Adding Ambience to Your In-Ear Mix: Part 2

For an introduction to ambience, start with Adding Ambience to Your In-Ear Mix: Part 1. In this post, we’ll look at specific techniques for adding ambience using room mics.

Some Tips for Getting Better Ambience

So you’ve decided you want to add some ambience to your musicians’ in-ear mixes, and you want to do it the right way. So now what?

Position and aim mics so they’ll pick up what you want to hear.

If you want to hear the audience, a simple place to start is with one or more mics on the front of the stage aimed at the audience. Using a low mic stand for each mic will minimize the visual impact.

Alternatively, you can suspend the ambience mic(s) above the stage. Aiming the mics down at the band will, of course, pick up sounds from the stage itself, while aiming them out at the audience will pick up the audience. Some mics designed for overhead use have a gooseneck or wire integrated into the housing, allowing you to angle the mic element in the direction you want. You can also use a simple (and nearly invisible) piece of fishing line to secure the mics at the desired angle.

Pick mics well suited for the purpose.

The two most important things to consider in selecting a mic for ambience are the frequency response and the polar pattern. Make sure the frequency response matches the frequencies of what you want to add to your mix. (We have a post on frequencies coming up soon, so stay tuned for that.)

(If you’re not familiar with the different types of polar patterns for mics or even what a polar pattern is, check out this post in the Audio Lab!)

For polar pattern, a good choice will generally be a cardioid microphone, which is responsive to the front and sides and fairly dead to the rear. Placing a cardioid mic a at the front of the stage aimed at the audience would pick up the audience well but reject most of the sound from the stage itself—a great choice for ambience use. A hypercardioid mic is less sensitive at the sides but slightly more responsive to the rear and may be a good choice in some situations. By contrast, omnidirectional mics pick up sounds from all directions. This is a suitable choice for when you just want to get some of the room into your in-ears but generally won’t give the best results, particularly if you’re trying to remove the musicians’ sense of being cut off from their natural space. For more on that, read on!

Stereo is always better than mono.

You can certainly make a difference with only a single well-placed mic, but you’ll get better results with two or more mics mixed down to a stereo ambience mix. Remember that stereo audio has spatial information in it from the differences between the left and right channels, so a stereo ambience mix could, for instance, allow a musician to have a sense of where in the audience the guy shouting for “Freebird” over and over is. Mounting two cardioid mics in an X/Y pattern will give you excellent stereo imaging. A single ambience mic of any type will not provide any spatial references.

Integrating Ambience with Personal Mixers

If you’re using A640 or A360 Personal Mixers and you’re making a stereo ambience mix as described above, you can assign those audio channels to the One-Touch Ambience™ control using  a custom channel configuration. Patch the left and right of the ambience mix from the console to your Aviom input module or other front end (exactly as you do with other channels), and then assign those network channels to the Ambience channel  One nice thing about this is that you don’t have to give up standard mix channels to add ambience to the personal mixing system.

If you’re using A320, A-16II, or A-16R Personal Mixers (or A640 or A360s in Pro16 or Default modes), you can still send ambience audio to the musicians’ personal mixers. Simply connect those channels to the front end (like the other “regular” channels) and then ambience will show up as standard mix channels on the personal mixers. The musicians then need to make sure that the Stereo Placement or pan controls for the ambience channels are set to full spread and centered.

Final Thoughts

If you’re recording your performances, record ambience too.

If you’ve gone to the trouble to set up ambience mics for the monitor mixes and you’re already recording your performances, record a stereo ambience track too. Adding ambience to a recording can dramatically enhance the listeners’ experience of a live recording, making it sound more natural and energetic.

Experiment!

Don’t expect to get the perfect ambience set-up on your first try. Every room is different. Every sound system is different. And every musician’s preferences are different. So it’s going to take some time to get it just right. But if you’re willing to invest the time in getting mics positioned well and mixed down to a good stereo mix, you have the potential of getting outstanding results that satisfy everyone!

Tags: A320, A360, ambience, how to, in-ear monitors, live, tips, worship