| compression
first, the E6 is awesome! I have four, and have been trying to talk the pastor into using one, but he still likes his tie clip lapel... as far a compression goes, for your live setting, you won't want to do anything radical on your comp settings, don't go much above a 4:1 ratio, and leave the attack and release settings in the middle, but definately not too fast, or you'll hear the comp squishing and releasing. For live compression of an orator, I mainly use what's called multi-band compression for de-essing. this is essentially a 3 way crossover and 3 compressors. What makes it a de-esser is that you can squish all the highs, so the sibilance or "s" noise isn't so annoying, without squishing all the "meat" of the spoken word. I have a TC Electronic Triple C. They stopped making this a while back and I wish they hadn't. It has a bunch of presets that I used, tweaked the settings to fit my needs, and saved as a user preset. It's awesome. If you look at the gain reduction while it's in use, it will tell you everything you need to know about what's happening, and what you can change to fine tune it to suit your needs. If it's attenuating way too much, you should raise your threshold, or lower your ratio, or a mix of the two. If it's dropping out too fast or coming back too slow, you can change that with the attack and release settings. Finally, if it's still too quiet or loud overall, you can adjust that with the output gain, or the fader/send going to the compressor. Bear in mind that if you just raise the fader going to the compressor to make it louder, it may not get louder, but rather just squash the signal more. It's a hard concept to grasp at first, especially when you learn about companders, expanders, gates, limiters, and the like, but if you understand the basic 5 adjustments of threshold, attack, release, ratio, and output gain, you can quickly get a good understanding of how you can utilize these devices to make your job as sound guy MUCH easier.   |