Especially For You – Yamaha RIVAGE PM5 Tours UK With Stock Aitken And Waterman Musical

In 2024, audiences in the UK and Ireland have been able to relive the mid-1980s and early 1990s as I Should Be So Lucky, the official musical celebrating the music of legendary producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman (SAW) tours provincial venues for the first time. A Yamaha RIVAGE PM5 digital mixing system has helped them to step back in time.

For a show which celebrates the unique musical legacy of SAW’s Hit Factory production house, sound designer Ben Harrison faced the unenviable task of a production where the star was 23 songs with a very distinctive production sound, originally sung by artists including Kylie Minogue and Rick Astley. Not only that, now they were being played by a live band and if they didn’t sound exactly right, the audience would know. With Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman themselves involved, the sound had to be perfect.

Supplied by Cardiff-based Stage Sound Services, Ben has specified Yamaha RIVAGE PM series digital mixing systems for a number of high profile musicals. These include 9 To 5, The Great British Bake Off Musical, Bugsy Malone, Burlesque, Death Note, Shrek, The Spongebob Musical and on the world tour of We Will Rock You (supplied by Orbital), as well as Tarantino Live and the pantomime Mother Goose, starring Sir Ian McKellen.

“Yamaha has made my decision of which mixing system to specify really easy,” he says. “The RIVAGE PM series sound great, the onboard effects and plug-ins are superb, Yamaha mixers are universally known and the theatre mode really tailors the automation of the console to what I’m looking for. It is invaluable when it comes to the usual problems of hats / position changes and understudies.”

For I Should Be So Lucky, Ben chose a Yamaha RIVAGE PM5 system as the 21st century solution to recreating the sounds of more than 30 years ago. “Mike, Matt and Pete’s music is so iconic, and the production techniques played such a huge part in their sound, that I wanted to be able to facilitate anything they wanted to try,” he says.

“The RIVAGE PM5 system’s effects and plug ins are some of the best on the market. They model some of the era's classic processing, but Yamaha’s VST Rack software also meant we could run any VST emulations of era-specific gear we wanted. This avoided having to potentially take racks of outboard equipment on tour and made things very simple.”

As well as the critically-important sounds, I Should Be So Lucky also presented Ben and the sound team with the familiar challenges of the jukebox musical format.

“It’s really important to maintain the theatrical integrity of this show,” he says. “Songs are often used for narrative purposes, so the words become very important and need to sit higher in a mix than the originals. Finding the balance of which songs are performance numbers, which move the story along and mixing them accordingly is really important.”

And for a touring production, reliability and roadworthiness are obviously paramount.

“Reliability is a huge factor. Yamaha is renowned for being reliable and that’s essential on a touring production,” says Ben. “The touring teams work incredibly hard, their schedules can be gruelling, so having the confidence in the equipment and knowing that, in the unlikely event of a problem, high quality support is only a phone call away is really important.”