In the dim and distant past, when I didn’t know any better (and West End producers weren’t keen to enlighten me), I rigged my sound systems on my own, balancing precariously on ladders with a speaker in one hand and a wrench in my back pocket. I crawled through filthy spaces to run cables to FOH positions, lugged mixing desks and tape-recorders into impossibly small alcoves, and cadged mains supplies from unwilling house electricians who didn’t hold with this new-fangled sound design stuff.
After a while, I sometimes managed to find someone to help out for a few bucks and a pint or two in the pub afterwards, but nothing really on a regular basis, and in fact, on one particular charity gig when the promised help failed to materialize, I rigged four UPA-1s on proscenium booms, on my own, off a ladder, as well as manhandling the amp racks down a flight of stone stairs to the basement, running all the cables and setting up the mics for the band. It nearly killed me.
Then one day, I met a chap who was handling projection on a show that I was working on as sound designer. Yes, children, we did projection long before that upstart video came along—programmable, as well. Do a Google search for “AVL Dove” for a look back into the time when the clatter of multiple Kodak Carousel projectors changing slides was the annoying sound of the day. This chap, one John Owens, told me that he did sound as well, not as a designer, but as a production sound engineer, and if I wanted to not put systems together all on my own, he was the man to help out.
It so happened that everyone on this particular production, with the exception of the director, was called John: him, me, the lighting designer, and the talent (it was a one man show), which got a tad confusing during technical rehearsals, and in consequence, we became Mr. Leonard and Mr. Owens. In time, we went into business together, and then, many years later, out of business together, at which point I carried on as sound designer, and he went on to become a well-respected theatre consultant, now resident in New York and doing very well, I must say.
And so I was introduced into the world of the production sound engineer: a body of people with a set of skills that are as invaluable to a sound designer as his laptop and his esoteric ear-buds. I have been fortunate to work with some of the very best in the business, both here in the UK and on Broadway, and they have become friends and colleagues, gently dissuading me from some of my more foolhardy plans and digging me out of deep, deep holes when I’ve ignored them and gone ahead anyway. Mostly, this has been done with a sad shake of the head and a gentle reprimand, as nothing is more delicate than a sound designer with a bruised ego.
Now that Mr. Owens has become respectable, having tired of digging me and other sound designers out of our respective holes, I have a small go-to team of PSEs who know my foibles and can anticipate and appreciate the sometimes rather strange requests that can appear on my kit lists and are able to decipher my quaint shorthand terms for items of kit, the numbers and letters of which temporarily escape my rapidly diminishing memory. “You know, that small square black rectangular thing that I like to use as a float mic…” They can instantly identify this as a Crown GLM 200 and differentiate it from “that big black rectangular thing that I don’t like to use as a float mic but have no choice…” which is, of course…well, I’m sure you know what I mean.
My favorite UK production sound engineer is a genius by the name of Ken Hampton. Ken is brilliant, knowledgeable, diplomatic, thorough, and just loves a challenge. As I write this, he is busily engaged with a colleague of mine, working on The York Mystery Plays and putting what will no doubt be a pristine-sounding installation into York Minster, the largest medieval Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe, with an RT60 in excess of seven seconds.
Nothing fazes Ken: He has a toolkit and an accessories kit to cover all eventualities, and if he hasn’t got it, he’ll either make it or source it incredibly quickly. On an outdoor gig as part of the 2012 Olympics, Ken not only provided a flight-cased refrigerator to keep the milk for our tea and coffee at a sensible temperature during the week-long heatwave that we had to endure, but he also sorted out quite a few problems for the broadcast team, who turned up more than a little unprepared.
Ken and John Owens in the UK, along with Jim van Bergen and Chris Cronin in the USA, and a few others who I don’t have space to mention, have gotten me out of more trouble than I care to remember, and yet, they are rarely considered as being part of what’s now become known as The Creative Team. The job that they do allows those of us who call ourselves designers to do the best work that we can, and without them, many a nascent sound designer would have come a horrible cropper. They deserve our thanks, our appreciation, and probably, at least in some cases, our awards.
On one of my earlier forays into the world of Broadway, I committed an almost unforgivable faux pas, the details of which are not important now. Suffice to say that I really shouldn’t have done what I did, and I really shouldn’t have done it when I did it. My production sound engineer took me to one side and gently explained that he’d managed not to get me thrown out of the theatre and that he’d mollified the local crew and that everything was now okay. I asked him what he’d said. “Oh that was easy,” he replied. “I just told them you were an ignorant Brit who didn’t know any better, and they accepted that without question.”
Let’s hear it for production sound engineers all over the world.
John Leonard is an award-winning designer who has been working in theatre sound for over 40 years. In his spare time, he records anything that makes an interesting noise in high-definition surround sound. He is also almost certainly the only sound designer in the world to have piloted a Spitfire. His sound effects libraries are available online at www.asoundeffect.com.
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