Tech reviews: orchestral sounds from the keyboard

The musical has always been the highlight of the co-curricular year for me, ever since I was cast as a semi-broken voiced Pharaoh in Joseph in Year 6. Over the years since my grand debut, I have had the pleasure of working on everything from semi-staged scenes with solo piano accompaniment to West End shows with a hybrid of pits of amazingly talented musicians, click tracks and studio generated backings. The excitement of all of these disparate elements coming together to make a show is a magic unlike anything else in the school year.

My first musical production as a teacher involved the band being relegated to a storage cupboard off to one side of the studio theatre. If you have any experience of theatrical orchestra pits, you'll understand why I felt quite at home! The lack of space, not to mention the volume of six musicians arranged in a small box, brought up an all too frequent issue: having to do without instruments. In my broom-cupboard-pit there was no room for any sort of percussion. Live drums would have left the rest of us with some significant hearing issues, and even a slimline electric kit would have taken up more space than we had been allotted.