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Yamaha Digital Consoles Cast For Stage Production Of “SAMMY”

Production's sound designers John Shivers and David Patridge incorporate the digital consoles

The Tony Award-winning Old Globe in San Diego, California is currently hosting the hit play “SAMMY” based upon the life of legendary entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., the production’s sound design by John Shivers and David Patridge incorporating Yamaha digital consoles.

Masque Sound (East Rutherford, New Jersey) provided elements of the sound system for Shivers and Patridge. “It’s always a pleasure to work with clients as skilled and as organized as John and David,” states Scott Kalata of Masque Sound. “They are especially capable of designing well thought out systems that are extremely reliable and sonically pristine. They’re both right up there with the best sound designers in the business.”

A Yamaha PM5D digital audio console is ats the center of the sound system.

“We know the PM5D to be a quality digital mixing platform that presents a good combination of feature set versus economics. For shows on the scale of most regional theatres in the U.S., the PM5D offers a solution that has a reasonable footprint, is reliable, and extremely operator friendly, explains Patridge. “On SAMMY, we took advantage of the ability to cascade the inputs from a Yamaha MY16-AT card to buss the sound effects system into the PA.

“Sound effects for SAMMY were programmed using QLab V2 that we used as a master cue list to recall scenes in the PM5D. QLab’s audio was routed over optical from an RME Fireface 800 to the PM5D’s card slot, cascaded to the busses and, in turn, routed to various speakers.”

Patridge says that a Yamaha DM1000 digital console was paired with two AD8HR external preamp units to serve as a sub-mix for both drums and percussion as the sound design for SAMMY easily exceeded the inputs available on the PM5D.

“We like the higher quality microphone preamps available via the AD8HR and the ability to pair them with Yamaha’s product line of digital consoles using MY slots and serial control of preamp functionality is very convenient.”

Front of house mixing duties are handled by Old Globe engineer Erik Carstensen, the second project he has mixed for Shivers and Patridge. “Erik combines a good deal of industry experience as a sound engineer with a calm and good-natured demeanor – an excellent combination for a venue that could easily produce 15 different works in a season,” Patridge says.

“The selected channel programming and routing on the Yamaha PM5D is intuitive and flexible,” adds Carstensen. “I find that changing and storing EQ and dynamics settings, for example, is achieved quickly – vital in the production process where audio usually doesn’t get a lot of time to get it right. On top of that, using the PM5D in combination with our DME64 has been very reliable, show after show.”

With a cast of 16 of Broadway’s best singers and dancers, the world premiere musical, written by two-time Academy Award and Grammy Award winner Leslie Bricusse, depicts Sammy Davis Jr.‘s days as a child working in vaudeville through his time with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra as a member of the Rat Pack.

Yamaha Commercial Audio Website

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