Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
VAMPS of St Neots
2023
The incredible cover photo is credited to Sally Jex.
Sound
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a hugely successful show for VAMPS of St Neots, breaking a few VAMPS records for sales along the way. It was the first show that I am aware of being involved in that had at least one sell out show, it was also the first amateur show to have 3 shows on a Saturday, and a Sunday performance. As Matt from 1ONE0 was going to be controlling his homebuilt Chitty prop car from the stage, he needed someone to run sound. I stepped up and took on the role.
It was the first big musical I had run sound for, and although disappointed that there wasn’t going to be a band, I was somewhat thankful as I had to run around 20 radio mics, on a mixer I was also using for the first time, the Behringer Wing.
The Behringer Wing software is completely different to the XM32 software so it was a learning curve. The workflow took a bit of getting used to so initial sound checks were slow as the encoders aren’t as simple as they are on an XM32 surface. The show control feature was great, meaning all I had to do was save all my changes for each scene as an individual scene within the show and all I really had to do throughout the show was press Go. My overall favourite feature was the highly customisable surface, where every fader strip and some encoders could have any channel/input you need. This, mixed with the Show control, meant that for each scene I could display only the mics I needed, and in any order I liked, saving me from having to change layers.
I barely scratched the surface with the Wings capabilities, and I hope to use it more in future and find out what it can really do.
Overall, I’m confident I did a good job – despite there being conflicting reviews over whether everything was too loud or not. There were some mic issues, as you’d expect, which required new headsets but otherwise everything seemed to work as expected and I missed very few noticable cues where mics were not unmuted. My main issue was the tracks, due to timing in production week and a last minute change to where the QLab was going to be run, we never got a chance to sort the levels of each track out so they were at suitable levels. The tracks provided by MTI were awfully balanced, meaning that some underscore was blisteringly loud, whereas the song tracks were too quiet. Given time to have sorted this out properly, all would have been much better from a sound point of view.