Engineering For Audio
Theatre
Advice from
Tony Palermo
 The
Museum of Television & Radio
(MT&R) in Los Angeles has a small radio production studio
that was really intended for talk show production. It has a
small mixing board that accommodates five microphones, two
DAT tape machines, two CD players, two analog cassette
machines and little else. However, you don't need very much
equipment to produce a radio drama. I'll describe the
minimum necessary and if you have more than that available,
good for you.
Microphones:
Dialogue Microphones:
In pictures of the golden era of radio drama, you'll see several actors,
scripts in hand, clustered in a semi-circle around a big pillbox microphone (an
RCA 44BX ribbon mic). Those b-directional ribbon mics were a big component in
getting the intimate radio sound, and are available nowadays is expensive
reproductions (see AEA's great line of ribbon mics) But it's easier to have
actors arrayed in front of several microphones. You can get by with three
to four Shure SM58
uni-directional dynamic microphones for dialogue. (You can find knock-offs
of the SM58 for $20-$30 each. Try
www.speakerrepair.com )
The
SM58's are the sturdy, standard, inexpensive P.A.-style mics
seen everywhere, (they resemble a cigar with a silver golf
ball on top). We use three mics to accommodate the various
heights of our large casts (7 to 12 actors), which often mix
children and adults. The uni-directional feature of the
SM58s limits the area where the mic is sensitive to one
direction. (My apologies to the more technically savvy
readers, but some people don't understand these concepts, so
I will cover them as necessary. See Peter Elsea's Primer
on Microphones, from the University of California at
Santa Cruz's Electronic Music Studios.) A uni-directional
microphone has unique pickup pattern (polar pattern). If you
can imagine a balloon stemming out from the top of the
microphone, that is the area where the mic is most
sensitive. It is very in-sensitive in the area
directly behind the mic--where the cord is plugged in.
Pointing the mic away from some areas allows us to
keep our mics from picking up unwanted sounds, such as the
sound effects--which have their own mic.
I use mic stands with booms instead of straight-up
stands. This way the actors can't accidentally step on the
base of the stand and make a bump sound during production. I
generally have my actors speak 6-10 inches from the mic. Any
further and then we have to turn up the mic too much which
brings too much "room tone"--along with air conditioning,
etc. A small hoop wrapped with nylon mesh, called a pop
filter, can allow actors to get closer to the mic without
"popping" their P's. At the MT&R, we use 8-inch diameter pop
filters due to our large casts and they really get the
actors at the proper distance from the microphone. Pop
Filters cost about $24-$30 and are available from musical
instrument stores and the Markertek A/V supply house
http://www.markertek.com.
We pair up our performers by height and assign groups to
one mic. I try to have them speak into the mic from about a
foot away, if you are much further back. you will hear the
"room tone," which may not be desirable. If the script calls
for a scream or shouted line, I tell the actors to shout up
towards the ceiling. It's preferable to have two performers
in the same scene be at the same mic since that makes their
conversation more convincing, but sometimes you have to
separate them. When two actors are at one mic, we control
their volume with distance--we move quiet actors in closer
and have louder ones stand further away--though not far
enough to make the audience feel somebody is speaking from
far away--we use that technique as an effect when called for
by the script. Since it's generally
confusing in radio drama to have more than four voices
talking at once, three mics do the job nicely.
Special Uses of Dialogue Microphones:
We usually reserve one of our three dialogue mics for use
with an effects device--either a tone-control-style filter
to sound like a telephone voice, or a reverb to sound like
somebody is in a deep cavern or that we're listening to
somebody's thoughts--an interior monologue. Some of our
scripts have actors speaking with a normal tone, say Lois
Lane in her office, while she's on the phone with Clark
Kent, whose voice is filtered to sound like it's coming out
of a tiny telephone handset speaker. When we use this
telephone technique, we also arrange the microphones so
Lois' mic points 180 degrees away from where Clark's
filtered mic is. In the following diagram, ----o
is a microphone, with the dotted line representing the body
of the mic and the circle representing the front of the
mic--the silver golf-ball part.
Lois o---- (normal mic faces Lois)
(filtered mic faces Clark) ----o Clark
This makes use of the SM58's uni-directional feature to
prevent Clark's normal-sounding voice, as heard in the
studio, from "leaking" into Lois's mic and undercutting the
sound of his filtered, telephone-style sound.
Microphone Effects Devices:
Some radio scripts require characters to be talking on
the phone, in a cavern or from behind a door. This requires
changing the sound of the actors voices to convince the
audience of these facts. The classic radio thriller, The
Shadow, used a telephone-style voice to signify when the
main character was invisible (on radio!). These kind of effects require
some technical trickery. For the muffled, distant voice behind a closed door,
have the actor step back from the mic and speak into a cigar box missing one
side.
For telephone-style voices, you need to take the
normal sound of the actor's voice, cut all the bass
frequencies and boost the higher frequencies. A cheap way to
approximate the sound is to have the actor talk into a
coffee mug or deep plastic tumbler held besides their mouth
and close to the microphone. The professional way to do this
is via an electronic tone control.
Some mixing boards will allow you to cut the bass and
boost the highs and "thin" out the sound; However, the
MT&R's board had no tone controls and other sound board tone
controls may not cut or boost enough (A 15 dB boost/cut is
typically used to approximate telephone voice effects). But
even with a mixing board EQ, the sound isn't convincing. (I
built a special telephone
filter mic out of 1960s phone elements and I offer those
for sale at The RuyaSonic.com Depot.)
In the old radio scripts this telephone voice sound was
called a "filtered voice" or indicated as (FILTER). Here's a
script sample:
CLARK KENT:
(FILTER) Lois? I'm calling from a phone booth...
For cavern sounds we originally tried having the
actors stand quite far away from the mic, but the actual
size of our studio wasn't big enough to sound like a very
large cave. Some modern mixing boards have digital
reverb effects built in. Our board doesn't, so we use an
external reverb device. You can find
these under-$100 devices (about the size of paperback book) used to
provide various room-size simulations for guitars and drums.
We plug a mic into
this black box on one end, and plug a mic cable out of the
box and into our mixing board.
The best route is to use a semi-pro mixing board like the
ones from Behringer
or Mackie. They can route mics, effects
devices and CD inputs any way you want. You'll need enough inputs for 6 mics or
so, plus two CD/MP3/SD playback devices, and maybe a "line-in" input for a
keyboard player.
Sound Effects Microphones:
For sound effects on a couple of
cafeteria tables, we placed 2-3 Shure SM57
microphones around them. These mics have a tighter pickup pattern. (Again, You
can find knock-offs of the SM57 for $20-$30 each. Try
www.speakerrepair.com )
Just as we use the reverb devices to make the actors
sound like they are in a cavern or having an interior
monologue, or speaking from Heaven, we also put the sound effects microphone through
a reverb to give them a different quality. All the advice
above regarding black boxes and adapters applies here too.
However, we use a second reverb device just for the
sound effects, so we can control the amount of reverb
separately from the dialogue reverb. The amount of reverb
can be adjusted with a knob on the black box from none at
all (called "dry") to way too much reverb ("wet"). We've
found that if the dialogue is too wet, audiences have a hard
time understanding what's being said, but sound effects need
to be a bit wetter than the dialogue for the cavern-effect
to be convincing. However, please note that if the
sound effects get too wet, they become mere "noise" and lose
their effectiveness. If your audio is not clear--the
audience loses their focus and your drama will suffer--they
could even tune to another station.
When using a microphone with an effect, we often have
actors step from one mic to another depending upon if they
use the effect or not--like if a character is using reverb
to introduce a flashback, but then appears without reverb
during the flashback. I always mark their script with [REVERB] or [DRY] to
keep them straight.
Mixing Consoles
The MT&R production studio came with a "broadcast" mixing
console--although it isn't particularly suited for radio
drama. You should look into a mixer that has several inputs
(for each mic as well as your music playback devices) along
with tone controls and the ability to send/return effects
devices. Putting the effects devices through such a
dedicated "effects loop" is a much better way to control
noise and effects levels (wet/dry) than putting the device
"in-line" from the mic to the sound board input. Most music
production mixers, such as those from Mackie, Tascam and
Panasonic will have these valuable features. Headphone mixes
for at least the director and sound effects people are
desirable. Behringer
offers quiet, inexpensive mixers well suited to producing
radio drama--live or in the studio, several come with
built-in reverbs and other effects.
Headphones
I highly recommend Sennheiser HD-202 headphones—available between $20-$30
on-line (Search at Google for: Sennheiser "hd-202”) These headphones are
comfortable and provide great acoustical isolation from the sounds
nearby—something very useful when the SFX artists or keyboardist must gauge
their own volume and balance in the mix. I’d suggest headphones for the sound
effects artists and the director. Also buy a straight (not coiled) extension
cables. Get 20-foot or 25-foot cables. The Sennheiser HD-202 headphones use a
1/8” plug, but come with a 1/4” adapter, so you can get extension cables with
either 1/8” or 1/4” male and female ends. Try Radio Shack or search Google
for: 25 Foot Stereo "Headphone Extension Cable" 1/8
Music Cues
We use between 13 and 20 music "cues" per
program--everything from the program themes and episode
intros to "stings," music beds and even some car driving
sound effects. For more information about finding
and using music cues, see my page
Fitting Music to Radio Drama.
We currently play our music cues from custom made CDs.
(CD-Rs--as in, recordable). When a music cue is
called for, we push the track number and pause button--wait
a second for it to cue up, then release the pause button to
trigger the cue. A decent home CD-player can do the job.
Fancier broadcast CD-players can even skip the between track
gaps and self-cue themselves. However, if you burn
your own CDs with music cues, make sure to test them in the
intended CD-player well before production--some CD-players won't sync up
fast and some CD-players won't play some CD-R discs at all--it depends on the
blank CD-R media and the CD-player. Also, CD-players can vary in how long a new
track is muted before it starts to play--if your track starts at 0:00, it's
possible that the first second or two of music could be muted--yuck! In my
professional rig, I use an American Audio SDJ-1 Dual SD MP3 Player (try
www.amazon.com)--it uses plays MP3s from
those SD memory cards that all the digital cameras use nowadays.
When I burn music cue CD-Rs, I always put eight seconds
of silence at the end of the track. The ending silence gives
the engineer a safety period to turn down the music channel
on the mixer before the next track starts--sometimes
engineers get busy and run out of hands. You may want to put
less silence between those tracks that must quickly play
back-to-back. For manipulating the time between tracks, I
highly recommended CD-Architect, the CD
burning software available from Sonic Foundry
http://www.sonicfoundry.com. It was perfect for cutting
radio drama cue CDs. Look for other fancy CD-R
burners--especially ones that let you manipulate the index
points. Another option is to use two CD players and two
identical CDs, then alternate between machines for every
other cue.
Another approach would be to use a "sampling" keyboard that would trigger the
cues from specific notes, or have a computer play music cues as sound files in
the popular MP3 format.
I would only suggest that whatever method you use, you
may need to have two devices to play music--not for back up,
but for back-to-back playing. If a script has a battle
raging, you'll use one machine to play the battle music, but
once the battle scene ends (which can vary based upon how
fast the actors speak), you may need to play another cue
immediately and you can't wait while you swap tapes or CDs
or wait for the next CD track to be reached. If you need
super-fast triggering, use two machines.
If you use duplicate CDs to cue from, just keep your
track numbers straight. Here's how I indicate machines and
tracks for a music cue when writing a script: A is for
machine 'A' and the 5 if for CD track #5:
4. MUSIC:[A-5]
STORMY DREAMS-ESTABLISH. LET IT FINISH.
Here's what I provided for the engineer on a horror show
called "Grim Scary Tales." The numbers in parentheses
indicate how long the cue runs on the tape in
minutes:seconds. The designation BED means there will be
dialogue under the cue and BRIDGE means the music plays
between scenes with no dialogue under. The [Machine: A -#1]
indicates which CD-player and the track number for this
music cue.
MUSIC CUES: “Crusade of Terror!”
1) Grim Scary Tales Intro (BED) (0:40)
[Machine A - #1]
2) Episode Intro/Battle (BED)
(1:00) [B - #2]
3) Elsa’s theme (BED) (0:25) [A - #3]
4) Citadel Celebration (BRIDGE) (0:15)
[B - #4]
5) Stormy Dreams (BED) (0:15) [A - #5]
6) Cavern Tomb (BED) (2:10) [B -
#6]
7) Eblis theme (BED) (0:25) [A - #7]
8) Elsa Underground (BED) (1:20) [B
- #8]
9) Ghoul Attack (BED) (0:40) [A - #9]
10) Tender Garrick (BED) (0:34) [B
- #10]
11) Ascent of Eblis ((BED) 0:45) [A -
#11]
12) Rid-Go Commercial (0:33) [B - #12]
13) Grim Scary Tales Outro (BED) (0:30)
[A - #13]
Marking up the Script
The director, together with the engineer, should go over
the script and mark it up as to where, when and how long
music cues run. The designation BED means there will be
dialogue under the cue and BRIDGE means the music plays
between scenes with no dialogue under. I use two
different hi-lighter pens (one for Machine "A" and the
other for Machine "B" cues) and highlight the cues. Then I
draw a vertical line with the hi-lighter through any
dialogue or sound effects cues to show just how long the
music cue runs. Some DAT/CD machines (or cues) may need a
bit of time to begin playing--if so, we will mark the script
to begin the cue just a bit earlier than where the script
indicates.
Here's a representation--as can best be presented in HTML
of what we do. I can't show the vertical lines, but explain
where they would go, below.
(page 8 from my adaptation of Macbeth: Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare On The Air
“Macbeth”
8.
1.
MACBETH: That will never be. Who can impress the
forest?
Yet my heart throbs to know one thing. Tell me,
if your art can tell so much, - shall Banquo’s issue
ever reign in this kingdom?
2.
SOUND: THUNDER.
3. MUSIC:
[A-2] WEIRD MUSIC-UP. DUCK FOR VOICES.
4. ALL WITCHES:
Seek to know no more.
5. MACBETH: I
will be satisfied. Deny me this, and an eternal
curse fall on you! Let me know!
6.
SOUND: INTENSE BUBBLING-SLOWS-STOPS. THUNDER.
7.
MACBETH: Why sinks that cauldron? And what noise is
this?
8. FIRST
WITCH: Show!
9. SECOND WITCH:
Show!
10. THIRD WITCH:
Show!
11. SOUND:
THUNDER.
12. MUSIC:
WEIRD MUSIC (BED)--FADES.
13. MUSIC: [B-3]
HERALD HORNS (BRIDGE)--DUCK.
14. NARRATOR:
Thus, the stage was set for...
(A pink hi-lighter line would be
drawn vertically from just before cue #3 to just below cue
#12.
Cue #13 would only be hi-lighted
green since the cue doesn't play under any other cues.
Note that I also included the machine
track ID [A-2, B-3] when that music cue is on one or another
machine. This simplifies the
engineer's job a good deal.)
Rehearsals
The engineer should be familiar with the music and script
before the cast and SFX crew begin the cue
rehearsals. I suggest you read along with the script and
practice triggering the music cues. Then do a second
run-through adding any reverb or filter effects. It's
important that you know your script and story. You'll be
busy enough adjusting mic volumes when the regular rehearsal
and production starts. At some recording sessions, I've had
one person watch the mixer and the other read the script and
trigger the cues. It depends on how many engineers you can
get/pay.
Engineering radio drama is not difficult if you know your
script cold. Don't make life tough for yourself by trying to
wing it.
On-Air Style Live production Vs.
Post-Production Assemblage:
This article has covered how to engineer a radio drama
produced in the "golden-age" style, where all
dialogue, music and sound effects are created in real time.
However, much of it applies to the recording of the elements
of drama that can later be manipulated in what is called
"post-production."
I choose to produce audio dramas in the old fashioned
"On-air" live style. If you have sufficient prep time and a
large enough cast and crew, you can produce your show
quickly, cheaply, and with a very realistic feel. However,
to minimize errors, this method requires a bit of
organization on the producer's part and enough rehearsal for
both cast and crew. It also relies on the music being able
to properly fill the times required by the script. I compose
my own music for my productions in such a way that it will
run just the right length for the performance.
Much more common is the style of production where the
dialogue is recorded separately and then the music and sound
effects are added in post-production. This method allows
more editorial control, but can take longer since everything
must be assembled and layered together--usually
through a computerized multi-track recorder (For PC's:
Cakewalk, Cubase, Vegas, the free program called Audacity (www.audacity.sourceforge.net/
) etc. For Mac's: Pro Tools, Digital Performer,
etc.)
A drawback with the post-production method is that the
actors are performing in a vacuum--they can't hear the music
or sound effects that will accompany them and this may
result in a less expressive performance. Also extensive
cutting and pasting of dialogue lines can ruin the actors'
timing. Lastly, the amount of work required to assemble a
show bit by bit can stretch out greatly, making for a
tedious and expensive job.
A lot of people favor the intensive post-production
method, but I prefer to record my shows live into a
multi-track tape machine (a Tascam DA-88 or Edirol R-9 2-track recorder) and then dump that
into a computerized audio editing program (Cakewalk Sonar. I then edit the separate tracks (music, SFX,
dialogue) by replacing bad lines with re-takes, adding in
extra sound effects and doing digital pasting of music cues
(replacing the analog playbacks that were used when
recording the whole show live). I've found that this hybrid
method gives me a "live" feel while allowing for enough
editorial control. With it, I am able to produce a high
quality program in a very short time.
For some smaller productions, I record in my home studio
directly to my computer's hard disk (using Cakewalk's "Sonar" software package). I then layer the music and sound
effects tracks, assembling the program, scene by scene. This
can be time-consuming, but is sometimes necessary when I
have a very low budget for cast and crew.
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