Brenden Friedel
Active Member
What do y'all use to get the audience's attention before a show/presentation/concert?
Sound f/x Attention Grabber
- Thread starterBrenden Friedel
- Start date
@Brenden Friedel It varies greatly depending upon a number of factors. Please provide additional details such as:
Outside in a large park in daylight?
Inside in a comparatively tiny 'black box'?
Gaining the attention of 200 to 500 people or cutting through the din of 17,000 to 40,000 inside your local arena?
What type of event:
150 grandmothers attending a matronly matinee;
500 bikers anxiously awaiting the start of a monster trucks in mud event;
2500 patrons waiting for the female mud wrestlers to commence grappling?
Please narrow our focus @Brenden Friedel and I'm confident many of us will respond.
I, for one, will even wait until afternoon and avoid April Fooling you.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard
EDIT: Inadvertently typed 'or' instead of 'of '. (I despise typo's [& posters who don't correct theirs])
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Well let's see, lot's of options.
The chime thing is always popular. In the lobby to announce that "it's time".
You could also cue up Also sprach Zarathustra. That's always an attention getter.
The classic concert opener-"Ladies and gentlemen, the best rock and roll band in the world, THE ROLLING STONES."
Woodstock had Wavy Gravy do the job.
Jethro Tull opened the "Thick as a brick tour" by coming on stage wearing technicians lab coats and checking the instruments and amps, then they removed the coats and started playing.
You could also use a local personality to do a Wolfman Jack type intro.
The chime thing is always popular. In the lobby to announce that "it's time".
You could also cue up Also sprach Zarathustra. That's always an attention getter.
The classic concert opener-"Ladies and gentlemen, the best rock and roll band in the world, THE ROLLING STONES."
Woodstock had Wavy Gravy do the job.
Jethro Tull opened the "Thick as a brick tour" by coming on stage wearing technicians lab coats and checking the instruments and amps, then they removed the coats and started playing.
You could also use a local personality to do a Wolfman Jack type intro.
Being that your other recent post is about a musical theater production, I'm going to guess that's the context. I run a High School P.A.C. We always play a carefully selected series of songs (for example if it's Grease you play lots of 50's and 60's be-bop love songs). We then have a chosen song that's about 3 minutes long that we cut to when we call places (I believe for Grease we played "Why do fools fall in love" for the pre-show and "Wild Thing" to come back from intermission). This way everyone in the cast and crew knows that when this song ends it's when we start. In the house I raise the volume level so that the music goes from being something in the background to being something it's hard to talk over. This gets their attention and tells them we are about to start while also drawing them into the world we are about to create. With about 30 seconds left in the song we turn the house lights down to half. With about 5 seconds left we do a 3 second fade to blackout... hold for about 4 more seconds and then fade up to start the show. Magic!
klane2
Member
I simply take house to half and play a pre-recorded pre-show announcements reminding people to turn off phones and such. It last about 25 seconds and it usually shuts everybody up and tells them to sit down
PB Theater Tech
Member
House to half, then a pre-show announcement that's either prerecorded or done live. Here in California, if it's a ticketed event we are required to point out the location of the exits in our size venue.
