Staged at Cardiff's Sherman Theatre, the entire performing and technical crew of the production were students of RWCMD, which was also the first independent theatrical production of Quadrophenia to receive the endorsement and creative input of The Who's Pete Townshend.
A Yamaha M7CL-48 console was chosen to mix the show, with second year student Seeta Mistry as the show's FOH engineer. She was tutored on the console by RWCMD 'old boy' Nigel Thomas, with some help from Yamaha's Karl Christmas.
Having previously been head of sound at Bristol's Old Vic theatre school - where he determinedly introduced digital audio, Thomas' recent experience with the M7CL on an Opera Babes tour convinced him that it was the ideal console to give Mistry the best possible start in digital audio."Having been a student at the RWCMD, it was a nice approach by the college to ask me back to help with FOH on the production of Quadrophenia," says Thomas. "My experience at the Old Vic Theatre School had shown me that Yamaha digital consoles make 'going digital' for live sound so easy that when Gareth Owen at Orbital Sound suggested I use an M7CL for the for Opera Babes tour, I needed no persuasion. Within 20 minutes I was up to speed on it."
He continues: "Someone had clearly thought the desk out very carefully, it's very much a digital desk which can be approached in an analogue way, which why I was so keen to recommend it for Quadrophenia. I was convinced it was the best way to bridge the gap between Seeta's previous mixing experience and her operating a fully digital rig."
Thanks to the M7CL's onboard processors, no outboard was required for the production. "There was more than enough onboard processing for what we needed," says Thomas. "We also deliberately kept it relatively 'safe'. We wanted to work within certain parameters, because really pushing the boat out wouldn't have been fair on the students.""Using the M7CL made my job a lot easier," says Mistry. "It's a fairly intuitive desk to programme and operate and it cancelled out a lot of excess equipment. The only major problems I experienced with it were not the desk's fault - it was contradicting tips from different people on how to mix a band. For instance I was told by one person to run the show using the DCAs and then told by another that they should be kept at one level throughout and that it's the individual faders that I should be using to mix with. By the end of the run, I was just using individual faders and everything was thankfully sounding good."
She adds, "Using the M7CL also meant that I could put what I wanted where I wanted it, in the sense of putting the fader section I wanted to use onto the centre control section, and being able to operate like that. Overall, I have learnt so much from the production and the desk and the people I worked with. I've taken a lot away from it."
(Jim Evans)
