A Week at the Theatre

After popping in to the theatre last week to watch the rehearsals a couple of weeks ago, I find myself in charge of sound for this week's play, See How They Run.

When I was in Sheffield, I tried my hardest to avoid sound positions at all costs. I'm not a big fan of loud noises - particularly when they are as unpleasant as the chart tunes that were pumped out at the weekday club nights. I was trained to work the desks - as I mentioned in a previous post - sitting in front of all those knobs and faders terrified me, I had to 'watch' the desk once and should anything have gone wrong I would have been of very little use.

As I write this, I am sitting in front of a shiny new digital desk - a Yamaha M7CL for those of you who are interested in this sort of thing - having only ever used an analogue desk - this is all very new to me. Not only that but it appears that Yamaha like to name everything very differently to almost every other manufacturer. On most desks for example, channels can be muted, when the light is on, the channel is muted and no noise will come out of it. On a Yamaha desk however, channels are turned on and off and so when the light is on, sound does come out. This was the source of a lot of confusion when I first started playing with it.

Having missed or messed up most of my cues during Friday's rehearsal, I am very surprised that today has gone so smoothly (for me at least). The pressure is now on to keep this up for the rest of the week. I will be very disappointed if I miss one of my cues - particularly if it is one the actors are relying on as a prompt for a line or action.

It is nice to feel part of something though, I'm starting to learn my way around the place and make myself known to the regulars which is nice. The second time I turned up, I was accused of being an axe murderer - whilst I'm sure this was an exaggeration, it is nice when people know your name. It doesn't always work the other way around though, I'm really struggling to remember the names of the cast - I have to learn two names for each of them (their real name and the name of the character they play). The latter is much easier because they are referred to by that name throughout the play. To make matters worse, they all look and sound very different when they are out of costume. It's all very confusing.

I shall finish - as usual - on a musical note. I heard this on BBC 6 Music - now that I have a digital radio, I finally get some decent tunes in the morning even if I only get to listen for about 20 minutes. Saturday morning's are my favourite - Andrew Collins and Josie Long have a wonderful show - particularly the I'm in business feature during the last half hour, if you don't know what I'm talking about, I strongly recommend you download the podcast - you'll miss out on the music but the banter is the best bit. Anyway, I digress. You can currently download this single for free courtesy of 7digital but the album is also very good and you get 22 tracks - how often do you see that these days?

The band is M83, they are from France but I don't hold that against them. They are relatively niche still but this might be about to change.