Push Button Preshow Calls

Hey all,

Anyone have an thoughts or suggestions for a project that we have been mulling over at my space?

Looking to make a series of pre-recorded messages for things like "15 minutes to top of show", or "places" etc. Because we run a volunteer company for most shows and work with a lot of community theatre, the hope is to keep a consistent message and make it easy to use. Imagining a push button station of some sort on deck having to feed our backstage paging system which is centrally controlled in our booth.

Any thoughts?
 
Sure you could do this, if you have a QLab system already with the Audio Op and it has any sort of advanced license it's as trivial as setting up a secondary Cue List that has the announcements that go to an output to feed the Program System and then setting up a MIDI button backstage to trigger that Q List. You could also just self-contain it on an iPad and have that shoot into the Paging System, lots of ways to make this possible and few wrong answers!

In my experience a handheld switched mic is way more cost effective and flexible than anything pre-recorded. In larger professional shows it's standard operating procedure to put 1 switch mic at the SM Console and 1 switch mic in the SM's office so they can page the dressing rooms from wherever they are hanging out.

I'll also tell you no matter what the system you have in place, actors will always actor and turn down the volume of the paging system if they have in-room volume control, and they will still miss the paging calls - pre-recorded or live announce, amateur or Broadway all actors share this in common.
 
Sure you could do this, if you have a QLab system already with the Audio Op and it has any sort of advanced license it's as trivial as setting up a secondary Cue List that has the announcements that go to an output to feed the Program System and then setting up a MIDI button backstage to trigger that Q List. You could also just self-contain it on an iPad and have that shoot into the Paging System, lots of ways to make this possible and few wrong answers!

In my experience a handheld switched mic is way more cost effective and flexible than anything pre-recorded. In larger professional shows it's standard operating procedure to put 1 switch mic at the SM Console and 1 switch mic in the SM's office so they can page the dressing rooms from wherever they are hanging out.

I'll also tell you no matter what the system you have in place, actors will always actor and turn down the volume of the paging system if they have in-room volume control, and they will still miss the paging calls - pre-recorded or live announce, amateur or Broadway all actors share this in common.


We currently do not run QLab here unfortunately, so that is a no go, but a MIDI button was kind of where my mind was immediately drawn to.

How you describe, by manually doing it, is already what we have in place with switch mics strategically placed. Generally our Head LX is in charge of these calls, as the experience levels of our volunteer back stage crews is unreliable. What we are trying to accomplish is removing that duty from the LX and making it 'actor-proof' for our volunteers.
 
What we are trying to accomplish is removing that duty from the LX and making it 'actor-proof' for our volunteers.

No such thing as actor proof in my experience, we just have to mitigate risk as much as possible...well whatever you're running for audio now may have the ability for external triggers.

That being said - someone would still have to trigger these recordings, so at the end of the day is it worth going to the hassle when it's just the difference between hitting a button or saying a few words into a mic? Wall-clock triggers are cool, but the reality of theater means you're going to have house-holds and calls will shift so they are unreliable.
 
No such thing as actor proof in my experience, we just have to mitigate risk as much as possible...well whatever you're running for audio now may have the ability for external triggers.

That being said - someone would still have to trigger these recordings, so at the end of the day is it worth going to the hassle when it's just the difference between hitting a button or saying a few words into a mic? Wall-clock triggers are cool, but the reality of theater means you're going to have house-holds and calls will shift so they are unreliable.

While I personally agree with you, unfortunately for the moment it is out of my hands.

The theatre having not closed here at all during COVID, yet still not being able to have shows for the forseeable future has us really scrapping the barrel for things to keep ourselves busy. Boss wants at least an actionable plan so that he can later say no that it will be a waste of money lol.
 
We currently do not run QLab here unfortunately, so that is a no go, but a MIDI button was kind of where my mind was immediately drawn to.

How you describe, by manually doing it, is already what we have in place with switch mics strategically placed. Generally our Head LX is in charge of these calls, as the experience levels of our volunteer back stage crews is unreliable. What we are trying to accomplish is removing that duty from the LX and making it 'actor-proof' for our volunteers.

PI Engineering X-keys triggering files to play in VLC player. All you need is an old computer, and VLC is free.
 

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