Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2009 - 65

Monitors
There are noticeable differences in how the actors monitor the
band however, as Abe points out: "Forty years ago, the singers heard, so we didn't have to do band monitors onstage. The
band was there and they listened to it. listened to themselves.
Today the hearing ability of performers, as well as audiences,
is much less it seems and so you have to give them more monitors. You have to give them band monitors, and the singers
want to hear themselves. That's a major difference."
To solve this problem, Abe employs a pair of loudspeakers
on either side of the stage, nestled in the scaffolding. Abe does
give them something that he normally does not provide, a little
bit of their own vocals in the upstage speakers: "In a rock and
roll show, you can take those mikes out during dialog scenes
so you don't get the reverberation that would occur if you had
monitors on while they were trying to talk."
The loudspeakers not only serve as monitors for the
singers, they also provide additional localization options
for Jacob: he can pull the music all the way down into the
side stage towers for a really aggressive rock and roll number, he can lead from the onstage monitors when he wants to
pull the sound back some, and he can shift the image over
to the band itself. These differences are very small, and are
not noticed by the average listener. Instead, they provide an
appropriate context for each scene that increases its impact
without drawing attention to itself. None of this subtlety could
have possibly existed in the original Hair production, and in
some sense, Jacob's return to Hair at ATC may have provided
him with the opportunity to do the production he would have

liked to have done originally if the technology could have supported his desires.

Mixing
It's hard to believe that Jacob revolutionized theatre sound mixing in the original Hair production when he simply instructed
the sound mixer to turn down the channels that weren't being
used, thus increasing the amount of gain in the system before
the onset of feedback, and drastically improving the sound
quality by not amplifying the ambient noise in the theatre. From
those humble beginnings, mixing of a modern musical has
come a long way. Today, Jacob mostly wants to talk about mixing with delay, a concept where one can control the localization of a sound source by subtly varying the delay times of the
loudspeakers to ensure that the audience localizes the source
of the sound to the actor onstage: "That's my localization trick.
We just add some more time to Woof when he's singing upstage
on the scaffolding, so it kind of draws it back up to him rather
than in the loudspeakers. I added a little more delay to his vocal mike in his channel only, so everything of his gets delayed a
little more as he moves upstage."
When this happens, the sound system tends to disappear,
and the audience experiences that balance of natural sound and
sophisticated reinforcement that is the goal of Jacob's design.
All of this wouldn't really be possible without the programmability of today's modern digital consoles. Any time the delay
needs to change, sound mixer Jake Scudder simply programs
the new delay into a new preset, and then recalls that preset
at the appropriate moment in the show. Jacob explains: "The

The mix position is tight, with a Yamaha dm2000 mixer squeezed between the last row of seats and the rear
wall of the theatre. The dm2000 has layers of inputs rather than many columns of side-by-side input channels,
which make it fit in the tight space. Production sound engineer, Jack Scudder (right) says that mixing sideways
is uncomfortable for him only when the levels get so loud that they cause hearing fatigue in the ear facing the
stage-but that is a situation not encountered in an Abe Jacob sound design.

S P R I N G

2009

theatre

design

technology

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2009