Crowd mic bleed

[Rob]

We are in the process of switching over from an analogue mixer to digital-based audio. We will have two SQ5s and an AB168, and my job with my SQ is to run our online streaming. I have a shotgun crowd mic but my problem is that we have a grand piano in a room that’s too small for a grand piano, and no matter where I put the mic the grand piano comes thru loud and not very clear. With the analogue system, I just turn the piano mic all the way down and that works OK, but with a digital mixer, there’s got to be a better solution.

We do have a mic picking up the grand piano for the in-house audio/recording, so my line of thinking was to pick up the piano mic, pipe it into the channel with the crowd mic but with the polarization reversed and just cancel the piano sound out as best as possible. What I’m not clear about is how to group both inputs (the crowd mic and a polarized piano mic) into one channel/fader in a way that doesn’t consume its own group/aux. I suppose if I gotta, I gotta, but I’m hoping someone else has experience with this and/or have some suggestions.

Thanks!

[Mike C]

Trying to cancel the piano sound would be an interesting experiment but I don’t think
it will do much more than make for a strange sounding piano.

I take it the room mic is to pick up congregation singing and they are singing along to the piano?

Is the sound your picking up the acoustic sound directly from the piano or what is being amplified in the room PA?

If the piano in the room is louder than the congregation singing there not much magic that can be done.

[Rob]

Thanks for the reply!

Yes, you have the situation nailed down. The sound from the piano reaches the microphone directly with no amplification from the room PA.

One complicating factor is that the room has an echo that is just wild. When I did the ol’ clap test, the graph was showing reflection spikes for several seconds. The decay is quite bizarre looking and it actually creates a unique sound that’s quite lovely and visiting musicians have commented that our church is one of the best churches to sing in. The problem is this means I’m not sure how much of the piano sound is direct from the piano vs echos off the back wall. This by itself could tank the whole idea.

Unless I hear a digital routing option from someone, I’ll just try grouping mics together and experimenting like I planned. I’ll let you know how it goes.

[Mike C]

A room that has fluttering multiple echos is not what I would consider good acoustics for anything, many times when people hear that in a they somehow think it means good acoustics.
Rooms with a big natural reverb with a smooth decay can sound good with large choirs, orchestras, not so good with amplified live music or trying to understand someone who is speaking.

There’s no real digital magic to make the piano lower and still pick up the people singing.
Different mics may kind of help.
Is it possible to get a few mics closer to the people singing, at the mic that would make the voices louder and piano softer.

Can the piano player play softer?

[Brian]

I have two thoughts…

First, you could use a gate to lower the crowd mic volume when the piano is playing. Of course that will prevent you from capturing the congregational singing, but it will allow you to use the mics all the other times. It is amazing how adding a room mic will make the stream feel more real because you hear people’s reaction, coughing, laughing, etc. Congregational singing can be an important part of a stream, but it’s not the sole purpose of a room mic. This would be an easy way to gain some benefits of the room mic while trying to minimize the issues it is producing.

Second, if you want the mic open all the time, spend some time trying to time align it with the mics on the piano. This will help reduce any phasing that occurs when two mics pick up the same signal, but at different times. This may be part of your clarity issue that you are experiencing. Of course the room mics are going to be picking up reflections too, but you want to time align it to the first transient it picks up and don’t worry about the rest.

[Geoff]

Rather than a gate to reduce the crowd mic, a ducker is what you want. You can find it in the compressor library. The difference between a ducker and a compressor is that the ducker reduces the gain by a fixed amount when the threshold is exceeded, whereas a compressor reduces it proportionally above the threshold. The other factor is you need to key (side chain) the ducker from the piano channel. If it needs to be keyed from more than one channel you can burn an aux to do that. Use the filters to fine tune it so you don’t get false triggers. There are half a dozen different parameters to work with to get it sounding as natural as possible.

In general getting your audience mics in coherence with the rest of the stage sound can be done by placing them close to the PA speakers. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but I’ve tried it, and it does work.

Geoff

[Brian]

Yes a ducker is what you want. I was thinking it was in the gate section, but was wrong – it is found in the compressor settings.

[Author]

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