TiMax TrackerD4 Monitoring Featured in Buena Vista Social Club Sound Design

	Tony-winning Band of Buena Vista Social Club. Photo: Evan Zimmerman

Jonathan Deans recently won his first Tony Award for the musical Buena Vista Social Club. Deans' sound design made use of TiMax's TrackerD4 stage-tracking product to follow the movements of musicians onstage, providing each with personalized monitor mixes via speakers built into the stage deck.

With the production sound package supplied by PRG, this solution was created to counteract the challenges discovered earlier by Deans. "I learned a lot about the music and musicians and what needed to be done," he explains of the show's prior off-Broadway stint.

"Cuban music, it was explained to me, is like a watch," he says. "The cogs all must work together, and if we miss one, it doesn't work. It's fascinating, as all ten of the musicians are the hub. There's not one person who leads, they are all playing off each other, both with rhythm, pitch, and tone, and who steps forward, so getting the monitoring right and natural for them was the key to success."

Deans quickly discounted in-ear monitoring as a solution. The roving musicians had to engage and respond as actors while authenticity was a further consideration. As the production is set in both the 1950s and 1990s, visually obtrusive foldback was considered both inappropriate and impractical.

Instead, Deans distributed monitor speakers in the floor to deliver a more consistent level of output across the stage. The Off-Broadway production saw sound operators taking multiple cues to support the ten musicians' need to focus closely on each other.

"That way of working wasn't that successful for them and certainly not for Timothy Jarrell, the front-of-house mixer," Deans says. "And although it was successful for the audience, it just wasn't as pleasing for the ten musicians. That's when I thought of tracking the Musicians as a solution."

Instead of using TiMax TrackerD4 conventionally to follow the actors primarily to help the audience focus on the spoken word or the singing, Dean's linked the tracking system via two Meyer Sound Galileo GALAXY Network Platforms to Meyer's Spacemap Go, so it could vary the foldback in real-time across up to 27 monitor speakers in the stage floor.

He explained, "My understanding was that I could plan the speaker layout, the tri-sets and the crossfades in Spacemap Go, put a TiMax TrackerD4 Tag on a musician, and their mix would follow them around the stage. And it worked. It worked very successfully. It gave the musicians the freedom to move more freely without having to think about exactly where they are standing, and the front-of-house mixer to concentrate on the sound for the audience mix."

The pairing of TiMax TrackerD4 with Spacemap Go was another first, Deans notes. "David Strang from PRG, Robin Whittaker from TiMax, and Steve Ellison and Rob Mele from Meyer Sound got together to make sure that the communication between the two devices worked really well. Both manufacturers had been looking for a project that would work to make the handshake between both systems completely solid, and this was it, and it is now in place."

A critical measure of the system's success is that the usual plan-B safety backup measures in place for the production were never needed. Also, as Deans pointed out, the TiMax TrackerD4 integration brought a bonus for the front-of-house mix. The tracked monitor mixes create stronger sound-focused anchors onstage, which helps the fixed-delayed, audience PA system to localize the performers as they move around.

Another special feature used was TiMax TrackerD4's capability to understand when each of the musicians had reached their home position and stop tracking. This simple trick prevented audio output swapping between two speakers in the floor, should the actors move around in their seats, for example, which would cause confusion and a musical distraction.

The ultimate measure of success for Deans is the energy of the show. "The Cuban audience knows the story, and there's always interaction, with them calling out and joining in. By the curtain call, they're all singing along, and it's a super cool show to see because of the energy."

He concludes, "And that is why it was so important to be able to track the performers, giving them what they needed to be able to play in the way they want to be able to play. The tracking gave fluidity, and it was intriguing to do and to see the results."