Theatre Sound Recording

I am a sound technician and musician based in the United Kingdom providing recorded sound FX, music and voice-over recordings for Theatre Productions. The "Sound File Library and "Play Collections" on the menu will give you access to my sound FX library. If you would like to know more about how I prepare my show-tapes, please look at Hard Disc and Minidisc.

Most of my Sound FX work is for local Amateur Dramatics companies such as the Reigate Amateur Theatrical Society (RATS), of Reigate, Surrey and The Miller Centre Players, of Caterham, Surrey. Such Drama Groups provide a wide variety of venues from small multi-purpose halls, through open air productions to fully equipped professional theatres. Drama groups such as the ones mentioned above are capable of provide challenging and exciting drama of very high quality. From the technical point of view part of this capability is due to the money that can be spent on lighting, sound and stage equipment since there are no staff or manpower costs associated with their productions. The rest is due to the skill and enthusiasm shown by the stage crew and technicians.

I can provide cassettes, mini-discs or CD's on a commercial basis for individual projects or shows. But, I don't produce sound effects CD's.

As a musician I play guitar in a Barn Dance Band based in South-East England performing traditional English, Scottish and Irish music, with the odd French and Romanian tune thrown in for good measure.
Listen to three mp3 recordings of my band (These recordings were actually made at barn dances):

Hard Disc and Minidisc

When I first became involved with Theatre Sound, in the early 80's, I only had a Tascam 244 Portastudio and, later a Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder on which, with difficulty, I sometimes had to prepare the most complex of sound tapes. Those days are long gone. The digital revolution has swept the 'old ways' aside. All my 'show tapes' are now prepared and edited on the same computer that created this page.
 
Computer hard disc recording provides the best method of editing sound. Even the humble desk top PC can easily be configured to edit sound and music in ways that are almost impossible by any other means. Admittedly your PC must be fairly powerful and customized to work effectively with large quantities of digital sound. Also, there are disadvantages when you use the same PC for hard disc recording that you use for your word processing, Internet access and all the other little applications that you must have. You may have to set up a special configuration and you're bound to run out of hard disc space eventually. But, since hard disc recording is arguably the best method of sound recording available for the foreseeable future, if you need to manipulate sound and you don't need a dedicated professional, studio hard disc system then the humble PC can provide the answer.
 
For my Sound FX work I use Cakewalk Pro Audio 9. This is a good software package for Sound FX editing. I use it to prepare all my shows.
 
When each show tape is ready to run I, unfortunately, have to transfer it to another medium for playback at the theatre. Ideally, I would run the show from a PC using SAW+, but I've yet to find a theatre that has a PC in the control room, especially a PC that is powerful enough to run my software.

So, for the moment all my show tapes are recorded onto either, my Roland VS-880 Digital Studio Workstation, mini disc or compact disk.
 
For those of you not familiar with mini disc, it is a recordable optical digital disc. It is supposed replace the cassette since it can record and playback. However, due to the use of compression techniques to enable all the data to fit on the disc, it is technical inferior to compact disc. To date, no mini disc system has been devised that can come close to hard disc recording in terms of quality and ease of use. I very much doubt that the technology is capable of ever threatening hard disc for professional use except where high quality sound and flexibility are not a primary concern. However, mini disc has found favour in the theatre in the UK and is being used increasingly by radio stations, since theatre sound systems and radio jingles do not necessarily benefit from the best quality sound and some compromise is acceptable. For playback in auditoria that do not have their own equipment or the equipment is inadequate I use the Roland VS-880. The advantage of using this machine  is that it is an 8 track mixer and has built signal processing, compressor/limiter, reverb etc. as well as being a hard disc recorder with almost instant access to any part of the recording. It also has the advantage that I can pre-configure speaker selections, signal processing settings and even signal levels and save them for each performance without having to worry about using and configuring the theatre equipment. 

Sample Sounds

Here are some fun recordings of a woman's voice for your pleasure.

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