Re: Advice for dealing with singers who wander out in front of the PA
For a gate to work to your advantage, the background noise that you are filtering out must be lower than the quietest part of what you're trying to pick up. Finding that point can be pretty challenging, depending on mic position and the instrument. If you're micing your drums, and you blast a monitor speaker into the mic, you won't be able to set the gate low enough to be effective. A gate can be effective in keeping cymbals out of your tom mics. Of course when the gate is open, the cymbals will come through, so if the back pickup is bad enough, the volume of the cymbals will increase every time you hit the tom. Net result could be crap versus just leaving the mics open and turning down the overhead mics to create the mix you want.
Compressors and gates are often found in the same package, but their jobs are vastly different. A compressor is designed to decrease the overall dynamic range of a sound. Used correctly, they can make things fit into a mix better, but used incorrectly, they will make a mess. On a vocal mic, they can be extremely helpful for the singer that doesn't have an even volume to their voice. If you notice some artists, they use their built in 'arm compressor' to do the job so the sound man doesn't have to. The way the arm compressor works is when they sing that stupid loud note, they pull the mic away from their mouth to even out the sound level. Other artists will just sing that loud note and hold the mic to their mouth the whole time. If the sound operator is paying attention, he can pull the slider down to simulate the effect of the 'arm compressor' although his reaction time may be slower. If you use a compressor for the job, it listens to the level of the sound and will turn down the level based on how loud it gets. Now, the tricky thing is to figure out how fast and far you want to set the compressor to react so it matches the desired result. In many cases, compressors are way over used, and the result is no dynamics to the sound, and everything ends up at the same volume for the whole song. Not a good position to be in.
