on that show; the opportunity wet my appetite and I was convinced that I could take it all the way from design to providing the ideal theatrical touring package.”
Madden, a long time devotee of the Midas XL4 mixing console, took some cagouling to change to Yamaha digital. “I came across the Yamaha PM5D-RH mixing sound for Lionel Ritchie, there was a requirement for a compact, highly flexible console with a complete effects and dynamics system on board. It really delivered; intuitive operation, really clean, no problems at all.”
The success of ‘Tonight’s the Night’ brought in the offers. “It seemed to me there was a space in the market that had my name on it. I have listened to just about every piece of audio kit you could think of. The Meyer, the Yamaha M7CL and the Shure UHF-R series all appeared on the market at the same time. The relationship of these products is absolutely ideal for the very special needs of touring theatre. At this point of time these products provide the ideal combination.”
“The Yamaha M7-CL is the long awaited route from analogue to digital. It’s sensible, feature packed, sounds fantastic (especially the compressor) and is priced so that breakeven is not a totally elusive dream. All my balance guys are getting on with them fine.”
For Wheaton at the sharp end, this is all new technology, does he agree with Madden’s assesment? “Yamaha sent one of their trainers, Tree,” {David Tordoff ex Radiohead monitor man}. “He came to the warehouse for a couple of hours, frankly that was all we needed. My first impression was it looks easy, and that is how it has proved to be. Because it’s all there, faders for every channel, and because there’s not loads of layers to wade through, it’s simple. Bar a couple of pushes in/out you’re there.”
The Little Britain show is obviously a frantic exposition of what we see on TV, does that present for a complex, heavily cued show? “We spent a short week in rehearsals down at Twickenham Studios – I knew straight away that I wouldn’t be programming a big cue list because I’d have to edit it every three days as we moved venue to venue. With a largely spoken show the varying acoustics of these venues really alters the way it sounds.” It should be noted Wheaton mixes front of house and stage monitors, “so I operate manually from that point of view, and for this desk that present no problems at all.”
“The audiences can be very loud, so I have to ride levels a lot. But there are only four main voices to deal with; I’m using compressors in the desk on all of them, all the performers can go from a whisper to a scream as I’m sure you’re aware; the compressors are really smooth, I’m very impressed. It’s the same with effects, I’m not using a whole lot for the show, a bit of delay and a couple of reverbs, but they all sound really nice. That’s one of the key features of the desk – with a PA like this you can tell – the desk doesn’t colour the sound at all.”
Running the show manually, as presumably you’ve done with analogue desks for years? Does using the Yamaha digital mean a slightly different way of working? “As I said, operationally every channel has a fader so it’s really quick. I like the fact that I can bring any channel I want to the central section of the desk. I hadn’t even heard of this desk three or four weeks ago, now I’m all over it. OK it doesn’t look like a sound desk, but that doesn’t bother me, the CentraLogic™ display does, it’s got all the channel strip controls right there, and that’s all that matters. I like the fact that all the channels are there physically on the fader, and when you grab any individual one it’s instantly on the screen display.”
Are there any other features of the desk he’s discovered since leaving rehearsals? “The USB Key is a nice feature, I don’t use it to lock people out the desk – that’s not necessary in a touring situation like this – but I do use it for back up. If the desk lost its memory I could reload in five seconds, the desk boots up in the click of your fingers. It’s all just that easy.”
Anything you’d pass on to other engineers approaching this desk? “Not really, there’s a huge amount of facilities, more than most people will ever need. Essentially Yamaha have really thought about how they’ve put the desk together. To me the desk appears like it has been designed by a sound engineer not by a software engineer. It works to the same logic I do, when you need something it’s there.”
