She Loves Me | Middle Tennessee State University

Name: Brittany Della Murphy 💌 Sound Designer & Sound Engineer

She Love Me

Composer: Jerry Bock | Playwright: Joe Masteroff

For She Loves Me, I served as the Sound Designer and Sound Engineer.

This is the first time I have worked as a sound engineer on a show and this was the first time I worked as a sound designer.

This was a challenging experience because as the sound designer, my focus was on finding and arranging sound effects. As the sound engineer, I was focused on the science behind how sound works in our theatre, figuring out the best equipment for the job, programming the board, and mixing sound during the show.

After being approached to Sound Design and Engineer “She Loves Me”, I decided to take an audio production class as an elective to improve my knowledge of sound engineering. It’s easy to hit “GO” on a QLab, but sound engineering is much more than that. It’s understanding the space you are in, the specs of the equipment you are working with, and making sure you are doing the calculations to make sure your equipment can produce the best sound possible in the space.

I personally love sound engineering more than designing right now due to the nature of it. It feels like I’m flying a plane, while I am still a novice sound engineer I expect things like feedback and frequency issues can occur, but that’s why it’s important for the engineer to be just as involved in the show as the actors so you can fix issues if they occur.

Monitor, Mics, Inputs

Keeping in mind that I will have actors moving around on stage and that I am working with a live orchestra, I decided to figure out Microphone Placements first. I was working with 6 SM57s and 3 SM58s so I tried to keep in mind the way the instruments resonated before deciding which instrument got what. The 2 keyboards got D.I. boxes and we had a percussion mic kit. Lavalier microphones are also typically omnidirectional so it is important to keep that they pick up equally on all sides of the microphone which can lead to combing effects and frequency if the engineer is not paying close attention.

After figuring out microphones and placements, I was able to concentrate on monitor placements. My theatre has a primary reach in the pit and we have a second smaller reach that can be plugged into the main reach to give more channels if needed. All orchestra microphones were patched into “Reach A” with the help of the added “Reach B” I was able to put additional monitors in the pit and they could be on individual channels. This means if the percussion needed more keys or vocals in their monitors we could give it without affecting the other monitors. The stage monitors were channels A & B. I put my B monitors in the back with and have them louder back there. My A monitors are in the front, they aren’t too loud, but loud enough for actors to hear comfortably.

Cue Sheet

At the beginning of this process, my director had planned for the majority of the sound effects to be done by the Orchestra. To make the rehearsal process easier I went ahead and found sound effects for the stage manager to use in rehearsals. We ended up using those sound effects instead of having the orchestra playing those sounds.

We scrapped the “drawer opening” and “restaurant ambiance” sound effects as we found the scenes played better without the extra sound effects.

We added extra dropping and breaking sound effects into “A Romantic Atmosphere.”

The most challenging sound effect was the “Busboy trey drop into the gunshot,” my director kept wanting a more clattery sound. I went through 5 versions of this cue and finally on the last one when I added a window-breaking sound effect in the mix, my director jumped and was like “THAT’S IT!”

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