Olentangy Liberty HS at the 2009 Percussion World Championships
Making Sound Decisions
May 7, 2009
By Michael Boo
As integral as music is to winter guard, when fans come to the University of Dayton Arena for the WGI World Championships, they likely never think of the sound production.
And that’s the way it should be.
Producing the sound the audience hears is not as simple as just popping in a CD and letting it play. There is a great deal of equipment used, hours of preparation to make everything run smoothly and a cast of engineers who control the entire output of sound that eminates from the speakers.
A Look at the Sound Table
Fans walk right past the sound table without fully realizing the complexity of the sound equipment and what goes on there.
John Capellupo and Kevin Morris work for One Four Three Creative, a Boston firm that has been contracted by WGI since 1980, when the World Championships were held on Cape Cod. They run the audio during the show and interface with the instructors, walking the fine line between what the instructors want (loud) and what OSHA guidelines allow (under ear bleed potential), so that playback is pleasant for the audience.
Instructors might want the sound table to take the dynamics out of a piece of music, saying, “This is too soft, turn it up.” Then the loud section comes in and the volume has to be turned down again. If something is dynamically happening for a sustained period of time, Capellupo and Morris will try to adjust it. According to Capellupo, they’ve never had anyone say, “I wish you hadn’t fixed that.”
Every CD player and each venue is unique. A system such as the one used by WGI has to be tailored for the venue. Capellupo and Morris know exactly the needs of WGI and tailor the system for the UD Arena. Ultimately, all they care about is how good the individual shows sound.
When the instructors drop off the CDs, they’ll often ask for a sound check before the doors open to the public. If they present a CD, one of the engineers will insert it into the CD player and check it out. Later, at the appropriate moment, they’ll play the CD after the announcer finishes announcing the unit. They will continuously adjust the volume and equalization, always thinking, “How can we make this sound better?”
CDs can be fickle creatures. One may work great and an exact copy doesn’t. Sometimes instructors will burn a new CD for the World Championship Finals, but will have never used it during the season and will not have tested it. It’s recommended that instructors don’t bring out an all-new CD the night of the big show.
Sometimes, CDs haven’t worked, which is why a backup disk is important. Capellupo and Morris have three CD players at their fingertips, so if there is a problem with a CD and the instructor is at the sound table, they can be handed the backup CD and put it in another player and the show can continue on. But there have been times when a backup was needed and the engineers were told the backup CD was “in the van.”
During the sound check prior to World Class Finals, there was a sound check CD that played fine on Friday that wouldn’t play on Saturday. It’s not a foolproof media. One little scratch in the wrong place and the media can fail.
There’s a push for units to use a digital recording device for playback, like an iPod or MP3 player. This eliminates one mechanical factor as well as the act of the sound engineers being handed a CD that has never been played in the system before. The MP3 players are good to use because one just plugs them in and goes. The instructor has to dial it up and hit “play,” something the engineers won’t do, as every archive structure is different.
The WGI World Championships are the only winter guard shows Capellupo and Morris do all year. This contributes to the pressure of knowing thousands of people are sitting in the audience in anticipation, waiting for the sound engineers to push a button and kick off each performance. It’s regarding that moment that causes Capellupo to say, “You just hope something comes out.”
In earlier years, Capellupo and Morris utilized only the UD Arena house system, but now they hire a local contractor to bring in extra equipment to their specifications. Hidden behind the black screen across the back of the performance floor, are 24 18” speakers, 24 15” speakers and more horns and processing equipment “than one can imagine.” That adds up to approximately 40,000 watts of power. They use the 30,000 watt arena system to supplement the main system, which allows the sound to be distributed through the arena so that it sounds as good in the very back as it does in the first row.
There are a number of things that have happened over the years that keep the job interesting for Capellupo and Morris. The year Miamisburg first won the Scholastic World division for their musical tribute to Marilyn Monroe, they had to stop the music in the middle of the show for a silent guard feature, and then start it back up when told to by an instructor. Fans never realized the silent gap wasn’t recorded into the production.
Instructors have run up the stairs to the sound table, totally out of breath. So, when the music started, it seemed to them that the music was slow. The pitch control then speeds up the sound per the instructions of the out-of-breath instructor, who then has had to ask for the speed to be turned back down when guard equipment started to litter the floor because the members had trouble catching it at the faster speed. Capellupo and Morris estimate they’re asked to speed up the music about 10% of the time.
The most wacky thing either of the engineers remembers is when they were based out of the sound room overlooking the performance floor and had to physically grab an instructor by the legs to keep him from falling out the window after he became overly excited during his unit’s performance.
New problems are always cropping up. Capellupo and Morris spent 45 minutes the morning of Finals tracking down a buzz that showed up overnight, finding and eliminating it.
Capellupo states, “We remember when there were just 40 guards in a small hockey rink maybe one-eighth the size of UD Arena. We’re happy with how this has turned out.”
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