Do you mute between singing on open vocal mic's when mixing down?

Say you have a chance to mix a gig down later, do you mute open unused mic's? Or leave em open?

[Jay Kahrs]

I only gate or mute them if it doesn't drasticly change the ambience of the recording. If it does I'll try to either use them in the mix or patch in an expander.

[Remoteness]

Jay and I have similar approaches to this.

When mixing post the performance:
If I like the sound of the room tone and the performers are not blasting away on their rigs (that's around 30% of the time), I tend to leave them up. Many times I leave them up and either gate them with just a 3 to 6 dB of attenuation or manually ride them. If I don't have a choice (about 70% of the time) I'm muting or gating at about 6 to 40 dB every chance I can. Expanders work well too.

I get more control of my mix when I track the performance. When we are primary audio on stage, we get to pick the mics and position them as we like. If necessary, we suggest different speaker placements to help the recording. It all depends on how important the recording is to the production. I try to position the mics away from loud signal sources. Kind of like a virtual gobo or gate. This is one place were "Vaporware" gobo's would work. When the mics mostly point away from the offending sound source, you have better isolation and less noise to gate or mute later. That makes your job much easier during the mix process.

Important note: If you're not mixing the tracks, this may cause some serious problems for the mixer down the road. They will not be able to "fix it in the mix" and unfortunately, you're also not helping the mixer's economics when you do this kind of stuff.

[Jay Kahrs]

I learned a long time ago (in college) that bad ambience is better then a drastic change in sound. One of my friends recorded a band on a 1/2" 8 track at a local bar and he gated the vocal mics to tape because there was a buzz on the line which I'll assume was a ground loop. When we got everything back to the dorm to mix the vocals and everything else sounded fine, no buzzes. But, now we had hard gated vocals to tape. The result was pretty bad.