There’s a lot we, as theatre sound cue designers, can learn from the studio recording industry. In the studio it’s very much about definition or clarity. Frequently a “mix” bares little true relationship with the real world. Rather it’s an implied accuracy designed to satisfy the listener.
Creating satisfying sound cues, particularly those composed of multiple tracks, can and indeed should use similar principles.
A “Real World Example” That Is Truly “Fake”
A drum kit is a classic case in point, particularly in rock music. Some of the best examples come from the nineteen eighties with artists such as Phil Collins. Placement of the individual drums through careful use of a pan control – snare, kick, toms, hi-hats, crash and ride cymbals etc – creates a dynamic panorama of audio that sounds more realistic and contains more clarity and energy than say Ringo Starr’s kits on early Beatles records (including the stereo ones). In reality, when listening to a drum kit “live” we don’t hear it spaced out in this manner across the sound spectrum at all. But a recording, and in a very real sense our sound cue mixes are kind of “live-time recordings”, is enhanced and becomes more satisfying when we do.
One might think that the primary method of laying out, in our example a drum kit, would be dictated by the physical position of the instrument in the kit – and to a certain extent they are. Bass/Kick to the centre, snare off to the right of centre etc. But they are also placed according to frequency.
A kick drum being a low frequency sound primarily, fits better sonically in the centre because it acts as an anchor for the “rhythm” and because a low level sound is more full bodied in the centre of the spectrum,sounding wimpy when panned off centre or to the extremes (which may well be the effect you want to achieve in special circumstances).
A snare on the other hand is a higher pitched sound, a snare “cracks” or “smacks” and as such isn’t going to become muddy if moved a little more off centre. Because a snare has an underlying lower frequency to it’s sound as well (we’re talking acoustic snares here and not a Lyndrum type sound) it’s usually not a good idea to be to extreme in it’s placement lest we lose that “natural” feel and the impact of the drum stick on the skin.
Toms are a different thing altogether, a low tom has a sufficient mixture of high and low frequencies to move it to the outer left of the sound spectrum, a mid tom a little further centre from that and a hi tom further to centre again. Cymbals are similar. Most drum kits in rock music for example are panned approximately along these lines in a mix:
- Bass/Kick Drum: – Centre
- Small Tom:- Right (3)
- Snare: – Right (8)
- Crash Cymbal:- Right (11)
- High Hat: – Right (14)
- Medium Tom: – Left (3)
- Low/Floor Tom: – Left (7)
- Crash Cymbal: – Left (14)
Combine this with judicious – read not overdone – compression, reverb and even delay and you can really get an incredible array of sounds that can be “natural” sounding, bizarre, wacky or even “massive” ala Phil Collins “In The Air Tonight”.
For Our Theatre Sound Cues
Most of us probably aren’t going to be mixing drum kits in our sound cues for theatre productions very often. However the example is a good one in terms of illustrating how a collection of related sounds can be tweaked by judicious panning to produce a panorama of audio for either/and/or a natural sound or a unique or dramatic effect.
Spend some time playing with pan on your sound cues, especially when using a theatre sound cue software program like MixAction that allows playback of multiple tracks at once in “layers”.
Scott Kane