Posted February 20, 2024

Behind the Scenes – Richard Feren

Richard, it’s no exaggeration to say that you are the preeminent sound designer working in Canadian theatre today. How did you come to have a career as a sound designer?

Unexpectedly! I was trained as a classical musician from a very young age; at six years old, I was learning to play violin and learn music theory. And so I had the classical music background, and then I also developed an interest in tape recording stuff. I had a little cassette recorder as a kid, and I graduated into multi-track, four-track cassette recording. A friend of mine and I would compose music and record it and produce it on that.

How old were you when you were doing that?

Well, that was more late teens, I guess. But in my early teens, I was only about 13, I started volunteering at the college radio station in Guelph, CFRU FM. And I had some mentors there who kind of showed me the ropes. I actually had a weekly radio program from the time I was 13, for about the next ten years. So I learned a lot of audio production—fairly basic, at the time it was still all tape, analog. I was producing some of the news programs, which would have been on a reel-to-reel, so it was a lot of transferring from one tape to another, then editing, splicing.

So anyway, by the time I was in my early 20s, I had released a bunch of cassette music. Fiona Griffiths, who was working with the Theatre Resource Centre (at the time, she was teaching at University of Guelph) had bought some of my cassettes. She liked the music, and she hired me through a grant for young people just out of school to work at the Theatre Resource Centre in Toronto. So I actually moved back to Toronto, which is where I was born. I was working basically in the office there as office manager. Ian Wallace [well-known theatre artist and clown] was still there at the time, too, and he got me to deal with the audio for their productions and workshops. So, I started to make cues on tapes for that.

Another company, Pow Pow Unbound—it’s no longer around, but it was Darren O’Donnell’s theatre company back in the early 90s—did this show called Field at the Rhubarb Festival that I happened to see when I was just starting out in the business, and they had a guy playing electric violin with a bunch of pedals. It was very odd, and I kind of liked it; it was quirky, they were all in long underwear! So after the show, I went up to talk to this guy, just to ask, kind of shop talk, you know, about what kind of pickup was he using on his violin. And he was like, “Oh, you play electric violin?” And I was like, “Yeah.” He said, “Because they’re remounting this show in two months and I can’t do it. So let me introduce you to Darren.” And so they basically brought me in to take over from this other guy. And so that was my first time; but it was more of a live performance thing. I didn’t really do the tapes for that. But then they asked me to do the sound designs and the compositions for Stephen Seabrook, who’s still a friend to this day. He had me work on some of his shows and then I worked for Nadia Ross and her company [STO Union], and then [Daniel] MacIvor and Daniel Brooks. So, you know, this is what people needed. And I knew how to do it. Even though I was just kind of making it up as I went along! But I had the radio background, I had the music training, I had the multitrack recording experience. So I just put that all together and kind of developed my own style.

Speaking of the technology, how has the advent of digital technology changed the way that you work?

It’s changed it totally from top to bottom, in pretty much entirely a good way. Working with tape was very limiting. And of course, losing fidelity at every stage of the process when you’re transferring from one tape to another. Digital has been very empowering. The only drawback has been that there are so many choices when you start on something, it’s like, what do I even use? So now I try to impose parameters on myself—otherwise you just get lost in there being so many options. But what’s remarkable is that in the first few years that I was doing this, we only had tape and you know, very few theaters actually still used reel-to-reel. It was mostly all cassette. And so if there were 40 sound cues in a show, then there were 40 cassettes and the technician would have to rewind them all. You put it in, press play, and then you stop it when you hear a sound; and then you turn it back a quarter turn, and then put them in their little cases. You’d have all these cassettes and you’re just swapping cassettes back and forth. We went from that to burning CDs when we could do that. The quality of that was a lot better. And of course, the cueing was a little easier because you just had to line up at the top of the track.

And then when computer playback emerged, it started very clunkily with a notoriously bad program called SFX, which only ran on PCs. But, you know, that introduced being able to program the sound cues and automate them. Then when QLab was released, I embraced that, you know, right from version one; I’ve been using that since 2008, and of course, that’s the industry standard now. You’re losing a bit of the live operator vibe, but, you know, you can’t count on them even knowing how to do any of it anymore. It’s great being able to program it and have so many layers that you can be running at the same time. And then editing-wise, with tape, you had to redo it, you had to go back and record over to correct something. Whereas now if you need to shift the timing, you can grab a chunk of audio and just shift it a little bit. It’s amazing.

Richard, how much creative freedom do you usually have on a project? Are there many other people involved with sound design, or you just work mainly with the director?

Primarily with the director, yeah. And there’s a lot of coordination with the stage manager, who’s an important partner—always—in the process. But I usually have a fair bit of creative freedom. Each show is very different. Sometimes, the script provides some guidelines and sometimes they’re fairly specific. Other times, I just extrapolate from it what is likely to be needed. Of course, I’ll have some discussions with the director beforehand. And I usually make a little bit of content before rehearsals start, whenever possible. But I try not to get too deep into it because, sometimes when we start rehearsing my original ideas I realize they aren’t really going to work. So I sketch out a few things and then once people are ready, usually by about the second week of rehearsal, I’ll try a few things and that will tell me, “Okay, this kind of thing is going to work. This kind of thing is not.” Then I’ll focus on what works and I build it up pretty quickly over the course of rehearsals. By the time we’re ready to start to load in, most of the design is there and we’re running it in rehearsals. QLab has also made it a lot easier to transition from rehearsal to the venue because I can basically just bring in my QLab bundle. We’ll still have to add all the additional outputs and tweak the levels, but we don’t have to actually program everything from scratch. So that helps!

Can you think of any examples of the types of obstacles that you run into with the job?

Sometimes there are things that are just difficult to nail down. You know, what kind of thing should be here? Sometimes it’s just scheduling—that’s always a thing. There’s frequently a need for recording voiceovers. So that has to be worked out with a stage manager: “When can we get that actor?” It’s not always possible to bring them to my studio, so I have to find a quiet room in the building. That’s one of the biggest obstacles, because buildings are notoriously noisy. There’s always HVACs and buzzes and weird sounds when you’re trying to record voiceovers. Sometimes I’m even recording singers, and very few venues actually have a space that’s designed for audio recording. So that’s often a challenge. Most of the obstacles are technical. Because creatively, we can usually figure it out, though some things can take much longer. But dealing with audio systems, there’s always some kind of glitch that you’re having to fix! But you just keep plugging away at it.

In addition to your work in dance and theatre, you do a lot of film work. What are the differences between creating a theatre soundscape and sound designing and scoring a film?

There are very substantial differences. In theatre, what I’ve learned is that, most of the time, you don’t want to over-structure things. It’s more modular, in a sense, where I use loops and layers of things that we assemble in QLab. So one layer is just chugging along steadily, and then there’s some detail that is a separate cue that you can cue over top of it. Or you fade different layers in and out to give it shape. But it’s got to respond to what’s happening live. Whereas with scoring to film, you actually have a very solid, linear, very defined thing. So you can and should be very structured with it, down to “Okay, this note is going to fall right when that happens on screen.” You can be much more detailed and elaborate within the structure, because it’s not going to change. Whereas with theatre, you have to keep it a little more loose, create a few simple components that operate together. So that’s the main difference.

Do you have any advice for young people who might want to go into sound design as a career? Is there anything you’d advise them to study or any direction you’d tell them to take?

First, don’t expect to make a comfortable living. I’m still struggling, you know, thirty years later! But I would say, if you have any music chops, that’s going to serve you even if you’re just doing straight-up sound design. Having that musical knowledge will help you in terms of how you structure things. And basically, you just have to start messing around with stuff, even if it’s just GarageBand, just start playing around to see what you can do. Get to learn the software. Basically, you need to know a DAW [Digital Audio Workstation] and you need to know QLab; there are other playback programs, but QLab’s really the one you need to know. And then I use Logic Pro to make basically everything; I use that for film work and theatre work. (It’s a really versatile program, but it can be daunting for people right off the bat.) I would say, just start to play around with the tech, make your own things, so you’re getting some hands-on practice with it.

The other thing I would just say is, especially if you’re going to be working in theatre, you need to be a good collaborator. You need to know how to listen and observe and to be able to figure out how what you’re doing is going to dovetail with the other departments: with your lighting designer, with the actors. You need to be able to communicate with the director effectively and efficiently. And also, coordinating with the stage manager, which is one of the most important things!

I won’t keep you any longer, Richard, because I know that you are in rehearsal right now. But could you give us a sneak preview of what you’re working on?

I’ve got a couple. I’ve actually got both film and theatre projects on the go. There is a very big show coming up from Canadian Stage called The Inheritance, which is actually two plays. It’s got a Part One and Part Two, similar to a show like Angels in America. So I’m basically designing for two full-length three-act plays, but there will be a lot of elements in common. And then I’ve got a short film by Peter Pasyk that the Stratford Festival produced; I’m mostly just doing the score, but sound designing some sequences. And there’s also a film that I’m mostly doing sound design for, for Miranda Calderon, a feature, which will be finished probably by the summer. And it’s very unusual, so that’s kind of interesting.