Help! Tracking Room Talkback Mic setup

I’m lucky because I often get to record multiple musicians in a tracking room and while I can see them thru the glass, its next to impossible to hear them in the control room even if they shout. I’m not complaining about that for sure.

I usually set up an omni mic in the center of the tracking room for Talkback communication so the ones without vocal mics can communicate back to me between takes. The gain is pretty high so that I can hear people in the room well and I compress it so that I can hear all of them evenly. This part works fine.

The problem is I need to manually mute the the channel each time we do a take or else there is that mic becomes a way too loud room element in the mix.

What I really want is a ducking gate that closes on the room mic when there is signal present from any of the tracking inputs.

I tried the gate which comes with cubase and enabled sidechain and keyed it from the track but unfortunately the key only seems to open when signal is fed to it. I want it to do the opposite, ie. close the gate.

Thoughts, other idea?

Use the standard Cubase delay, or -compressor.

Delay? Not sure I understand how that would mute the sound. Can you explain more? What do you mean by -compressor as well. Sorry not following. thanks for the quick response though.

Te Cubase delay has a sidechain input that can do ducking the way you wnat it. Obviously you set the feedback to 0 and the delay time to 0.1 or whatever teh smallest value is. insert it in your room mic channel activate the sidechain.
The same is true for the compressor. Send a sidechain signal, and the compressor compresses the room mic signal. (low threshold, high ratio, no makeup gain). I personally would use the SMPTE generator linked to transport as sidechain signal. so whenever you press play or record, the room mic gets muted

Timecode! Great idea!

Worked like a charm and the smpte generator idea was genius I was trying to use a sine wave loop to do the same thing and smpte worked prefect and isnt dependent upon length of my loops I was trying before . great stuff Thanks!