How To Duck Your Crowd Mics for Live Shows and Rehearsals

[Music] [Music] hey hey hey what's going on guys and gals in this particular video we're going to talk about ducking the quack of the quackers okay one of our members ck up in the community up there on facebook x32 iraq users said you know what man this is what i'd like to do i want to be able to go live and i want to be able to have some crowd mic set up and i want those to stay off until they get finished with the song and the lead singer you know comes up and he wants to interact with the crowd he wants those mics to automatically come on now we could assign those two mics to a mute group but we want this to be 100 automatic now the other suggestion they came up with that you know when you're in rehearsal this would be a great thing to have as well if you're used to using in-ear monitors you know there are so many variables guys you got to really think of all of it okay some groups will sit in there and whether you're recording or rehearsal and they'll just stay at it until they get what they want to get you know until they're confident with the tightness of what they're working on now some people will go into that same studio or rehearsal and they will sit there and just say you know what after the first song i'm coming out of here you know out of these uh in-ear monitors so that's what we're talking about here it's called ear fatigue okay if you've done this long enough you'll know exactly what i'm talking about so if you look at the meters right here you'll see that channel 15 and 16 those are two mics that i have set up in my control room right now these are condensers and i've got them dumped all the way down okay and i'm going to show you how to do this and what that means now the other ones these are gated right here and uh these are the toms uh eight and nine are two of the uh i think it's tom one and tom two it's not the floor tom and as you go through you'll see these pop up every once in a while because it's you know there it goes right there you know they're hitting uh the the tom and it's releasing that gate and it's opening up and it's coming through okay so let's go ahead and listen to that and you'll see exactly what i'm talking about [Music] okay so as you can see and i'm gonna go back up to the meters now just for a second now uh my input signal i have the two condensers and and by the way these are uh behringer c2s i think i bought them on sale from sweetwater they were like 39. okay these are little small diaphragm pencil condensers and i love them i use them all the time okay depending on what the need is you know normally you get what you pay for and i guarantee you if you got a chance to look you know just look them up uh behringer cf uh c2s and i think they've got them right now for 49 these things come with a hard case they come with their own mount okay they come with the um pop filters or or windscreens dead kittens you know whatever you want to call them so what i'm going to do right now uh even though you can see this signal coming in through 15 and 16 this is also assigned to the in ears okay so when the lead singer wants to interact with the crowd he will be able to hear these mics once they're undocked okay so how do we simulate that well i've got all my channels here coming in uh signed to mute group one and when i turn that off watch those red lines disappear instantly so now okay you know the rest of the band has stopped playing you wouldn't see these other signals coming in here but he would be able to hear anything coming through uh the crowd left and crowd light right mike okay so let's go ahead and look at what we've done well the first thing we've done is we've come over here to our buses and on bus number 16 i've created a crowd ducking okay now look if you've used all your buses uh like ck has then uh you know instead of bus 12 you can come up here you can use one of your fx okay kind of stay along with me here it's not too complicated but it does get a little bit tricky now as you can see in my in-ear monitor right here okay this is dana iem coming right out of here a bus number nine when i speak you're not hearing this through the microphone that this video is being done on you're seeing that signal come through those house mics okay so uh at this point i'm going to go back and i'm going to come up here to the crowd micah and we're going to go to the gate and instead of going with the gate guys we're going to go with the docker okay now over here your filters are so low none of this matters okay this is for a totally different thing but these are the source that you can trigger the crowd mics with and this is exactly what a ducking a signal is uh very commonly with a kick mic and a bass you might have the bass channel to lower itself automatically by two or three dbs every time the kick comes in so when that kick comes in okay because you've made that source in this particular case over here at base you see it's channel three right over here okay so the source would be channel three let me come up here right here okay so what this means is if i set this duck up on this channel okay then you would sit here and go up and every time that kick would hit and that signal would come through the base channel would already automatically duck down however many dbs that you want it to do okay now i went extreme here on the uh 60 dbs and i'm going to show you how this works okay i'm going to unmute this and you'll see this start ducking instantly okay now here's your range this is what sets how many db's you want to duck it by okay so i want to duck it all the way and that way i don't have to worry about it coming through or bleeding through and then on your threshold over here you can see i've got it set to 24.5 and this threshold is going to depend over here on the crowd ducking to how much you have signal going into that bus okay now this is the key thing there are so many ways you can do it from this point now it's incredible if i was going to do this okay and this is just strictly me and i'm out there playing a live gig and these guys did not want to hear any of the crowd mics in their in-ear monitors none whatsoever first off i would come if if dana was the lead singer okay i would be the only one that had the crowd mic put in okay i would be the only one none of the other band members would have that in there but i'm not okay so over here if if the lead let's say the lead singer is also the guitar player then you could take his vocal mic and i don't have anything listed out here but just kind of follow me now okay if if channel one was his vocal mic then i could add his vocal mic into that okay and let's say that he played the guitar and then i would add his guitar in there as well and that's all i would put in there okay because this if he stops playing the guitar and he stops singing then more than likely the song is getting ready to come to an end and this guy okay is going to be able to sit there and listen if somebody's out in the crowd if he wanna you know wants to interact with them if you're out in an arena this is gonna be very tricky if you're inside of a club it's gonna be pretty easy okay it's gonna be pretty easy to set now over here on the crowd as you can see that i've got the attack very very fast okay because i want this thing to duck instantly when somebody starts playing the hold you're gonna have to mess with because if not you start to you'll start getting this choppy effect and you don't want that the release same way i can't tell you how to set this because i'm not in your situation okay but again as you can see nothing's coming through the house mics now the mics that i have set up my little c2s unless i mute this okay if i mute all this incoming audio then instantly it goes away and as you can see i've got the signal coming up in here and then i've got the signal coming through channel 15 and 16. and over here on the iem uh let's go to the bus here as you can see i've got plenty of signal now coming in through my in-ear monitors okay look at that range down there at the bottom that's right at about 50 and negative 50 dbs okay and that's noise floor is what that is and the reason that noise floor is there guys is because of the gain okay on on a condenser mic especially the small diaphragm condensers you should never have to jack that gain up that high the lower that gain then the lower that noise floor okay as you can see i do not have these going through the left main and rights up here okay we want these strictly to go to the in-ear monitor for the people that want to listen to it on stage now if i bring the meters up again i'm going to be silent and let's look at meter 15 and 16. you see it totally goes away over here the ins and outs the same way it totally goes away but over here on the bus on my in-ear right here you see you have that little bit coming in and that little bit going out and that's because uh over here i've got it raised now i can i can adjust this you have that's why you have to play with this you have to adjust your overall in-ear monitor depending on what style what type what make and model you have and you can totally take every bit of that background noise out or that noise floor okay now you see the end let's go back to uh configure back to those mics and watch what happens now if i drop this phantom power down you can see i'm not getting very much signal coming out now and that's going to affect me over here on this bus you see the signal goes away on the bus now there's nothing coming in but that's because i've reduced the gain input okay so if i raise this up i'm getting a little bit but i'm still not getting any of that background noise that noise floor so basically you know what i'm showing you is how you do this and you're going to have to play with it and get it to where you can get that input signal okay without bringing in too much noise floor or static whatever you want to call it to where you can get a healthy output level now keep in mind again watch this meter if i turn around and face these mics now i can't see it but it should go up quite a bit okay now think about being in a crowd it's a lot louder people are hollering they're screaming they're woohoo and you know you'll be able to hear this a lot better and then that way you can set your proper input gains to that now if you're in the studio you're in a controlled environment or you're in rehearsal you're in a controlled environment you'll have no problem doing this whatsoever all right take care god bless and we are out of here

Channel: Dana Tucker

Views: 469

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Id: 6fT4iDtyqMQ

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021