Aladdin in Greystones Theatre

I had the amazing pleasure of doing the sound for St. Brigid’s School’s production of Mary Poppins and Aladdin! It ran for 2 nights in the Greystones Theatre. Usually these kids’ show are very samey, but this one blew me away!

The “Junior Choir” opened the night with their production of Mary Poppins, going through all the songs from Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! to A Spoonful of Sugar. They belted out the tunes and narrated the story before the interval when the “Senior Choir” got ready to perform Aladdin!

Not a normal Aladdin Script!

This was no normal Aladdin script though – this was a specially adapted version called Aladdin Jr. It was the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life! It generally followed the same story, but the language was a lot easier and it was much funnier – although the lead characters still had a huge amount of lines to learn! Keep in mind that these kids are all under 12!

The cast of Aladdin performing in Greystones Theatre

The Genie was hilarious – and somehow was always the one who ended up having to ad-lib to cover up silences! Aladdin and Jasmine both blew the audience away with their singing on “A Whole New World”. The narrators remembered a very large chunk of the script and kept us informed of all the developments in Aladdin’s love affair!

I just have to commend all the kids and teaching staff that were involved in that production! I would have watched it a few more times if I could have!

Now the fun bit!

Mix position which got surprisingly busy at times!

The 4 main characters wore Sennheiser mics, and took care of them very well! I was slightly worried about giving packs to kids this small, but they were impeccably behaved!

The rest of the cast were picked up by4 AKG mics across the front of the stage, as well as 3 more hanging above the stage.

The narrators used one of 3 SM58′s across the front of the stage. These were also used for some solo songs by cast members who were not individually mic’d.

The band consisted of keys, 2 guitars, bass, drum machine and a flute.

I was mixing on a Yamaha M7CL digital desk, and ended up using 28 channels in total!

This one should be obvious…. if it is 19″ wide, and has rack ears, it really should be in a decent flight case! If you have not got that far yet, bookmark this page and come back when your delivery arrives! Even the ABS Plastic racks are fine. Just some sort of protection for the equipment inside is absolutely necessary.

Along with protection, flight cases save time:

Power

You can have all your mains wired up before you take the lid off the case! You don’t have to do anything fancy with this. A plugboard on the inside of the rack. When you need to set up, you just drop the power cable out and everything is immediately powered up!

Or you could take this a little bit further. We have cut all our IEC cables to the exact length that is required (obviously leaving enough slack to route them neatly). This stops the back of the rack from getting cluttered up with lots of cable bunched up.

Looms

Realistically, if you have more than one signal cable coming out of the rack then you should use a loom. Looms take many different “cores” or cables through one lead, which is a lot neater. We have 16 compressors in a rack, and all the inserts go through one loom. Can you imagine 16 seperate insert leads coming out of the back of the rack? It would be a nightmare.

Patchbays

When you have everything inside and plugged in, it can get difficult to get at the stuff you need. Patchbays are a great way of keeping what you need to touch on the outside. You shouldn’t (hopefully) need to touch your power connections ever again, so they can be left. But inputs and outputs work great on a patchbay. See my example below!

Cable ties

Cable ties are very handy to neaten things up – but be very careful! Don’t go over the top! Leave yourself some slack in case you need to change something quickly. Make sure you don’t have to strip the entire rack just to change a fuse!

With this warning in mind – go have fun with cable ties! Tie mains power together up one side of the rack. Tie signal together down the other side.

Now lets see a nice rack!

I snook a camera into the warehouse to bring you these exclusive photo’s…. Enjoy!

Loom for signal, small patchbay for antenna inputs, 16A mains power input and output

There is a lot going on in there, but with a few cable ties and some smart thinking, it can be kept nice and neat!

Cable ties are your friend - but can turn on you!

All our network connections for WSM (Wireless Systems Manager) go into a hub stuck to the top of the rack. Out of the way, but we can still see status lights.

A simple patchbay for outputs from an amp rack

Flight cases make the rack look good from the front too!

A fantastic evening’s journey into the world of Stephen Sondheim packed full of some of his greatest music performed by multiple award winning Irish singers and actors. Songs including, Children Will Listen, Being Alive, Pretty Woman and Send in the Clowns to name but a few and including material from Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Assassins, Anyone can Whistle and Merrily we Roll Along. If you’re a fan of Sondheim or of just great music, this is a night for you.

Cool! I aint mixing, and I have cleared my calendar for that night!