"Transparent Gain Ajustment"

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This topic contains 8 replies, has 7 voices, and was last updated by Profile photo of airickess airickess 8 years, 9 months ago.

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  • #49032
    Profile photo of danthedeckie
    danthedeckie
    Participant

    Problem:

    Everything is sound-checked and sounding great, until the start of the show where you realise that the singer is also going to be talking a lot, and when talking, speaks *incredibly* quietly, but sings louder than Paverotti. The channel gain is set for the opera-singing level, and all the in-ear monitors and main mix are set for that. You don’t have enough gain left on the mix fader to get her voice loud enough when she’s talking. What you need to do is boost the gain by 20 db, and drop all mix sends by the same amount on that channel. Yes, a compressor is useful, but for this extreme a difference, and especially with classical music, if used enough to fix the issue, will screw up everything else.

    Solution:

    A mode where you can adjust the pre-amp, and all sends get simultaneously reverse-adjusted. My preference would be a l “fix downstream” / “transparent” adjustment button. Possibly on the touchscreen, possibly accessed by holding down the dLink/USB button on the head-amp section of the channel strip, possibly using a user-defined button. While the button is being pressed, any adjustments you make to the Gain auto automatically reversed on all mixes that that channel is sent to.


    I’ve never seen a desk that does this – but with digital it should be very easy to do.

    #49034
    Profile photo of MikeShand
    MikeShand
    Participant

    Can you set up two fader strips for that input, with the appropriate parameters and use the gain trim to balance the levels? That’s what I do on the GLD in those circumstances, but not sure if the QU allows this.

    #49035
    Profile photo of danthedeckie
    danthedeckie
    Participant

    Not easily – that is exactly what I’ve done on other desks though.

    I sometimes find myself in similar situations where because of the messiness of live sound, with short sound-check times, or multiple musos and instruments that I’d like to be able to do this kind of adjustment. Where the bassist has a good level to everyone, but then when the drummer gets really excited it’s no longer loud enough, and you end up maxing out the level you can send to the bassists IEMs, and it’s still not enough for him, but no-one else wants him any louder, etc.

    #49036
    Profile photo of croydon_clothears
    croydon_clothears
    Participant

    If you’re using AudioRacks connected via DSnake to your Qu Mixer, AND you have firmware version 1.7, you can easily map the same input to more than one fader strip. That would elegantly give you a channel for chatting and a channel for belting it out.
    However, if you’re plugging up locally on the back of the desk, perhaps the fastest solution would be to make a modest investment in a mic splitter or two?

    #49041
    Profile photo of SteffenR
    SteffenR
    Participant

    tell her to speak louder…

    #49042
    Profile photo of danthedeckie
    danthedeckie
    Participant

    Yep, that would also work.

    I guess a better ‘problem’ description is:

    Your gain structure isn’t right, but the output level currently is. If you adjust your Gain, then all the outputs will be messed up, and will all have to be fixed. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do this in one go, rather than have to do each output at a time, thus giving bad output levels while you are fixing it.

    An example of that is what is described above. Another would be that after playing for a while, you realise that all the musos are happy with their mixes, but the main fader for the bass (or whatever) is around -25, so making small changes is not possible. It would be nice to be able to fix the gain structure to allow unity-level mixing (roughly….) without messing up all your mixes.

    This is a feature request / suggestion, rather than a ‘oh help, I don’t know what to do!’ kind of thing.

    #49043
    Profile photo of DavidCo
    DavidCo
    Participant

    Don’t forget dynamics processing needs consideration too. Thresholds and makeup gains would need to be similarly compensated. What about cases involving linked channels? It’s quite a minefield.

    DC

    #49045
    Profile photo of [XAP]Bob
    [XAP]Bob
    Participant

    Indeed I suggested this quite a while ago. My case was the latter (the former gets told to project when speaking, or gets a separate mic).

    I’m sure the brains at A&H could come up with something sensible for inserted fx/makeup gain etc.

    I’m not sure what internal representation is used by the QU – is it FP for instance?

    #49047
    Profile photo of airickess
    airickess
    Participant

    If you have your monitor mix sends set to Pre EQ on a particular channel does that mean that makeup gain in the compressor does or does not affect the level of that channel in the mix? If not, then makeup gain on the channel is a good tool to use for these situations.
    If it does affect the level of all mixes then perhaps a second microphone standing by would be a solution (that is if you can’t split the input onto two channel strips, as was wisely suggested).

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