Meeting Topic: Audio for Broadway Shows
Moderator Name: Pascal Pahl
Speaker Name: Aaron Beck, Head of Audio at Michael Jackson One (Cirque du Soleil, Las Vegas)
Meeting Location: Bloomington, IN
AES at IU was pleased to welcome back IU alum, Broadway engineer, and now Cirque du Soleil engineer Aaron Beck for the 3rd AES event with him in 3 years. He was back in Bloomington again to mix the first week of the IU Opera Theater's production of West Side Story. Aaron is currently the Head of Audio for Cirque du Soleil's production Michael Jackson One in Las Vegas.
Aaron shared his background getting into Broadway audio, and various pictures of productions he has worked on in recent years, as well as short console videos of how mixing for musicals is different from traditional live mixing. Other topics of the conversation included typical lav placements to hide within the actors costume or hair, managing large numbers of wireless microphones, speaker array setups, I/O routing of his shows and all the racks it entails, and typical duties of Cirque show audio engineers. He also stressed that if anyone is interested in getting into audio for Broadway type musicals, to get a lot more tech savvy and be able to navigate software and firmware to integrate systems together.
AES at IU would like to thank Aaron for taking time out of his busy week to talk to the students, and we hope he'll be back again next year for another event!
Written By: Evan Berg
