Levelizer as Ducking Limiter

[wmstonetn]

I am mixing sound in a small church using SAC and I would like to setup the levelizer as a ducking limiter that reduces the volume of the worship band when the pastor is speaking or praying. I am looking for help in how to set that up and what the signal path would be. Thanks!

[Bob L]

The Levelizer has a keying feature that allows keying from an internal A or B bus architecture.

You will most likely want to patch the ducking Levelizer into a group chan that creates a master level for the entire band... with the pastor's vocal chan kept separate.

So... while there would be different ways to accomplish this, here is one such method.

Assign all the band and vocal channels (not the pastor vocal) to a physical subgroup... so output 9, for instance, assigned back to your master out 1 (therefore acting as a physical group). This means that you can duck the level of everything but the pastor vocal by lowering the gain on that group output.

Now patch a Levelizer into the pre or pst patch of the out 9 chan. Select the gate on and the rvs gate switch... now set the attack time to 500 ms or so and the release time to maybe 2 or 3 secs... set the floor down 6 or 8 or 12 db... however much you would like the band to duck.

The Key on that Levelizer will be set to bus A.

Now patch another Levelizer on the pastor vocal chan and set the SEND to bus A option on... nothing else should be active.

Now you can set the threshold on the out 9 Levelizer to a level that triggers when the pastor speaks... this will cause it to drop the gain on the out 9 chan.

Of course... this will not work for you if the pastor also sings as part of the band, because that will also trigger the rvs gate to drop the level.

Bob L

[wmstonetn]

Thanks Bob - great instructions!