The motion picture “Ghost” has returned from the entertainment afterlife in the form of a West End musical. Combining live acting and music with complex lighting, video and special effects, the show’s sound designer Bobby Aitken specified a DiGiCo SD7T for front of house mix requirements, which has allowed the team to stretch its remit to handling more than the audio.
Directed by Tony Award-winning Matthew Warchus, the show opened in July at the Piccadilly Theatre and is currently booking through until January next year. Working closely with associate Simon King and “Ghost’s” head of sound, Ben Evans, Aitken designed a system that had to work very closely with the other production disciplines.
“The SD7 is more of a production hub than just an audio mixer on this show,” he says. “It does so much. Of course it mixes the band, the vocals and audio streams from various playback machines, but it also serves as the timing and synchronization hub for the entire production
Aitken continues, “Because it is such a technically complex show, with video forming many of the set elements, the band, video and lighting have to be locked together. We use Ableton Live as a kind of ‘master lock’. It is started at the beginning of every song and produces a click track that the band plays with.
“It also provides additional audio playback and, importantly, SMPTE and MIDI time code, which we then put out to the video and lighting guys for synchronizing parts of their production with the show. Everything basically comes through the SD7T. We also use the code to start many of the “non-orchestral” audio files.
“The mixer is very deeply programmed; all in all we use about 110 stereo inputs, 28 stereo aux buses and 32 matrix outs. We step through 170 snapshots in the course of the show.”
Additionally, a DiGiCo DS-00 is located sub-stage that feeds a personal monitor mixer for each musician, allowing them to handle their own 16 channel mix. There are about 60 cues on the DS-00, which are fired from MIDI commands from the SD7T. “The DS-00 is basically unmanned, it’s pre-programmed and just gets on with it,” says Aitken.
Live stage shows also mean that, however much a show is rehearsed, there will always be slight differences in the performance. To accommodate this, certain effects need to be fired manually. The SD7T allows this combination of technical and human elements to easily co-exist.
