The Sound Devices 688 mixer/recorder
to production sound, many production mixers may not be fully familiar with how to properly utilize the
technology — when to use it and
when not to. Dugan explains how
to approach this in the field: “Well,
it’s called the Dugan Speech System for a reason, and that is because
it’s optimized for speech, which includes rap,” says Dugan. “But you
don’t want to use it to mix a musical
group, though it could be a special
effect. For example, you might use
it on some elements of a drum set
as a special effect. But it’s definitely
not intended for people harmonizing with each other, because the
algorithm separates the voices from
one another, which is the opposite
of what you want to do in music. In
music you want to bring them together to blend.” Dugan goes on to
say that in situations when people
are going to be singing together,
like in musical theater, users should
switch out of the Dugan Speech System into manual mixing, or switch
to the Dugan Music System if they
have that feature.
Dugan adds, “Beyond the caveat
that you shouldn’t try to mix people
singing together with it, it’s really
universal in terms of application in
any place where you’ve got a bunch
of people talking. The Dugan Speech
System algorithm can be helpful in
TV news panels, sports discussion
panels — ESPN uses it for all their
panels — conferences where they
have a panel discussion, political de-
bates. They used Dugan for most of
the Republican presidential debates,
including that famous one with
seven different people going back
and forth, talking over each other.
That used Dugan very successfully.
Dugan works great for situations
where you have a number of people
talking: late-night talk shows, game
shows, civic applications, sound
reinforcement for boardrooms, all
kinds of civic boards and panels,
boards of supervisors, school boards,
and things like that. Also, it should
be very suitable for reality TV, but I
don’t think that it’s much used there
yet. The Letterman Show was an early
adopter, and they used it for about 15
years. It’s great for dialogue micro-
phones in theater, where you have
multiple wireless microphones. And
collaboration is a big one, too. A
long time ago, in the analog Dugan
days, I put in a system for American
Airlines. They had a big conference
room with 25 mics in it. It was on 24
hours a day. Any number of people
could just walk in and sit down and
have a teleconference with some-
body. Houses of worship, as well,
can benefit from Dugan, especially
those that are more speech-orient-
ed than music-oriented. It benefits
many Catholic churches, where you
have people who talk from two dif-
ferent podiums, and you might have
two or three different locations on
the altar where you want to pick up
speech. The Speech System works
really well for that. So the applica-
tions are basically numberless. I’m
working on making products that
can be applied, and there are lots of
areas that have yet to be tapped.”
Tatooles elaborates, “Produc-
tion automixing is best suited for
unscripted productions where you
have multiple people on set, and at
any moment, one of them is going to
jump in. Also, these algorithms have
the ability to turn off the automatic
mixing tool on any given number
of microphones. For instance, if you
have a four-way interview applica-
tion where you never know who’s
going to jump in, but there’s one
core person. Maybe that’s a head of
state or something, and you want
them to always be on. So you can
turn it off on that mic.”
“Some applications are differ-
ent,” says Tatooles. “If for example
you’re in an incredibly high-noise
environment and you have one
person close to a noise source and
another person that’s far from the
noise source, you will hear a change
in background noise when the tran-
sition happens from one mic to an-
other. So at that point, you have to
decide, if they’re far enough away
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