ducker for audience mics

[flyingeyepro]

Hi All,

I want to setup a compressor as a ducker to ride the level of audience mics going to my foh recording. Basically I want the level of the audience mics to rise at the end of a song and decrease when they start playing again. I assume I should use the LR bus as a sidechain to the comp. Should I go with an internal comp or a plugin? Anyone try this yet? What kind of attack release setting seem to work best?

Thanx
Chris Mitchell
FoH/UM

[Pinball Wizard]

You may find this video to be helpful.

http://www.airusersblog.com/home-pag...ng-vocals.html

[Sheldon Radford]

Hi Chris,

There are a few cool ways to do this, depending on how automated you want it to be. The simplest thing to do would be to create two snapshots - one that fades the mics up (with a user-defined crossfade) and another that faders them down. You can then set up an event to trigger these snapshots when you press a button, or step on a footswitch. This works great because it's entirely within your control and doesn't require a plug-in or comp (which can be a bit tricky to dial in, especially if the material you're using as the key source is quite dynamic).

If you want to try side chaining a comp or ducker, one trick is to use a dedicated "key" channel, rather than the actual program material. This "key" channel is typically an oscillator putting out a steady tone (which is only routed to the comp, never to a mix). The benefit to this approach is that the triggering of the side chain filter becomes very predictable and easy to dial in, because it's using a fixed tone at a fixed level, rather than a constantly changing mix of program material. This also avoid false triggering or pumping during quiet bits.

For this setup, some action (again, pressing a button or footswitch), umutes the tone, which in turn acts on the side chain of the comp/ducker and turns the audience mics down. Even though this is still a manual approach, it's produces a consistent result and is usually fewer moves (and simpler moves, which can be done while making other changes in a busy mix).

For a fully automated approach you can try using the mix audio as the side chain input. Note that it's not possible to use an output bus to feed the side chain of an input channel, so you'll need to loop the output bus back into the console, either via external cables or through a plug-in.

For ducker plug-ins, hands down the best I've used is the Serato Dynamics. It has a dedicated ducking mode that works great. Download a demo and give it a try.

http://serato.com/raneseries-dynamics

(Full disclosure: I worked at Rane when the hardware version of this was developed, but was not involved in the plug-in development.)

Give some of these tricks a try. I'm sure others will have ideas as well.

Sheldon