Bo Garrard is the Director of Production and Resident Sound Designer at Mountain Theatre Company, where his creative and technical work merge seamlessly with his musical background. Currently, Bo is deeply involved in their production of The Burnt Part Boys, serving as Sound Designer, Music Director, and even stepping into the spotlight as a featured musician. He performs live on guitar for seven shows a week — entirely from memory — while also acting as director of production! Reflecting on the show, Bo said, “I had a lot of fun producing our backing tracks and creating some ambiences for a show that is so rarely produced”. Looking beyond his own projects, Bo is excited about the possibilities of QLab’s new Object Audio feature and the ways it might reshape future designs and collaborations.
Let’s delve more into Bo’s journey while learning about his approach and interest in spatialized audio.
Bo grew up in the Tampa Bay area in Florida and recently relocated to Franklin, North Carolina, for his role at Mountain Theatre Company. His roots are in music, and he pursued a Bachelor of Music before shifting his focus to Music Technology due to his fascination with the recording studio as an instrument. He is inspired by avant-garde composers such as Steve Reich, John Cage, Stockhausen, and the musique concrète movement. While hoping to reconstruct and reimagine music, he also played in pits for high school theaters, which led to him working as a session musician and with community and regional theatres. While Bo has been performing music since middle school, he only began working in the theatrical world in 2021. He points to albums by Frank Zappa and Sun Ra as early inspirations that expanded his understanding of music as art, and to the collaborative spirit of audio technology as the element that drew him toward theatrical sound design.
A recent highlight in Bo’s career was designing Hair, alongside his collaborator Matt Nall, in a large-scale outdoor stage, next to an airport and marina, with an audience of roughly 800. This presented unique challenges in RF management, system design, and logistics. Together, Bo and Matt acted as co-designers, system engineers, and traded responsibilities as A1 and A2 throughout the run, learning invaluable lessons from each other. It was Bo’s first opportunity to design a system from the ground up rather than working with pre-installed setups. Reflecting on the project, he describes it as a pivotal “level up” moment in his growth as a designer.
Community has been Bo’s greatest influence and support on his journey. Without formal theater training or traditional apprenticeships, he has relied on books (he cites Mixing a Musical by Shannon Slaton as a lifesaver), online resources, YouTube tutorials, and hard-won experience in the field. Due to his musical foundation, Bo approaches sound design like a composer and does a full score study and works closely with music directors when mixing. His approach is one of empathy and compassion, and he continuously loves to work with others to learn from their methods and absorb more knowledge. With mainly a music background, Bo enjoys continuing to learn new stuff every day and is most excited to get the opportunity to work with spatial audio, reinforcing his previous system design knowledge. Bo hopes that organizations like TSDCA continue to grow in advocacy, education, and community, strengthening the field in the way unions like IATSE have for their members. His advice to others pursuing a career in sound design is straightforward: “Be honest with others about your abilities, and take every opportunity you can to learn and do.”
Bo’s Picks
- Alternate Non-Sound Career: professional baking, waking up at 2 a.m. to fill the world with bread and sweets.
- Go-To Tech Snacks: Soft sweets like chewy cookies and licorice, with coffee always nearby.
- Pet Peeves: non-communication, but more specifically, moving forward without consulting sound
- Recent Favorite Music: Funk jams (Vulfpeck, Cory Wong, Delvon Lamarr Trio) and minimalist/phase music (Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Brian Eno).
- Favorite Tools: Soundly for sound effects and library management (“a game-changer”), Reaper for DAW work, QLab 5, TheatreMix, and Todoist for task tracking
- Technology that changed his process: Soundly — for its speed, flexibility, and integration.
Interviewed by Erica Fox & Aaron Woodstein