How I Became A Sound Designer
My mom told me that when I was a baby in my crib, my “bottom” (her word) would bounce up and down in time with the rhythmic clanging of the radiators. She said that’s how she knew I had an aptitude for music.
When I was only a few weeks old, my parents took me to a psychic, who held me and told them that I would “grow up to express himself through music.” There’s an audio tape of this conversation. I’ve heard it, with me crying in the background. This really happened.
When I was five years old my parents had me take guitar lessons, but I quickly switched to playing flute. These were instruments we had in the house. My mom brought back a 3/4 size guitar from Mexico, and my dad had traded some art for the flute. As it turned out, I took flute lessons for twenty years, was a music performance major in college, and was on track to be a symphonic flautist. After six years of marching band, my right ear developed piccolo-induced-tinnitus. The result is that I can’t be around the sound of a flute, and especially a piccolo. Sometimes loud applause creates static in my right ear. I don’t play flute any more,
My grandfather was a banjo player in jazz bands in 1930s and 40s, in Chicago during the time of Prohibition and speakeasies. He played the four-string tenor banjo. He spent his days at Wrigley Field and his nights playing Dixieland music in clubs.
When I would visit my grandfather in the early 1980s, he was leading a large banjo band just north of Los Angeles—the San Fernando Valley Banjo Band, which had about fifty members. They had a weekly gig playing jazz standards at a Shakey’s Pizza, and also appeared every year on the Jerry Lewis Telethon. He and I would sit in his living room playing through his books of jazz standards, he on banjo, and me on flute. This made me want to be a jazz musician.
My problem back then was that I was a flute player, which is not a traditional jazz instrument. And at age twelve, it’s also kind of girly, so I felt kind of insecure about it. And I was young, mostly friendless, and I wanted to learn how to play jazz, and I didn’t have access to a jazz band. Being an only child, and born with a DIY spirit, I figured out how to make one myself.
When I was thirteen years old, I convinced my parents to buy me a multi-timbral (“many voice”) keyboard, a midi interface for our state-of-the art 386SX computer running DOS, and a midi sequencer. I taught myself how to use the computer to talk to the keyboard, so I could make a multi-instrument arrangement inside the keyboard, and then record and play back each instrument individually from the computer, while listening to the sounds using boombox speakers. I would choose a song from one of my fakebooks and play in a couple of verses of a bass track, a keyboard ‘comping’ track, and a drum track. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was teaching myself how to play jazz piano and how to use a keyboard to mimic the sound of other acoustic instruments. I taught myself how to make digital arrangements and use computer sequencers. After a few hours, I would build a working arrangement of a jazz song. Then I would set it to loop, and practice playing jazz flute over the background I had made. (It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that “Music Minus One” records and tapes had existed for decades.)
With very little difference in technique, but a huge leap in sophistication—better sequencers and sound modules—I’m literally doing exactly the same thing now, thirty years later.
Fast forward to 2000. I was in my third year teaching high school English at Loganville High School, forty minutes east of Atlanta, Georgia. On the radio I heard about a comedy theatre called Dad’s Garage Theatre Company, and I decided to see a show. I immediately became obsessed with Dad’s Garage, and attended every show for months. It became too expensive to see all the shows, so I volunteered selling concessions so I could see the shows for free. I made some friends with the front of house people, and some of the improvisers. One night, after a show, I overheard one of the improvisers say that their piano player was leaving for another gig, and asked if anyone knew how to play piano. I said I could, and he said, “okay, you start next Friday.” I played every show for the next four years, every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, often six to eight shows a week, including festivals, competitions, fund-raisers, and also shows with other improv companies in Atlanta.
I was pretty bad at musical improv for the first few years, and the more experienced improvisers told me how bad I was in notes after the shows. I left the theatre feeling terrible about myself, and not wanting to ever go back. But I went back every week, both because I loved it, and more secretly, because I felt it was an act of courage to keep re-entering this difficult arena to try and get better. I was ridiculously loyal and consistent to Dad's Garage. And after a few years, I got better. I became the musician they needed, and they stopped hitting me with body blows to my ego. By the time I left Atlanta eight years later, I had played around 2,100 improv comedy shows.
Reflecting back on my improv days, I believe I was initially attracted to Dad’s Garage because I intuitively understood that this was a place where anything was possible. It was a place where no idea was stupid or dismissed, and everyone agreed. Agreement is the first rule of improv—that everyone has to support and elevate every idea and incorporate and justify increasingly ridiculous realities with truth and commitment. I wanted to be in a place where people agreed. It was also my first experience of choosing theatre as my extended family.
I was making some money doing improv, so I bought better gear, keyboards, computers, audio interfaces, sound modules, drum machines, and digital mixers. People started asking me to write songs and make music for their shows, and it turned out that I had equipped myself with a pretty respectable home recording studio, and that I turned out to be a music producer.
I remember thinking, early on, as I transitioned from underscoring live theatre “on-the-fly” to making sound design for scripted work, how much of a luxury it is to have many weeks to prepare and write a full arrangement to underscore a dramatic moment, rather than just doing it on a keyboard in real time.
In the late 2000s, I fell in love, got married, quit my teaching job, moved to Vermont and quickly became the resident sound designer for the Vermont Stage Company and St. Michael’s Playhouse. I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I was doing it. I did 23 professional shows in three years with these companies. In the beginning, I was working with dual CD decks to trigger sound cues. I didn’t have a way to output to multiple destinations. I remember one time I needed a telephone to ring In a particular corner of the stage, so I recorded the telephone ring onto a tape player and had an actor press PLAY offstage to make the ring sound. I worked out a way to use an early version of Ableton Live to trigger sound cues with graceful fade-in and fade-outs. It was rudimentary and fiddly, but it worked.
In 2010, I went on a four month sea cruise playing piano for comedy shows with a touring group from The Second City. When I returned to land it was clear that my career had reached a ceiling, and the best way to break through would be to go to sound design school. So I went to the Yale School of Drama. These were the Best Of Times. The students at YSD are of such high quality that everyone is pulled along by each other’s rampant brilliance, creativity, and focus. I needed this level of discipline. I learned a lot of things I didn’t already know—about system design, acoustic properties, and about how other sound designers solved all the problems I had been forced to figure out on my own (many of the solutions involved simply learning Qlab). I developed an intuition about sound systems, and sort of a sixth sense for troubleshooting audio gear. But most importantly, YSD taught me how to talk with other theatre people.
After YSD, I designed over thirty shows each year, and also taught sound design at the University of Connecticut. I’m still designing shows, big and small, and refining my process.
To be continued…
Joel Abbott, "About the Artist"
When I was only a few weeks old, my parents took me to a psychic, who held me and told them that I would “grow up to express himself through music.” There’s an audio tape of this conversation. I’ve heard it, with me crying in the background. This really happened.
When I was five years old my parents had me take guitar lessons, but I quickly switched to playing flute. These were instruments we had in the house. My mom brought back a 3/4 size guitar from Mexico, and my dad had traded some art for the flute. As it turned out, I took flute lessons for twenty years, was a music performance major in college, and was on track to be a symphonic flautist. After six years of marching band, my right ear developed piccolo-induced-tinnitus. The result is that I can’t be around the sound of a flute, and especially a piccolo. Sometimes loud applause creates static in my right ear. I don’t play flute any more,
My grandfather was a banjo player in jazz bands in 1930s and 40s, in Chicago during the time of Prohibition and speakeasies. He played the four-string tenor banjo. He spent his days at Wrigley Field and his nights playing Dixieland music in clubs.
When I would visit my grandfather in the early 1980s, he was leading a large banjo band just north of Los Angeles—the San Fernando Valley Banjo Band, which had about fifty members. They had a weekly gig playing jazz standards at a Shakey’s Pizza, and also appeared every year on the Jerry Lewis Telethon. He and I would sit in his living room playing through his books of jazz standards, he on banjo, and me on flute. This made me want to be a jazz musician.
My problem back then was that I was a flute player, which is not a traditional jazz instrument. And at age twelve, it’s also kind of girly, so I felt kind of insecure about it. And I was young, mostly friendless, and I wanted to learn how to play jazz, and I didn’t have access to a jazz band. Being an only child, and born with a DIY spirit, I figured out how to make one myself.
When I was thirteen years old, I convinced my parents to buy me a multi-timbral (“many voice”) keyboard, a midi interface for our state-of-the art 386SX computer running DOS, and a midi sequencer. I taught myself how to use the computer to talk to the keyboard, so I could make a multi-instrument arrangement inside the keyboard, and then record and play back each instrument individually from the computer, while listening to the sounds using boombox speakers. I would choose a song from one of my fakebooks and play in a couple of verses of a bass track, a keyboard ‘comping’ track, and a drum track. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was teaching myself how to play jazz piano and how to use a keyboard to mimic the sound of other acoustic instruments. I taught myself how to make digital arrangements and use computer sequencers. After a few hours, I would build a working arrangement of a jazz song. Then I would set it to loop, and practice playing jazz flute over the background I had made. (It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that “Music Minus One” records and tapes had existed for decades.)
With very little difference in technique, but a huge leap in sophistication—better sequencers and sound modules—I’m literally doing exactly the same thing now, thirty years later.
Fast forward to 2000. I was in my third year teaching high school English at Loganville High School, forty minutes east of Atlanta, Georgia. On the radio I heard about a comedy theatre called Dad’s Garage Theatre Company, and I decided to see a show. I immediately became obsessed with Dad’s Garage, and attended every show for months. It became too expensive to see all the shows, so I volunteered selling concessions so I could see the shows for free. I made some friends with the front of house people, and some of the improvisers. One night, after a show, I overheard one of the improvisers say that their piano player was leaving for another gig, and asked if anyone knew how to play piano. I said I could, and he said, “okay, you start next Friday.” I played every show for the next four years, every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, often six to eight shows a week, including festivals, competitions, fund-raisers, and also shows with other improv companies in Atlanta.
I was pretty bad at musical improv for the first few years, and the more experienced improvisers told me how bad I was in notes after the shows. I left the theatre feeling terrible about myself, and not wanting to ever go back. But I went back every week, both because I loved it, and more secretly, because I felt it was an act of courage to keep re-entering this difficult arena to try and get better. I was ridiculously loyal and consistent to Dad's Garage. And after a few years, I got better. I became the musician they needed, and they stopped hitting me with body blows to my ego. By the time I left Atlanta eight years later, I had played around 2,100 improv comedy shows.
Reflecting back on my improv days, I believe I was initially attracted to Dad’s Garage because I intuitively understood that this was a place where anything was possible. It was a place where no idea was stupid or dismissed, and everyone agreed. Agreement is the first rule of improv—that everyone has to support and elevate every idea and incorporate and justify increasingly ridiculous realities with truth and commitment. I wanted to be in a place where people agreed. It was also my first experience of choosing theatre as my extended family.
I was making some money doing improv, so I bought better gear, keyboards, computers, audio interfaces, sound modules, drum machines, and digital mixers. People started asking me to write songs and make music for their shows, and it turned out that I had equipped myself with a pretty respectable home recording studio, and that I turned out to be a music producer.
I remember thinking, early on, as I transitioned from underscoring live theatre “on-the-fly” to making sound design for scripted work, how much of a luxury it is to have many weeks to prepare and write a full arrangement to underscore a dramatic moment, rather than just doing it on a keyboard in real time.
In the late 2000s, I fell in love, got married, quit my teaching job, moved to Vermont and quickly became the resident sound designer for the Vermont Stage Company and St. Michael’s Playhouse. I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I was doing it. I did 23 professional shows in three years with these companies. In the beginning, I was working with dual CD decks to trigger sound cues. I didn’t have a way to output to multiple destinations. I remember one time I needed a telephone to ring In a particular corner of the stage, so I recorded the telephone ring onto a tape player and had an actor press PLAY offstage to make the ring sound. I worked out a way to use an early version of Ableton Live to trigger sound cues with graceful fade-in and fade-outs. It was rudimentary and fiddly, but it worked.
In 2010, I went on a four month sea cruise playing piano for comedy shows with a touring group from The Second City. When I returned to land it was clear that my career had reached a ceiling, and the best way to break through would be to go to sound design school. So I went to the Yale School of Drama. These were the Best Of Times. The students at YSD are of such high quality that everyone is pulled along by each other’s rampant brilliance, creativity, and focus. I needed this level of discipline. I learned a lot of things I didn’t already know—about system design, acoustic properties, and about how other sound designers solved all the problems I had been forced to figure out on my own (many of the solutions involved simply learning Qlab). I developed an intuition about sound systems, and sort of a sixth sense for troubleshooting audio gear. But most importantly, YSD taught me how to talk with other theatre people.
After YSD, I designed over thirty shows each year, and also taught sound design at the University of Connecticut. I’m still designing shows, big and small, and refining my process.
To be continued…
Joel Abbott, "About the Artist"