"always on" talkback

[Theo_Karon]

Hi all,

I have always been frustrated by the barrier to communication imposed by talkback toggling & imperfect pickup of musicians tucked away in distant corners or booths.

Freelancing at a bunch of different studios over the years, I've improvised just about every common solution under the sun to this problem, and one trick that has worked well for me is to have an 'always on' mic on the console meter bridge facing out in the same direction of the speakers, as well as a heavily compressed room mic out on the floor fed into the control room monitors. This works best in control rooms with heavy absorption in the back, as there simply isn't much coming back from the speakers into the mic, although feedback is still possible. When there is leakage interfering with monitoring on either side of the glass, I'll key a compressor off of a console send so that whenever anyone starts playing the talkback feed gets put nicely away.

This works OK, but still can lead to intelligibility issues. A good solution that I've seen a few times is a ready made monitor mixer / talkback solution (I forget which manufacturer) with a built-in control room speaker that the musicians could toggle, and an electret condenser or some such in each mixer out on the floor. This did wonders for intelligibility, but now we're back in toggle land, as obviously leaving all those mics open blasting through their own dedicated speaker in the control room during a take wouldn't get us very far!

As I'm in the early phases of designing my next room in LA, one thought I had was to marry the best features of both of these systems: a small self-powered speaker & omni mic in the control room, live room, and each of the booths. Each speaker receives a mix minus of the feed from all the other mics (this would be fairly simple to set up with say an 8x8 matrix), and all feeds are ducked into oblivion by either a pre-recorded tone on one channel or a feed of all the instrument mics minus vocals (for obvious reasons - if the vocal mic is ducking the talkback, that won't work!).

The ideal here would be that with headphones on or off, everyone in every room can talk and hear each other almost as though the glass weren't there. The other benefit is a talkback system in the control room that is completely independent of monitor levels and requires no attention from the engineer. The drawback is the obvious howl-round waiting to happen; from previous experience, my intuition is that there's probably a pretty wide margin for error between 'too quiet to hear' and 'outrageous feedback' at sane control room levels, but with that many sources I feel this could defy intuition.

Has anyone else set something like this up, and if so, do you have any thoughts to share?

Thanks,

Theo

[Scodiddly]

I'm curious if pro musicians are still mostly using headphones in the studio, vs. their own custom-molded IEMs from the concert world.

It's a lot easier to pop headphones on and off, for one thing.

IEM users are more used to having an ambience/audience mic as part of their feed.

Wacky idea - engineer and/or producer wears a lavalier mic that automagically turns on between takes?

[Nick Sevilla]

Whenever I have lots of musicians in a separate recording room, I put up a large OMNI mic where it can pickup everyone.

I do mute it when recording, but then it comes on always when not recording. If it is famous people though, I tend to run that omni mic into a separate recorder all the time, to capture their banter, in case it is needed later on for documentaries, music videos, etc. But it is independent from the main Pro Tools or 24 track tape recording rig. Usually a DAT or another DAW. If I do this, it is only with their permission. And if, at the end, they tell me to erase it, I do.

If only feeds the headphone monitoring rig, and In these cases I usually have a separate, small speaker in the control room to listen in as well.

As far as the talkback, I use what is available from control room out to headphone mixes, or improvise a mutable mic to their headphone feed. I like using things like a Rolls MS111 mic switch. It sits near me while recording.

[jacksaturn]

I use the Muteomatic plugin from Sound Radix for this purpose: https://www.soundradix.com/products/muteomatic/

It's a free plugin. I dedicate a mic and preamp specifically for talkback from the live room, and when I hit Play in PT, Muteomatic automatically mutes the input, then brings it back when I press Stop. I suppose you could automatically mute a number of mics in this same way if needed.

-Jack

[Theo_Karon]

I'm curious if pro musicians are still mostly using headphones in the studio, vs. their own custom-molded IEMs from the concert world.

It's a lot easier to pop headphones on and off, for one thing.

IEM users are more used to having an ambience/audience mic as part of their feed.

Wacky idea - engineer and/or producer wears a lavalier mic that automagically turns on between takes?

Ha! Just remember to switch it off before going to the bathroom...

I've been seeing more and more IEMs at sessions in recent years. I like them because the musician is comfortable right away AND I don't have to worry about bleed...

Re: some of the other suggestions here, all good stuff but also all in the ballpark of duct tape quick fixes. I'm envisioning a system that is totally independent from PT/tape feeds and is already on as soon as the room gets switched on, even during setup.

It occurs to me that speaker placement is likely going to be a crucial factor here. The more I think about it, the more it seems worth the experiment - even a partial success would be pretty great, and in the worst case I won't mind having some extra tie lines & routing flexibility between booths!

But think how great it would be if everyone could just communicate without having to toggle anything or think about it. I feel these communication problems are behind a LOT of the quotidian frustrations that emerge during sessions - I love the open concept idea for this reason, but I find for me personally the impediment to accurate monitoring outweighs the communication benefit. I consistently get MUCH better drum sounds (in particular) when I can actually hear what's going on while adjusting the equipment!! So for me an iso'd control room is necessary... I just want to have my cake and eat it too

It will probably be about a year til the build is finished (if I'm lucky...!)

If anyone's curious I'll revive this thread then and describe how it worked out!

[vvv]

If anyone's curious I'll revive this thread then and describe how it worked out!

Please, and with pic's.

[digitaldrummer]

I use the Muteomatic plugin from Sound Radix for this purpose: https://www.soundradix.com/products/muteomatic/

It's a free plugin. I dedicate a mic and preamp specifically for talkback from the live room, and when I hit Play in PT, Muteomatic automatically mutes the input, then brings it back when I press Stop. I suppose you could automatically mute a number of mics in this same way if needed.

-Jack

If I had more than one room I would totally use this. although even with one room, and everyone wearing headphones or IEMs, this could still work well.