recording LR + ambience

[MikeShand]

Before you jump in and say it’s easy, let me explain what I am trying to do.

At the moment I have a pair of ambience mics (amb L & amb R) and the two channels are fed to a stereo AUX (amb) which also takes inputs from all the speech mics (post fade). This is fed to a stereo pair in the monitor (Aviom) so the musicians have ambinence and a less reverberant feed from the speech mics.

I also have a stereo matrix (rec) the outputs of which are fed to the USB recorder and which takes a feed from LR + amb. (yes I know I get the speech mics in the recording twice, which may or may not cause comb filtering, but I don’t think it does, and anyway this is what I want to change.). The speech mics reach LR via a group (spch), which is also used to make a backup copy of the speech only via an off board recorder.

BUT, the musicians now want separate speech and ambience channels. Good, thinks I, that means I can claw back some mix busses (I’m on the limit as it is). So, I can simply send the amb L and amb R to the stereo linked pair on the aviom using direct out, and do away with the stereo aux (amb). Then I can send the spch grp to a spare aviom channel.

But now I have a problem. I can’t put the ambience mics directly into the stereo matrix (rec) becuase that is not allowed. But if I change that to a stereo aux, so I can, I then can’t take the LR into the rec aux!

So what am I to do? The only thing I can think of (without burning another mix bus) is to feed all the mics post fade into the rec aux. I guess that works, but is a bit of a pain to set up especially when I change things, becuase I will have to remember to add additional channels to BOTH LR and the rec aux, rather than just being confident that everything that goes to FOH gets recorded. And also the recording won’t be affected by master LR gain changes, but that is probably a positive.

So, to finally get to my question. Am I missing something here? Is there an easier way? I fear I might have brain fade:-)

[Nathan]

Sadly the only solutions i can see are:

1. Use another aux for the ambience.
2. Use mono ambience on the record feed via the Ext. In
3. Make all feeds to a record aux post-fade and accept that any routing changes have to be applied to both (could just copy paste the LR mix onto the record aux and then add back in ambient).

[MikeShand]

Thanks, as I thought. I hadn’t considered (2), but I don’t think it works in my case, nor had I thought of copying the LR mix. That might be a time saver.

[MikeShand]

Hmmm. It doesn’t seem to allow me to copy the mix assignments from LR (at least not in the Editor… haven’t yet tried yet on the actual GLD). Is this expected? I can copy from Aux, Grp and Mtx, and even DCA, but can then only paste into the same type of channel. But I can’t copy from LR, all it offers there is reset. I guess this all makes sense, but it means your option 3 doesn’t work.

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