Though Kid Prince and Pablo acts like a play with music, in many respects it functions a little more like a musical. Pablo (Jesús Barajas) is a drummer and has the task of underscoring a majority of the show, either playing a bucket drum or making live beats via a tablet. We elected not to use any mics, but needed to be able to hear what Pablo was playing on the iPad but have it feel different than the rest of the sound in the play so we would understand that it was live. This also set me the task of creating additional music (for scene transitions and such) that complimented Marvin’s music without mimicking it. Additionally, Raquel and Marvin have backgrounds in clown performance, and we wanted to bring that into this show. This led to a lot of visual gags accompanied or enhanced by sound, turning what could be regular comedic moments into living cartoons—one of my favorite things to do as a designer.

While Marvin supplied us with Pablo’s music, most of the transition music fell to me to create. Kid Prince and Pablo requires a lot of world-building to be done quickly, and that’s what I attempted to do with the transition pieces. Raquel and I are big fans of Arcane and used it as a starting point for how to quickly deliver information about two distinctly different worlds through sound. Hip-hop is banned in the world of the play, so I wanted the music of the Upper World to sound completely divergent from hip-hop, opting for strings or synthy 80s-style pop. The Underground was much more hip-hop focused, but needed to be different from the music Marvin had created for Pablo. This piece played at the top of the show to establish the Upper world, but then immediately transitioned to the Underground, where all the action takes place.