Theatre Sound Made Easy With QLab
Using QLab for Mac To Operate Sound From School Plays To West End
Sep 3, 2009
QLab is an application written specially for the theatre sound designer to give him or her the sort of power that modern programmable lighting desks have given to the lighting designer, leaving the operator with just a single 'Go' button to fire most cues.
Basic Hardware and Software Setup
The simplest system to operate your sound using QLab could be any Mac running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) or later with a headphone socket and a cable to take the sound to your theatre's mixing desk or amplifier. QLab can be downloaded free from the QLab web site.
While the sound from a headphone socket on a Mac isn't terrible for home use, there are plenty of USB sound modules that give much better quality sound more suited to a PA system. The cheaper ones will provide stereo sound, whereas the most expensive have many outputs that can send different sounds to different speakers around the theatre.
A Simple Sound Cue List
The most basic sound cue list will simply be a sequential list of music or sound effects cues that each fire when cued by the operator, similar to a sequence of tracks on a CD or Minidisk.
Of course the sounds will all need to be in a computer sound format before QLab can play them, so if they are on CD you need to rip them to disk first using something like iTunes. Tracks can't be dragged from iTunes to QLab, but if you CTRL-click on a track in iTunes and select 'Show in Finder' you can drag it from the Finder window to QLab,
To get sounds into QLab, either drag them onto the cue list in the required order or drag an audio cue from the toolbox to the left onto the cue list and either drag the sound file onto it or click the up-arrow under 'Target' and select it from the file open dialogue. Cues can be rearranged simply by dragging them around.
In the inspector along the bottom, the settings tab has a drop-down box for 'Output Patch' which you may need to change if you are using a sound module rather than the headphone socket or your Mac's speakers. Double-click on a cue's name in the cue list to change it. You can also add notes about the currently-selected cue in the box above the cue list, which could be a cue line of dialogue or special instructions to the sound operator.
To play back cues, click the 'Reset All' button on the toolbar and you will see a yellow dot against the first cue. Press the space bar on your keyboard or click the large 'Go' button and the first cue will fire, moving the selection and the yellow dot to the second cue. A currently-playing cue has a green triangle next to it, and a green progress bar will appear over the 'Action' time.
Clicking 'Go' does not stop any previous cues but plays the next one over the top of any that are currently playing. Therein lies its power, giving you the ability to fire spot sound effects over the top of background sounds and music, allowing you to build up a complex soundscape cued perfectly to the action onstage.
Fading Cues
A fade cue acts on a cue that is already running, bringing its sound level up or down.
Drag a fade cue onto the cue list from the toolbox. Drag the cue that starts the sound you want to fade onto this fade cue, then in the Levels tab of the Inspector drag the master fader to the new level; if you are fading the sound out, drag it down to -INF and click the 'Stop target when done' box. Under the Curve Shape and Settings tab, you can set the duration of the fade.
If you want to fade into another cue, on the Info tab there is a Continue drop-down menu, usually set to 'do not continue'. If you set it to 'auto-continue', the current and next cues will fire together; 'auto-follow' will fire the next cue when the current cue has completed.
Group Cues
A group cue is a folder that holds a number of other cues. You can set its mode in the Toolbox to 'Fire first child and enter into group', so the group acts as a sub-playlist waiting for the operator to cue each sub-cue or 'child', or 'Fire all children simultaneously', which fires all cues in the group together without cluttering the playlist with auto-follow cues.
In the case above for fading from one sound to another, a group set to fire all cues simultaneously would contain the fade cue for the previous sound and the sound cue for the new sound. Name the group cue after the new sound and click the disclosure triangle to hide the child cues and it keeps your cue list nice and neat.
You can also set the group cue to fire the first cue only and then experiment with auto-follow and auto-continue cues and pre-wait times (a delay between pressing 'Go' and the cue firing) to create a complex layering of sounds that all fire at various times from a single 'Go'.
Further Complexity
There are myriad possibilities from the above basic facilities for sound designs for plays or musicals, but there are many other types of cues and settings to be explored to give you even more possibilities.
All of this is without even touching on the facilities that require paid licences such as additional audio cues, video and MIDI control – everything described here and more is available in the free version of the software.
If you are using sound for a theatre show from a school play to a big musical and can put your hands on a recent Mac, QLab makes some quite sophisticated effects really easy to accomplish for free without carrying round a lot of gear and a technician to plug it all together.
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