Sam Snape and the Curse of the Chillesford Chough
CAST
Robin Hemmings, Ellen Chivers, Lizzie Wofford, Cameron Johnson
CREATIVES
Director - Ivan Cutting
Writer - Julian Harries
Designer - Emily Bestow
Composer, MD, Sound Designer - Chris Warner
Choreography - Scott Hurran
Wonderful to be back at the Sir John Mills theatre in Ipswich, home to those legends of rural touring theatre Eastern Angles, for their postponed Christmas 2020 show, Sam Snape and the Curse of the Chillesford Chough.
“Credited as composer and sound designer is Chris Warner and the music is a definite highlight.”
To East Anglia… and beyond
In addition to composing, MD’ing the songs and sound designing the show, I helped design the audio infrastructure for the live stream element. This involved having to heavily programme the entire production so that it could all operate on a go-button principle. No mean feat, but with the aid of a hefty dose of OSC commands via Qlab (thanks to the brilliant work by Patrick Gilles-Maillot and his work to bring a fully implemented OSC dictionary to the X32 console) almost every part of the Behringer X32 console was automated (despite being an extensively featured desk, it’s theatre cue implementation is a little underwhelming) to bring a great sounding mix to the audiences at home and to the socially distanced audience in the theatre, sat at cabaret-style seating.
Using OSC commands to populate the X32’s DCA layer on a scene by scene basis, and to recall snippets and other sub-mix automation. Patrick Gilles-Maillot’s OSC implementation is thorough enough to give almost total control - though it took some hardcore Qlab programming!
It’s always a challenge to capture an accurate live-capture audio stream, but the careful deployment of multiple ambient mics and head-mics, and some carefully planned out routing and sub-mixing paid off. Before signing-off on the design, the X32 Edit software allowed me to make numerous live tweaks to the livestream before adding the changes back to Qlab.
“The songs—played and sung with genuine talent by this versatile cast—are great and very different to the usual folksy mix we associate with this type of show, being more rounded in the main and in places quite poignant.”
7.5 IPS all the way. Dialling in some classic emulations…
For the film noir sound world I turned to some trusty old UAD classics: the Studer A800 tape machine, Pultec EQ and Ampex ATR-102, and for some nice 40s reverb Altiverb’s JetStudio impulse response. Knowing that the FOH system was going to have limitations when it came to a stereo mix, I opted for a dark (7.5 ips tape speed!) and grainy mix rather than tons of space.
In addition to a jazz trio combo, the orchestration relied heavily on a fave collection of (literally) toys. The trusty studio toy piano, toy drums, toy cymbals, melodicas and other nonsense was thrown out of the pram.
“The original live music is very catchy, comical, and uplifting”
And for some extra noir madness, you can’t beat Audiothings’s marvellous Wires tape-emulation, with some UAD AKG BX20 spring
Sam Snape & The Curse Of The Chillesford Chough runs from 10th-19th June 2021 live in the Sir John Mills Theatre, Ipswich and Live Streamed to audiences at home.