Automatically mute the room mic (ganginge input with groups ?)

[BarnabY]

Hello to all,

I’m currently mixing for a live sound and I also send a feed for video (broadcast).

Here is my basic installation:
– inputs for the music feeding some groups ==> groups (band, voice)
– other inputs (voice, background music)
– I also have an ambient mic for the in-ear and video

I have a difficulty : I would like the ambient mic to be ON only when the groups (band & voice) are ON. When I have an announcement between two musics, I would like the background mic to be muted and to be on when the music is playing.

I thought I could do a mute ganging with the room mic input + the band & voice groups, it doesn’t seem possible.

Do you have another idea ?

[Søren Steinmetz]

Set them in a mute group ?

[Mike C]

When you say automatically do you mean as in it mutes by itself when the band is not playing?

If an operator is controlling the mix…..it sounds like you are using audio groups for the channel group routing.
The ambient mic is most likely only feeding the needed auxes for the live stream and in ears and not routed to the main mix, in that case turning a audio group down would not
change the level into the aux regardless is the aux is set to pre or post.

You could use a DCA group and set the the ambient mic channel to post fade aux.

As mention a simple mute group would work as well.

[Brian]

Obviously you could set gates on your room mics to accomplish this automatically. Set it pretty high so that it only opens when the band is playing. Of course this doesn’t sound very transparent a lot of times (you can hear the gate opening and shutting). One trick to helping it sound more transparent is to set the depth to something like 6-8 db. This way the mics aren’t cutting off completely (which is drastic sounding between open and fully closed), but cutting 6-8db is plenty to get the mics well below the rest of the sound that you are hearing.

If you have the DynEQ add-on for the console, you can use it in a similar way to a gate but it sounds even more transparent. I use it for our pulpit mic so that it closes any time there isn’t speaking because our room is so reverberant and closing it takes the echoes away on our stream, but it sounds transparent so you don’t hear a gate constantly opening and closing. I use two bands – basically a low band shelf (perhaps 0-700hz) and a high band shelf (700hx and above) and they are set to cut about 6-8db each. However I have the Dyn EQ threshold set to “below”. This means the EQ is cutting anytime the volume is below the threshold and stops cutting when the signal reaches the threshold. Set it to “Fast” so it responds quickly. Then just dial in the threshold to the desired level. This cuts all the frequencies of the mic (effectively turning the mic down 6-8db) anytime the volume is below the threshold. But because of the way it works, it really does sound much more natural and transparent than a gate does.

Anyway, I hope that gives you a couple of suggestions on how to handle this besides having to mute the channels.

[BarnabY]

Hello to all

The use of a mute group is relevant, but not for this situation. And in practice, a mute group is sometimes tricky. It seems to be the same for the DCA.

Indeed, the objective is to be able to mute the Room Mic at the same time as mute the band and vocal group. Using groups instead of DCA is voluntary. Unfortunately, there are still differences between the two that make me prefer groups.

It seems that what I was looking for is to be able to “gang” inputs and groups together. Is this possible?
If not… I’d probably use the gate option.

[Author]

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