Re: [Callers] How to "Ring out a (microphone) channel"

Speaking as a dance producer and sound mixer... Everything is in proportion to the need of the moment and the current set-up. It is worthwhile and fundamental to ring out a hall for rock concerts, where the voice is often competing with extremely loud instruments, and the producer/sound engineer needs to have as loud as possible voice amplification, and feedback is a genuinely limiting factor in voice amplification. It is not so common that contra dance sound approaches the limits of feed-back levels, hence adjusting for the hall, by ringing out the channel may or may not be all that significant, and it can be that the contribution of either the hall or the speakers toward emphasizing some particular set of frequencies is less significant than figuring out the relationship between the current caller's voice, microphone, and sound system at hand. And it can be quite useful to ring out channels for troublesome halls. And even for non-troublesome halls. It matters in relation to many other things too. Placement of the speakers, if they can be adjusted, for example; also placement of the caller in relation to the speakers. For Contra dance it may well be that adjustments made for a turned-up channel and speaker system are helpful, but also may not be that important. Further, it's an artistic and producer standard for the music to be turned down in relation to the caller, when desirable, as in a no-walk-through contra and for squares. Can there be value in ringing out the hall and the caller's mike? Yes. You can also end up with strange sounding vocals, because you may be adjusting for a sound level you will never approach during the show. Intelligibility, which can involve ringing out the channel, yet mostly involves appropriately, as-needed reducing low-intelligibility fundamentals, especially but by no means exclusively for male voices, somewhere below about 700 or so hertz, and potentially slightly boosting higher ranges, 1,500 hz to 4,000 or so, depending on the voice, caller, hall, speaker location, monitor (if any), type of speakers, the pointing of speakers, sound system, humidity, and so on. The typical caller doesn't have a monitor, and the relationship with the monitor is a primary starting point for feedback for musicians, where ringing out the channel can really matter. Caller technique, though, can have much more influence on intelligibility. Does the caller have his mouth on the mic the whole time? Then the bass-proximity effect of directional cardiod microphones will emphasize the base end of the caller's voice, to great detriment of intelligibility in higher frequencies, even if the caller's lows are turned down radically. If the same caller spoke from a foot away from the mic, intelligibility can be improved many-fold, by reducing that bass-proximity effect, and this alone can be far far more important than adjusting the channel for the hall's reverberation on certain frequencies, and a god deal quicker. Indeed, this could aid the caller in challenging halls, if the sound person is not able to change the difficulty, for whatever reason. Step back from the mic and speak up, can be a useful strategy in such cases. (Recognizing the caller must save her voice for the next performance too.) Is the caller consistent in volume? I can say that some callers are wildly inconsistent, by spurts loud, and by spurts soft, or maybe they are punchy in voice, or perhaps worse, loud on a walk through and soft when the music is played. A punchy voice which is loud and soft from phrase to phrase is quite challenging for a sound person to adjust for. If turned up, then the loud is booming. If compressed, by the sound system to squash the loud and bring the soft up in volume, then the vivaciousness of the voice can be quite flattened. Does the caller enunciate clearly, with verve, enthusiasm, melody and joy? Are words well chosen, and few in number so that the audience hangs on every sound, instead of ignoring the caller because he talks too much, or a conversely a challenge to understand because only every 3rd word "counts" informationally? These non-sound amplification aspects of the caller performance too can be more important than technical sound efforts. Mark On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:42 PM, Will Loving <will(a)dedicationtechnologies.com> wrote: