Line-by-Line Mixing a Musical - Dialogue Crunching 42nd Street, 2018

Ever wondered what's going on behind the sound desk at the back of the stalls? Here's a view of me mixing a particularly dialogue-heavy scene from the musical 42nd St in the West End (Theatre Royal Drury Lane, 2018).

I was asked to explain this technique in the comments after posting a previous video, so here's my best shot at it:

Line-by-line mixing is a technique used in Theatre Sound to achieve the 'cleanest' audio possible; the aim being to aid the audience to hear every word being spoken or sung, and therefore to understand the story being told.

The idea is that a microphone is only ever live while it is being used. If you were to instead have multiple microphones live onstage, the words said by one person will go into each of those other microphones at slightly different times, creating muddy, unclear dialogue. You'd also pick up other actors breathing, coughing, sniffing, etc., all taking away from the 'focus' of the scene. You could say by only having one mic live we are able to control the attention of the audience and aid the intelligibility of the production.

In my eyes, although working in sound for theatre is a 'technical' position, we often feel as though we are performing with the actors and musicians. We're constantly adapting and adjusting to the performers in every show in order to coherently gel everything together, with the aim of aiding transference between stage and audience. As such when we operate we feel we are performing too - our instrument being the sound desk!

Please feel free to post any questions and I'll do my best to answer.

(I'm uploading this video purely for educational/demonstrative purposes - I do not own rights to the music, production, musicians or performers in any way).