Q&A

Here are some questions that students have asked me. Feel free to use this in your work.

If you’re after lots of quotes, check out my book! There are also video interviews with me here and here. and some print articles here and here.

Career related questions

How did you become a theatre sound designer, and how has your training affected your work? 

I wasn’t really interested in drama or theatre at school, and wasn’t really aware of the potential of a career in sound design. I was interested in sound and music production from an early age. I applied onto an adult education course, age 17, at a local recording studio, where I learnt about recording techniques and MIDI. But I discovered I didn't particularly connect with producing studio-based music.

A friend of mine was involved in an amateur production when their sound operator fell ill, and suggested me to step in. Pretty much instantly I knew this was what I wanted to be doing, but whilst I’d read some Shakespeare at school in English, and the occasional (and boring) school trip to a RSC Sports Hall production, it was an entirely new world to me. I started doing voluntary backstage work, as stage crew and any other role I could find, on local amateur-dramatic productions, and eventually at the local theatre, and enjoyed it more and more. I then did a lot of research on the industry: looking through career packs, talking to people in the theatres I volunteered in, reading The Stage, etc and eventually decided to take the next step.

I applied to Central School of Speech and Drama on their theatre design course (which then was a mix of set, costume, lighting and sound design), and managed to get in, probably due to the mix of knowledge I’d gained from the music production course and the experience I’d gained from working on shows. This was at a time when tuition fees were free, and being from a low-income family, I qualified for a maintenance grant (some money towards living costs), which enabled me to move away from home to London, though I did also do part-time work throughout my course to keep fed. The first year of the course was a foundation year, learning all sorts of things, architecture, fine art, drawing, CAD, and various aspects of the design disciplines. This opened my eyes up to a lot of stuff that I had previously known nothing about and would prove to be a foundation for how I could discuss ideas and concepts creatively. In the following years we did lots of paper projects and the like, at which I did very badly on the whole. I looked around at the other students and realised that the work we were doing wasn't that dissimiliar but when I presented my work I usually managed to shoot myself in the foot somehow or another. It took me a while to work out that half of sound design is down to communicating your ideas effectively and diplomatically.

After graduating, I spent a few years working in an office, starting off doing data entry tasks, which paid the rent. I’d got some business cards printed and sent them to some fringe theatres, which led to designing shows there, which definitely didn’t pay the rent, or often at all, but we’re really valuable for me to I develop my communication and artistic skills. The office I worked in was an amazing acoustic consultancy, which gave me the opportunity to learn on the job a lot about speakers and acoustics. By then, some of my peers were from Central were getting their toes in the door of the industry and that led to me getting more causal freelance jobs (i.e. the odd day here and there) as a lighting and sound technician. These led to some longer-term theatre jobs, operating and mixing shows, and I started working more often as a sound operator on shows, particularly on devised theatre, and as an assistant to other designers. I spent about 6 years touring shows, both nationally and internationally, whilst building up more and more design credits. Eventually, the design work increased to the point where I could do it full-time.

What steps are there on the "career ladder" for a sound designer?

There is no formalised career ladder. Typically, as you are starting out you will be designing in smaller or lower profile venues, which pay less well. As your reputation grows and spreads you’ll perhaps be designing larger and higher profile shows, which typically pay better. You may also start working on shows that pay royalties, either a weekly amount of money or a percentage of their profit. From then on, career development is more about finding the companies, directors, venues, shows that you want to work with, or on. 

What sort of advice would you give to someone who wants to enter this field?

This is not an easy industry, but it can be very rewarding. On one hand, the hours can be very long, there often isn’t a formalised career path and it can take a number of years before you establish a steady income stream. on the other hand, you often work with people so intensely that very strong bonds are formed for life, you aren’t tied to a rigid career path, and there are numerous niches of the industry to explore. Working in the performing arts is often considered a precarious career, and indeed Acting is a very precarious career, as much because there are way more actors than jobs. Other roles in theatre have a much healthier ratio of people to jobs, and there are many more people who make a career out of it. You do need to be quite proactive, you have to push yourself forward. The sooner you step into a theatre the sooner you can start working in it. You can learn a lot just by watching shows, even if to see how not to do things!

Many people start off in theatre, and then move into other aspects of live events or performance. Many of the people running large scale live events (like the Olympics) or running corporate events start off in theatre - it’s a vibrant training ground for other industries.

How accessible is the industry if you’re from a working class background?

Class is an often discussed topic in theatre, particularly in acting and directing, where it is definitely an issue. But “backstage”, in my experience, it’s less of a problem. Part of that is because you are more likely to be judged on your work, and there is less competition for work than in acting. That’s not to say it’s easy to come into what is essentially a middle-class industry from a working class background - but it is very achievable.

Culturally, I haven’t found it much of an issue. The high school I went to was pretty good, so I’ve never felt educationally disadvantaged. I did A Level English Literature after school and that meant I was able to talk about the drama side of theatre with a degree of knowledge. Where I was lacking information about Greek classics, or whatever, Wikipedia was able to help me out! Financially, it can be more of a struggle in the early years if you don’t have a parental safety net. In my first few years I had a job in an office to pay the rent. I eventually swapped that for sound operating jobs which paid reasonably well, but wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. It took me about 6-8 years to get to be doing sound design full time, and I could perhaps have achieved that earlier as there were opportunities for low paid designs I had to turn down in favour of doing non-design work that would pay for food. That said, the experience I gained over those 8 years have proved invaluable since so I don’t regret my career path at all.

Whilst I have a working class background I don’t consider myself working class. I make a full time living working in the arts, which is the very definition of middle class!

Whilst I’ve worked hard, I have to acknowledge my privilege as I work in an industry that is predominantly white middle-class men, so being white and male has given me advantages. And I’ve been very lucky too. Not everyone who set out with the same career goals as I did managed to achieve it, working class, gender or otherwise.

Do I need to go to Drama School?

No, it’s not essential by any means, and lots of people working in theatre don’t do that.
When I went to drama school, it was at a time when the UK government would pay your tuition fees and even a maintenance grant towards food and rent, though I still left with a large debt even then. There are advantages to going to drama school - see more about this here - but nowadays that has to be balanced against the level of debt you will incur in going there. If you’ve already been doing some work in the industry, have some contacts, have some ways in, then you could perhaps explore them first. If you don’t feel like you currently have any way in to the industry, that’s something drama school can certainly help with - though even then you will need to be proactive and push yourself forwards in this.

Do I need to live in London?

No. It’s certainly easier if you do, but many people don’t, myself included. London is often seen as the centre of the industry, and certainly when I’m asked to meet a director that will often tale place in London, even if both of us don’t live there! There will be lots of meetings that you have, unpaid, that will hopefully lead to paid work, but don’t always, Travelling into London for these can be costly, but then living in London is costly too! More recently, people are more open to using Zoom, etc, to have meetings. Rehearsals for show often take place in major metropolitan cities, particularly London. I’ve worked on shows that opened in Edinburgh, or Leicester, or even in Dublin, that have rehearsed in London. Of course, many shows rehearse locally too.

It’s down to personal preference. There are lots of people who commute to London everyday, or who stay with friends or use AirBNB for short stays.

You work for yourself, what advantages and disadvantages are there in doing this ?

You have to maintain a large contact base to stay in work consistently. Being self-employed you receive no benefits or holiday pay, and you have to keep careful track of your finances and bookings. Work is often at short notice so it is tricky to plan long-term commitments such as holidays. Some people might not like it, but I love the variety and unpredictability of work. It’s very hard to get bored. And I mostly control my own hours, wear what I like and am my own boss.

How important have other skills, such as organisation, communication and networking, been to your career? 

i have learnt to be very diplomatic as tempers can get frayed during production weeks. I have to be disciplined and manage my time and resources carefully - my deadline is 1000 people listening closely to my work- you can't cover it up if you are late or your work is sub-standard. If I blow it someone else will get employed next time. Consequently, you also have to be good under pressure!

Do you have typical days?

I have no daily routine, but I work a similiar schedule often when shows are opening. I will often spend the daytimes of the last few weeks of a shows rehearsal in the rehearsal room watching how things are developing, and often creating sound in response and adding it into rehearsals. The first week of technical rehearsals typically run 10am - 10pm and is where we move the show into the theatre and all the elements together for the first time. At some point the show will open, which is when I leave that project and move on to the next one. Your social life will often revolve around the people you’re working with at the current time.

Do you do plays and musicals? How is it different working on them?

I do both, though I’m known more for doing plays now than musicals. Whilst there are some sound designers who specialise in one strand or another, there are many who work in both strands. And equally there are many theatre productions that resist being easily defined into either of the above strands.

Traditionally, there have been two strands of sound design for theatre: plays and musicals, but increasingly the demand is to have more sound effects in musicals, and more music and vocal reinforcement in plays, which is blurring the lines. So rather than say, this is what a musical sound designer does, and what a play sound designer does, it’s better to talk about what you do when you have a live band and lots of vocal reinforcement, and what you do when you have a big soundscape to produce.

When you have a band and lots of vocal reinforcement, then there will be a lot of psychological, technical and logistical management of those elements, to get the best performance and sound out of the band and the performers, in a way that supports the story and the sound design. There will often be a large sound system to design that provides the audience with a high level of intelligible sound across the whole auditorium, that will also provide the musicians with foldback of the cast, and the cast with foldback of the musicians. Sounds easy, but then bear in mind that the band are probably in a very confined area, the flute mic may only be 1 metre away from the Kick Drum, the mic’s the actors wear usually have to be concealed in the hairline, and are omni-directional, so will also pick up the band foldback in a reverberant state, the actors move around the stage a lot so system delay times have to be shifted as they move so the direct sound precedes the amplified sound for imaging purposes. Sound systems for live bands and vocal reinforcement are more complex than any other sound system you will ever come across- 100+ simultaneous inputs and dozens of outputs are common.

The creation of a pre-recorded soundtrack (which can include sound effects, a more abstract soundscape, finding music, or recording and producing a musical soundtrack), can vary in workload as every show varies in how much, or how little sound it needs. At the simple end, this may simply be providing a few doorbell/telephone ring/dog bark style effects. At the more complex end it may be developing long running ambient soundscapes that emotionally develop with the play, along with hundreds of sound effects and music cues. A lot of time is spent working with computers, creating and montaging sound effects and abstract sounds, working with a composer to record and produce their music, and then integrating everything into the show, around the rhythms of the performers. Again, this can result in vastly complex sound systems.

Audiences are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their understanding of sound, and have paid a lot of money for their ticket so they demand cinema quality sound. It’s becoming far more common for shows to have sophisticated soundscapes, vocal reinforcement and live music; requiring the sound designer and their team to be able to master many skills.

Creativity and Art / Within the creative team

What is your definition of being creative? How creative are you?

It's maybe overly-simplistic, but one way of viewing creativity is that it is simply generating ideas, and finding solutions to problems.

On a theatre show, the director has overall creative control. When I’m working with a director for the first time, a lot of my energy goes into earning their trust, so they feel they can safely hand some of that creative control over to me. This involves a lot of relationship-building, of talking ideas over and getting to understand their tastes. I often work with directors multiple times, and typically I’m able to build more and more trust over every show. It depends on the director and the show too- sometimes they will have very clear ideas of what they want for a particular show, and sometimes not. I often encourage directors to tell me the effect they’re trying to achieve, rather than how to achieve it. For example, by telling me they want a sense of increased tension for a particular moment, rather than by telling me they want distant thunder: this means I can suggest lots of other (less clichéd!) ways to achieve that effect.

Directors are increasingly sound literate, and keen to use elaborate sound design in their productions, and that automatically makes for a more creative collaboration.

Are we there to be artists, or tools of the directors? Would you give up work rather than get hired as a sound designer and be treated like a technician?

We can choose what we want to be.

If I were to ask you to make me a chair, you could craft a very functional and effective chair. Whilst you could say there is artistry in doing so, you might not describe your chair as a work of art, and you might describe yourself as a carpenter. On the other hand, you could choose to make something that is both a chair and a work of art, and you could describe yourself as an artist for doing so. How you create your work, and how you label what you create, is up to you. But it will also in turn define how you are perceived and treated, and how your work is valued.

Creating something that has a function, whether it’s a chair or a sound effect, does not negate artistry. Most great works of art or music have been created or composed in response to something, whether it is the artist’s emotional response to an event, or a financial commission. Most of the works of Mozart, Bach and Beethoven were financially commissioned and composed for a specific function, such as a celebration of a birthday or a military victory. Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Picasso’s Guernica, and Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings are all examples of works where the artist was given a creative brief and paid for their work.

I rarely encounter directors who reel off a list of sound effects they want in the show anymore. This was not so unusual when I was starting out but this was mostly because sound design is a young field (the technology enabling us to do what we do has not been around for long), and prior to that most directors wouldn’t have worked with a sound designer before, and instead were used to giving their stage manager a list of sound effects to try and obtain off a BBC sound effects vinyl record. During the 1990’s and early 2000’s, sound designers became more numerous, and the technology became more sophisticated, but many directors did not know what a sound designer could do, and often assumed we were technicians because they mostly saw us playing with technology. Up until then many directors had been effectively designing the sound themselves because there hadn’t been anyone else to trust to do it for them. It took a long time for those attitudes to change. Partly that came about as directors learnt what we could bring to the process, but it was also about building up the perception of the role as an artistic and creative role rather than a craft or technical role.

Do you feel your role is ever compromised more than it should be or that audio is under appreciated in the design process? 

That depends on your relationship to the director. I'm lucky to mostly work with directors that appreciate sound design and want to integrate it into their shows. I find that the lighting designer, set designer, video designers, costume designer tend to work together very closely, but they are all working towards the same visual look, which isn’t the realm I’m working in. I find that my collaboration is more with the performers, the writer and director than it is with the other members of the design team because we share the same aural world, though of course the sound design often interacts and shares cue points with other aspects of the design.

Do you consider the dynamics of sound are under appreciated by designers both in the construction of buildings and sets? Does the design of those spaces make your job easier/more difficult? 

In my experience, set designers don’t generally consider where speakers can go when designing a set. But, to be fair, they don’t know where I’m going to need to put speakers - and often neither do I at that stage of the process. Integrating speakers into a set can be frustrating for all concerned, particularly if it has to happen after construction has been begun, or even after it’s been completed. Sometimes the set design takes a hit, or sometimes I don’t get speakers where I’d ideally like them. But that’s life!

Sometimes the set design can create acoustic issues and I’ll try to head these off before construction begins.

Building design is another matter, but generally speaking most new theatres involve significant consultation with all departments. Though as with all things, what is good for one department is not necessarily good for another, and budgets often mean that good intentions can’t be implemented in the final build.

Sound design outside the attention of the audience

Could you possibly outline some of the projects youʼve been involved in involving subliminal background sound? 

One of my early projects investigating almost-subliminal sound was The Oresteia at the National Theatre. We started off with a recording of a heating system to create a low rumble that played from before the audience entered. The effect was that the audience ignored the rumble, in the way that we filter out constant background sound - and theatrically, our brains try and filter out anything we think is not part of the theatrical world - we try to focus on the stage. We were then able to bring in abstract sounds - pitched down bowed violin and the like - to subtely underscore the emotional, dramaturgical shifts in the play. We were also able to very slowly increase the level of the boiler rumble over the course of the play, until at the very end of the show, when a gun is fired, we simultaneously muted the rumble creating an immense silence.

I use these sorts of sounds a lot when I'm asked to create a sense of silence, or focus in on a part of the show - I will put atmospheric sounds before and after the scenes when silence or focus is required, and take them out to create a sense of silence. This process is largely subliminal for the audience. The background sounds I use range from abstract sounds, through to naturalistic atmospheres.

Do you find there are particular frequencies which get a stronger reaction than others? 

There are certainly different frequencies that have more emotional connections. For example, bass sounds I think generally adrenalise and excite us - I think we have a primal connection between bass beats and the sound of our heart thumping, and of running. There are sounds very high up, in the 15-20kHz range that are on the periphary of our hearing, that cause us distress. Try playing a sine wave at 15kHz very quietly, and it gives us that heachache'y tinnitus feeling that I often associate with traumatic events.

You mention that the audience often filter out your work subconsciously, do you think this is reflective of our culture in general? 

We certainly live in a world of noise unlike any generation before us. Think back 150 years and what would be the loudest sound anyone heard during their lifetime? For most people, the loudest thing they ever heard would be someone shouting or the crack of thunder. Now we routinely hear sounds much louder than that on a daily basis. Traffic and aircraft noise pervades our every waking moment and is almost inescapable across the globe. As we can't turn off our hearing in the same way we can close our eyes our brains have adopted many low-level filters to prevent us reaching sensory overload, to bring to our attention only the sounds that are important to us, and to filter out those that aren't. But e are still emotionally affected by those sounds even if we’re not consciously aware of them, and that’s a super powerful storytelling technique.

Practise

Plans and drawings

How do you create plans?

For the majority of the time, I will just mark up PDF’s with speaker positions using Apple’s Numbers application. That works pretty well for the majority of shows where millimetre accuracy is not necessary. Numbers let’s you drag in a PDF and add elements on top of it. You can use adjust the opacity of the PDF so that your additions stand out more clearly. You can use the Edit Mask function, to crop the borders of the PDF. Check out here for examples.

When more precision is necessary, or when something can’t easily be determined on a plan because it is a complex 3D shape, I will work in a CAD package. I may also do this if there is going to be. lot of changes and interchanging of drawings between departments. From what I’ve observed, most lighting designers tend to use VectorWorks, most set designers use AutoCAD, and most venue architects use Rhino. And the live music world seems to use SketchUp. They’re all expensive, especially if you’ll only use them a few times a year. AutoCAD, SketchUp and VectorWorks all use expensive subscription models. I use Rhino, which has the more traditional buy the software then pay for upgrades every 2-3 years when you need to (it also has a 90 day trial so you can work out if it’s right for you). All the different packages work well through, so it’s entirely up to you which works best for you.

What do you use to create sound designs?

There’s a list of the kit I use (and recommend for others) here.

If you’d like more like this, check out my book here.