Joe Payne has been the resident sound designer at Pioneer Theatre for 10 years. He also teaches sound design classes at the University of Utah.

How do you come up with the sound design for a show? For a musical, we start with meetings and a script and decide what we want to accomplish in a show aurally. And then I go back and figure out what equipment we own, what equipment we need to rent and what equipment we need to buy to make that vision a reality. Then, once I've done all that organization, I have a crew who will replace speakers and reconfigure the sound system.

What's the process of creating the sound design? I go to a few run-throughs in the rehearsal room to mark down when people are speaking, where they're speaking, if they're speaking into each others' faces and if there's any oddities like rubbing through their hair, because that's where we usually put the mikes. Then during the technical rehearsals we EQ or change the tonality of the microphones on all the voices. We have to try to make the microphone sound the same as the person wearing it. So if that person has a lot of gruffness or a lot of sharpness or crispness, we try to emulate that so that when it's reinforced, it doesn't sound like they're in a tub or a box. We use that time to decide when they're coming and going and get an overall balance of the actors against the other actors. Then, once we get through the whole show once with the lighting cues and everything, we do the same thing over again with the orchestra. We'll have usually two rehearsals with the orchestra on stage, and then we go into an audience. We use previews and our final dress rehearsals to finetune.

What are some of the most important aspects of your job? Half of the job is making the cast feel comfortable. Making the cast feel comfortable about singing and performing and making sure they can hear what they need to hear and they have the energy on stage that they need. So the monitor mix is actually just as important as the audience mix, because if the actors aren't getting what they need, then they don't give the audience what they need.

What's unique about the sound design for Pioneer Theatre's next production? "A Chorus Line" is really straightforward sound design. A lot of solos, a lot of dance. Not a lot of tricks, not a lot of special effects. So the idea is just to make the show as clear as possible. There's two trains of thought when it comes to sound design for a musical. There's big and loud like a CD, and then the other train of thought is to enhance the voice and the musician so you can hear them, but you still get a sense of the direction of the voice and you still get a sense that that actor is singing that song. Natural reinforcement is what we pride ourselves on here.

Why is natural reinforcement important to you in theatrical productions? I'm a big believer -- and I teach all my students this -- that the biggest difference between us and film is the audience-actor relationship. If we lose that audience-actor relationship, then we might as well put it on tape.