Creating Good Vibrations At Mickey And Minnie’s California Digs
By Nancy Caronia

David Hatmaker and the automated Yamaha PM1D

When Walt Disney created his first animated characters, it’s likely he had no idea what impact his creations would have on the entertainment industry. Today, Disney is a multi-million dollar family entertainment business. The company has recently added a new theme park, Disney’s California Adventure, located next door to its very first park, Disneyland, in Anaheim, CA.

Comprised of three separate thematic locales--Hollywood Pictures Backlot, Golden State, and Paradise Pier—Disney’s California Adventure was designed to be a bit more edgy than Disney’s previous theme parks, as well as be a leader in Anaheim’s urban renewal process, according to David Hatmaker, technical director, Disneyland Resort. Disney’s California Adventure, Disneyland and the Disneyland Hotel are connected through Downtown Disney, a series of upscale retail shops, restaurants and entertainment establishments, all of which present challenges audio technicians normally don’t have to face.

“Disney diligently works to make audio an integral part of its theme park experience,” said Hatmaker, noting the sound used throughout the parks is not simply background noise while waiting to take a seat on a roller coaster. He should know. After graduating from Long Beach State with a B.A. in music, Hatmaker did a two-year stint at Knotts Berry Farms as an audio technician and then two more years at Crystal Cathedral before joining Disney as an audio engineer in 1987.

“I love this gig,” he enthused. “What I really like about it is it’s different every day. We do everything from one mike on an individual to a full blown rock ‘n roll rig. We’ve even designed and sent out a Radio Disney national tour. It’s played in facilities with anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 people at a mall to 6,400 people at the Shrine Theater in LA.”

While it’s true that a show is sometimes designed specifically for a road tour, most of Hatmaker’s work consists in keeping on top of the audio within the parks, no small feat in a one mile square area filled with outdoor attractions and surrounded by residential and business districts. “We try to be a good neighbor in the city of Anaheim,” he admitted.

“We have imposed noise abatement: no spillout at the walkway just outside the fence of the park into the surrounding areas at about 65 dB. It presents some interesting challenges”. How do you have the impact of an outside show while containing it so it doesn’t bleed out into adjacent areas? “One answer is we have carefully utilized newer horn designs, asymmetrical horns that fire somewhat downward. We always have to keep a close eye on the math and look at the inverse square law. Sometimes we just have to admit that it’s not possible to do a show in a certain geographical area.”

Disney’s reputation allows the over 300 technicians and 11 technical directors to push the limits when designing shows and events within the park. Hatmaker said he has the opportunity to work with many of the top audio design manufacturers and feels that Disney has helped drive the audio industry not only through it’s innovative designs, but in its rigorous use of beta testing. For example, microphone manufacturers have used Disneyland as a beta site since 1990 when the company first began taping mics on performers.

Though headsets have been used when a particular look is called for, as a rule lavaliers are the mics of choice for all Disney shows. The mics get quite a workout since the shows are louder than Broadway and the performers do five to ten shows per day. “Back in the beginning, the mics would last hours and maybe days. Now they last weeks and months. The technology has come a long way. The performers sweat and if there’s one thing microphones hate besides water, it’s sweat. The salts of the sweat tend to build up in the corners of the surround and they fail the mics. Pretty icky. We go through a lot of lavalier microphones.”

Hatmaker pointed out that Disney is dedicated to keeping it’s patrons from noticing the technology that makes it all happen, as in the case of hiding the lavalier mics. Additionally, speakers and subwoofers are routinely worked into the landscape such as the vaulted inground subwoofers designed by Steve Kadar at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) for Disney’s California Adventure. Pairs of 18-inch rubber surround, waterproofed subwoofers are placed underwater in a concrete vault.

A special water drain was designed so the water avoids the speakers and the subwoofers go out a tuned cavity that has an exit of approximately two feet eight inches by four feet, all completely invisible to park patrons. Other nifty ways of hiding speakers include sculpting steel wire and articulate foam into rock formations, and then putting speakers behind the finished sculptures as is done in Golden State, the Yosemite-like theme attraction in Disney’s California Adventure.

Hatmaker said the technological advances of the last decade have made everyone’s life a bit easier. “With a digital console, you can recall settings so that the racks and racks of audio analog gear have been replaced with computers and small racks that have many inputs and outputs for digital processing. Also manufacturing processes have allowed speaker manufacturers to actually go back to designs that were theories in the 40s and 50s and find out if the designs work. That means bigger, better line arrays, more compact horns, and better geometry. It’s a great time to be alive! Soon we’ll be able to use a palm pilot to control and EQ digital audio on an Ethernet system. A technician will be able to go out with his Palm Pilot and trigger a whole sequence of show events via the infrared port.”

Hatmaker noted that the company’s first big push toward digital came in 1994 with “The Hunchback of Notre Dame Festival of Fools” at Disneyland park. Citing the show as “super complicated,” he said that the director warned them at the first meeting the show would be a “bit of a challenge.” “If the show had been theater in the round, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. That’s just one center stage in a circle with the speakers hung around the circle,” said Hatmaker. “But the director wanted to also do theater around you in a five acre space. There were four stages around the center gazebo stage placed at 12, 3, 6 and nine o’clock. At noon there was a big 35-foot bell tower stage experience.”

“The other three areas had large performance areas that were interconnected to the other stages with ramping and runways. All these spaces had to be zoned. The director wanted to be able to put talent at a 3 o’clock stage and have them interact with the talent on the 9 o’clock stage 220 feet away. The digital console routed all the mics to their appropriate zones at the appropriate time based on a SMPTE time code and it also turned mutes on and off on an analog console as well. There was an analog feel and there was an analog console that the one audio operator mixed on, but then the mics went in the digital audio console and were routed to their appropriate places, frame accurate.”

Hatmaker said every venue within the parks has subwoofers installed and digital processing has allowed the designs to “acoustically steer where the lobes land, especially in the sub bass. The wavelengths are so long we’ll oftentimes delay back the subwoofers or the whole system. Typically, if you’re standing six or seven feet in front of a subwoofer, where we’ll often have guests, that sub energy is not getting to them, it’s out 35, 40 feet. However, if we move that subwoofer back in time, say ten or 15 milliseconds, the sub bass energy is closer to where we need it to be. We’re not blowing out the people at the stores or the vending carts, we’re putting the energy where we need it to go. It’s a multifold process and the digital audio technologies are allowing every designer now to do what they wanted to do for a long, long, long time.”

Hatmaker feels the major event of the last 25 years that changed the way audiences view the audio industry was not the invention of the CD or 5.1 home cinema, but the Sony Walkman. “For $125 to $150, people could put the sound right into their head. It was totally personal. It could go as loud or as soft as they wanted it, they could play whatever they wanted and they didn’t need a manual to put the thing together.

“But most importantly, it meant that buying a Michael Crawford tape meant they could play it in their Walkman and have 95 or 100 dB at their head relatively inexpensively. Well, when they then went to see Michael Crawford in ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ they wanted it to sound like their doggone headphones or why bother? I think what that pushed us all to do was make it a better experience--make it louder, thicker, bigger--surreal.”