some advise please :)

[roostmusic]

I am currently working with a percussionist that plays a full on tribal drum setup (4 dynamic mics, 2 condenser overheads). we are working together as an electronic music live PA act. I have some synths all hooked together sequenced via a laptop...going into a mixer. the percussionist has a separate mixer for his stuff so that I can feed 1 stereo signal into my mixer and control the overall volume of what he is playing. The problem is that he switches from playing with his hands to playing with drumsticks...which dramatically increases the overall volume, loudness, and attack of what he is playing...drowning out the entire mix. What is the solution here? a noise gate? compressor? are there any recommended settings for this so that the volume of the percussion can remain consistent no matter how loud he is actually playing?

Thanks for the help!!!

[malcolm123]

Not trying to be funny,

But I would get someone to manually control his volume.

Or if your board has snapshots or something for different levels for each change.

If the two levels are too drastic then maybe some high end compressor may help.

someone will probably give you a better answer.

Good Luck

Malcolm

[tanlith]

That might work... to be completely honest, I don't know enough about gates and compressers to say if they can be used THAT way... I know exactly what you mean by the change in volume. We had a similer problem when our percussionist would switch from his hands to his sticks.

Keep in mind this is an "old tech" answer as we had this problem about 10yrs ago... but here goes...

Now we had to custom build a patch bay to do this back then (not sure if we built it becase of the cost or because they didn't exist hehe) here's what it did:

All the mics feed into the patch bay... from there there's 2 outs for each in that can be switched simultaneously back and fourth... now once you have something like that setup, the rest is reletively easy:

In your particular case you got a total of 6 mics so you'd need a 12 channel mixer for the drummer... the first 6 out from the patch bay go into ports 1-6 on the mixer and the last six into 7-12...

do 2 seperate sound checks for the percussion and mix appropriately... basically at that point, you use a footswitch to allow the drummer to switch between output(s) A & B at will...

You might need to use a noise gate to mask out the switch between the two, but this will definitely work and from my experience is REALLY reliable. No worries about an "accidental rim shot" standing out way too much because the compressor couldn't "contain" it....


- Tanlith -

Webmaster: Super Loop Library

[Tonio]

what tanlith & malcolm suggested could be of help.

FWIW if he changes to sticks on different tunes, you could do a sound check and make markers on the mixer for both hands level and one for stick level, and adjust. But if he's changing to stick during a tune it may take another set of hands.

Or maybe a limiter punch in somehow?