London’s Hackney Empire theatre recently lent its stage to the world premiere of Vanara the Musical – a timely tale of environmental disaster and tribal conflict with a message of hope and unity – with sound operator Ollie Dudman mixing Olly Steel’s sound design on a Yamaha Rivage PM3 mixing system, supplied by Stage Sound Services.

Steel first used Yamaha digital mixers in 2008, as Sound #2 on the High School Musical UK tour, with a system designed by Rick Clarke. ‘I used Yamaha digital systems on various productions after that, especially when I was doing sound design in my own right and was able to specify the system,’ he says. ‘When the Rivage PM10 system came out in 2014, I was sold. It had everything I wanted and I knew that, with some extra development and tailoring, it could be a very powerful system for theatre. I said that, if it could potentially do more than 144 channels, a Rivage PM system would be ideal for any musical on the planet, but it would also benefit greatly from a scalable form factor.’

For a new production like Vanara the Musical, time is a critical issue, especially as the show has some unconventional elements. These included the musicians being on a 3.5m stage riser and a range of instruments that are unusual for musical theatre, including electric cello, taiko drums, ocarina and bansuri. With the PM3, Steel chose to do everything in the Dante domain, including playback and multitrack recording.

‘For a show that was modestly-sized in both scope and budget, it had a lot to achieve and it featured very big, epic-sounding pieces of music. Score-wise it was like nothing I’d known before,’ he says. ‘Being able to do everything in Dante was a godsend because, if we had gone down the Madi route, it would have cost a lot of money. The composer wanted multitracks from every performance and we were able provide them without it increasing the cost.

‘We loaded in on Monday, with the first performance on Friday. The system really helped in terms of the available time. The trouble with the software of some other systems is that it’s so complicated, you have to work hard to know exactly what it’s going to do. I really enjoy the simplicity of the Rivage PM theatre mode; this was Ollie Dudman’s first time using Rivage PM and it only took me 10-15 minutes to show him things like the DCA programming and bank recall. He said the same thing that other first-time users do, that it’s very easy to learn and is like using a supercharged CL5. The integration with OSC and QLab also makes it a really flexible solution.

‘I’m only speccing Rivage PM3 systems on any new show from now on,’ he adds. ‘The system ticks all the boxes for any level of theatre production.’