Sound setup problems

[agermich]

Hi There

 

I'm mainly a lighting man but I need some help from the noise boys for a show that I'm working on at uni so please excuse me if this post is a bit confused :) . Here's the deal. For the show we have put a pair of speakers upstage in the grid for use with distant ambient sounds in the show. These are in addition to our FOH Bose 802/302s. What we want to do is have one CD1 playing through the FOH speakers, then bring up CD2 on the upstage speakers and then X-fade CD1 to the US and CD2 to the FOH.

 

In order to do this we put each CD player into a pair of channels assigned to the FOH. We then used the direct outs to go into another channel which was assigned to US. Now this is probably obvious to alot of people out there (but it wasn't to us) that this didn't work because the direct outs are post fade. What we need is a pre-fade.

 

I have come up with two solutions that I would like to run by the masses. Solution 1 would be to use a splitter to give us two outputs from each CD player. The other was to go out of the insert using a stereo jack with the signal send (tip) and signal return (ring) joined to bypass the cutout (if that makes sense).

 

By the way the desk is a Soundcraft spirit live 4 2

 

Any help would be great.

 

Mike

[dbuckley]

Splitter would be easiest, a CD player will happily drive several desk line inputs, so a simple passive split will be fine.

 

Nice to see some ambient soundscapes. Far too rare.

[agermich]

We've also got some backfill speakers behind the audience so you can really believe the soundscape and feel the sound coming from all around you.

[dbuckley]

Very cool. I used to do stuff like than when I was crazy (a couple of decades ago now) with fleets of tape recorders.

 

Last time I did ambisonics was for a dropped gun on stage, which of course goes bang, and then the ricochets from behind the audience follow...

 

The best way to control this sort of stuff these days is with SFX software, which can do all the multi-channel panning for you, in a controlled programmable way. Unfortunately, non of the other (all lower cost!) PC based packages have this stunt, its the killer trick of SFX. Most of the usual suspects can play multiple tracks to multiple output channels, but cant pan one stereo playback track between several pairs of stereo output groups.

[david.elsbury]

Amdram show I'm doing at the moment, sort of similar, it's a play called "Bouncers" and there's a speaker offstage in the rear corridor (offstage disco effect) (BTW it's like a 100ish seat venue, nice) plus the fixed FOH speakers. I was stuffing around for ages trying to make it easy to re-assign sound from FOH to backstage, goofing around with prefade monitor sends and all sorts. In the end I re-set up the system so that the left output on the mixer goes FOH, and the right output goes backstage. Crude, and loses stereo imaging, but for my purposes it's working.

 

I really must get myself a SFX (general, not specific) computer made up.

 

HTH, somewhat..

David

[agermich]

Hi there

 

We seem to have got it all working now. We did a setup with the ambient track on the main speakers and backfill with just a little on the upstage. We then put some gunfire on the upstage and it sounds amazing :P . One of the other main effects that its going to be used for is to bring up the underscore music for the choral sections (the shows Women of Troy) on the upstage speakers and then x-fade it with the ambient music onto the FOH (ambient to upstage). We've tried it out and it sounds great. I've got a busy week coming up now as I'm the lighting and sound designer for the show, luckily I've got an assistant for lighting and another for sound. LX rig tomorrow, all's going well.

 

Mike