Show Cue System

Just wanted to give you some feedback from the first play that I used SCS for the sound effects.

Out theater group just did "The Beams are Creaking" -- a play about the life of Pastor Dietrich Bonnhoffer - a Lutheran minister in Nazi Germany. The entire first act is vignettes from his life with very quick scene changes in between. During these scene changes 5 “radios” on stage blare out different news reports describing the rise of the Nazis – at some point all 5 radios will be on full blast, creating a cacophony of sound. In addition there are the standard sound cues such as phones, air planes, and background music.

For hardware I was using a Firepod digital interface running 6 outputs into a Spirit 324 Live Digital mixer then out to three stereo amps with 5 speakers hidden around the “radios” and out FOH hanging clusters. Several stage mics (hanging and boundry layer) were also used for sound renforcement. The Spirit digital mixer allows me to save snapshots which I then triggered using the SCS interface so once the show started I did not have to touch the board much!

Let me be clear from the start – there is now way I could have done this elaborate of a show without some sort of control software – Prior to using SCS I would have had to limit the number of speakers and would probably have had to settle with just panning left and right. I all, not counting level changes there was over 85 sound cues.

For the first use the software worked very well – I did have some stuttering a looping issues at first, but once I raised the buffers to 2500ms the problems seemed to go away.

One of the coolest effects we did was a live radio broadcast. It started with Dietrich setting on stage giving a live radio address into a microphone (SM57) This started in the speaker under the radio booth and I added a static track underneath it. As the speech goes on, different rooms light up on stage showing the other characters listening to the broadcast on there radios. As each area came up, I used a midi program control to route the live broadcast to the appropriate speaker/radio and add another static track to the new radio. Finally at the peak of his radio address, the authorities pull the plug on him leaving only static while he pantomimes a very passionate part of his speech (midi trigger used to mute the mic). Music suddenly blares out of all the radios.

So thank you Mike for providing an excellent solution at a reasonable price! Can’t wait to see what ver9 will be like!

John Isgren
United Players

Do the lx controlled via the SCS also?

If lx means lights, then no we did not choose to run the lights from SCS for this show, although it would have been nice for the timed sequences -- I did not have time to test that out and also we were a little nervous tying the entire show into a single system with no backup. I am also just taking over responsibility for lights so I am not as familiar with our board yet.

In the future I would like to run the whole show from SCS for our smaller productions, but will probably keep it split for our large musicals.

I see, thx for your reply, because most of the time my production will only contains limited no. of technical person and most likely they will be on the stage to help the miking, scene change...etc.

I cannot use SCS to control my lx board because its Strand MX, an very old but enough for us lx board ( we use different board for moving head).

But i tried to setup effect which go sd fx together with moving head fx... the result is ok... although there is some delay on my lx board (i think)...

Thanks for your reply