Whenever I’ve musically directed a show, or even just played in the band I’ve always tried out technology as a means to improve the quality of the music the band is producing. Amateur theatre has more than it’s share of compromises, not least in the orchestra pit, so any way I can find of getting a better outcome is worth it. Plus I like playing with the gadgets and software.

I’ve tried a few different setups over a number of shows running on my various Mac laptops over the time (starting with an iBook G4 – I can’t even remember what I ran on that thing, followed by a MacBook and now MacBook Pro). I’ve used Native Instrument’s Kontakt 2 a number of times with various software libraries. I believe I played You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown and Tick, tick… BOOM! on this setup. For Charlie Brown, I (rather non-ideally) covered the reeds on keyboard while conducting. I recall the flute patch I was using was very successful, but the clarinet and sax less so (in that order). Still, it meant I wasn’t leaving anything out of the already compact arrangement. For piano we just used the on-board sound of a Yamaha Clavinova, a sound I’ve never been particularly fond of. Tick, tick… BOOM! was easier as I was relying mostly on piano – Native Instrument’s Akoustik in this case – as well as some rock organ and a piano+bells combo. Driven by the same Yamaha Clavinova, I was able to program the piano+EP with pulsing delay exactly how I wanted it for “Real Life”1. This worked well, and the sound of the Akoustik was greatly appreciated, particularly for the all the exposed and solo piano parts that call for a bit more realism than the “rock piano” sound on the cast album.

On a note of technical functionality, I always tend to use the “voice select” buttons on given keyboard, such as the Clavinova to send Program Change messages to the sampler to select the correct patch. I’m more practiced in this method than using a foot pedal, and it’s also dark in the pit and your view is naturally obstructed. Interestingly, the Clav throws some wild Program Change numbers, not just 1,2,3,4 etc across the panel as you’d expect, and as my Roland did. This made programming and running the patches at home rather difficult. To avoid having to reprogram the sampler at the theatre, or maintain two versions, I wrote a script in PureData (also known as PD) which grabbed the midi input, took out the program change messages and depending on a toggle I could easily switch, it would map them to the program numbers that Kontakt was expecting. PD would then output the MIDI back to Kontakt. It worked perfectly and didn’t really introduce any latency issues at all. I believe I also wrote one which converted the program change messages into channel changes.

I played the Keys 1 book for a production of Blood Brothers using Apple’s Main Stage (version 1). Again, it’s a piano heavy show but called for some rhodes, rock organ, bell combos and all those ghostly (or rather, ghastly) synth pads. I was determined to avoid the tacky sound of the Blood Brothers cast recordings, so went for more acoustic, earthy sounding pads (and combinations of two pads in some cases, or a pad and an EP). I stayed well clear of anything that sounded FM-generated. The piano was an interesting one for this show; I tried many different patches and ended up with Garage Band’s default piano patch. It was bright enough (overly bright) to cut through the mix when needed. It sounded awkward by itself, but with the rest of the band it seemed completely appropriate. At times I’d doubt myself thinking “Surely not, there must be something a bit more ‘real’”, but I ended up playing all performances with it. Main Stage itself is a chunky beast. It looks perfect for what I want it to do, but it’s very heavy and I did have some stability issues (overall it was fine).

The only other setup of note was when I used Logic because I had drum tracks for 70% of the songs that I wanted to punch in. The show was Nuncrackers and I had neither room on the stage for a drummer, nor a physical person who was particularly interested so I sequenced all of the more necessary drum parts. I played them on a keyboard to improve the ‘human’ feel, and copied and pasted to reduce the work. It’s not a musically complex show, and most of the songs run straight through without any vamps allowing me to start the click track (the 4 musos were on headphones). Logic is not built for this sort of stuff, so when I did have vamps, I had a few keys I would hit on my laptop to turn on and off loops. It was extremely stressful as I sometimes only had a single bar to activate a repeat or the drum part would have carried on without us, but it worked 95% of the time. As an added bonus, this setup mitigated any sound control issues that would have been extremely problematic with a live kit on stage.

Overall, these weren’t particularly demanding synth shows, mostly relying on acoustic piano, EPs and bells. I’d love to find a great brass ensemble patch that I could incorporate in the same way, because I’ve heard some great ones in shows I’ve seen but have never been able to replicate it. Also, in the future I’d like to give Main Stage 2 a whirl and see how it handles playing a live show, perhaps one with more demanding requirements.

1: The director told me she saw another amateur production where the pianist, on an acoustic piano, mimicking the delay by playing each repetition.