Talkback mic automation trick
Here's a little trick that I had forgotten about till recently when I needed a talkback mic and I no longer had a mixer with that feature or the desire to spend the money for one of the headphone and monitoring systems that feature that.
I have a track that I have hidden using the track manager that has a live mic plugged into it with input monitoring activated. I have set the track output to none so that it is silent in most cases. I have created a send that is assigned to a bus called "Talk Back." In the Talk Back bus track I have created individual sends to five independent cue buses. Those busses are output assigned to individual hardware outs that are patched into 5 independent headphone amps. Basically this allows me to create individual headphone mixes.
So now I have a Talk Back bus that I can use to talk to five individual musicians through their headphones. I use the mute button on that bus to open and close the Talk Back mic. The problem is that to talk to the booth, I have to open the console view or the bus pane on the the track view to get to the mute button. (I guess I could have come up with the way to assign the mute button to a midi switch.)
I remembered a way to automatically close and open the Talk Back mic depending on the state of the play/record transport. This is what you do.
Create a track and stripe it with some sort of audio signal that is constant. For me, I pulled out my old trusty signal generator and created a test tone clip of short length. I used 400 hz but that doesn't matter - it was a steady tone. Set the output for the test tone track to "none." You don't want to hear it. Now turn your test tone clip into a groove clip and stretch it out for a number of bars to cover your recording time.
Next insert an instance of SONITUS compressor on your Talkback mic bus. Set the Threshold for -60db and the ratio to "inf". I've got the Attack at 0 and the release at 1ms.
Now on your Test Tone track, create a send to sidechain the SONITUS compressor on your Talkback bus.
If all is set correctly (assuming I explained this properly), everytime you start play or record you will key the Sonitus Compressor (with the test tone) which will close the source of the Talkback bus (at the FX bin) and you won't hear the open mic in the headphones. When you stop play or recording, the key will stop and the talkback mic will open and you can speak to your talent.
Hope this is something new to someone here.