Tips/hints for running vocals thru Live at a gig ....?

[lolalola]

Ok, so I know lots of people don't recommend running vocals into Live in a live situation, but many people seem to actually do this, and seemingly with great results. So I was hoping to get some + feedback here from those of you who have done this, and some insight into the do's and don'ts of sending a lead singer's vocals into Live, onstage... Thanks!

[wascal]

I've was doing this with a live band earlier this year. First, make sure you have a fader mapped to the mic channel so you can turn it down quickly if it starts feeding back

We didn't run the mic through anything too complex, only ableton fx to keep latency low. I mapped knobs on my controller to a filter delay send, a reverb send, a phaser send and a simple delay send, then 'played' the sends live when we gigged along with the other tweaks. I also had reverb length, delay filter freq etc mapped to knobs to make things a bit more dynamic. We also had a violinist running through a similar channel and it worked pretty well latency wise.


We did try automating all the fx on our tunes to dummy clips in practice for a few gigs, but what sounded good in the practice room usually sounded like overkill on stage deafeningly loud so we ended up doing it live. It was a massive ballache spending our 10 minute soundchecks doing damage limitation on our delay and reverb fx automation basically

[lolalola]

I've was doing this with a live band earlier this year. First, make sure you have a fader mapped to the mic channel so you can turn it down quickly if it starts feeding back

We didn't run the mic through anything too complex, only ableton fx to keep latency low. I mapped knobs on my controller to a filter delay send, a reverb send, a phaser send and a simple delay send, then 'played' the sends live when we gigged along with the other tweaks. I also had reverb length, delay filter freq etc mapped to knobs to make things a bit more dynamic. We also had a violinist running through a similar channel and it worked pretty well latency wise.


We did try automating all the fx on our tunes to dummy clips in practice for a few gigs, but what sounded good in the practice room usually sounded like overkill on stage deafeningly loud so we ended up doing it live. It was a massive ballache spending our 10 minute soundchecks doing damage limitation on our delay and reverb fx automation basically

Cool - were you doing anything else in Live on the same laptop as the vocals? I'll have synth (Ableton instruments/vst's only, nothing 3rd party!), and some backing tracks too, so was mainly concerned about sound drop outs, etc.

[Kent_in_CO]

Here are some tips from a djtechtools article I did on live vox: http://www.djtechtools.com/2010/11/21/mic-tips-for-djs/

Kent // SEVEN7HWAVE

[wascal]

I've was doing this with a live band earlier this year. First, make sure you have a fader mapped to the mic channel so you can turn it down quickly if it starts feeding back

We didn't run the mic through anything too complex, only ableton fx to keep latency low. I mapped knobs on my controller to a filter delay send, a reverb send, a phaser send and a simple delay send, then 'played' the sends live when we gigged along with the other tweaks. I also had reverb length, delay filter freq etc mapped to knobs to make things a bit more dynamic. We also had a violinist running through a similar channel and it worked pretty well latency wise.


We did try automating all the fx on our tunes to dummy clips in practice for a few gigs, but what sounded good in the practice room usually sounded like overkill on stage deafeningly loud so we ended up doing it live. It was a massive ballache spending our 10 minute soundchecks doing damage limitation on our delay and reverb fx automation basically

Cool - were you doing anything else in Live on the same laptop as the vocals? I'll have synth (Ableton instruments/vst's only, nothing 3rd party!), and some backing tracks too, so was mainly concerned about sound drop outs, etc.

Yep, we had at least one 1/2 a second dropout per show at first - My laptops 5400rpm HDD couldn't cope with playing 6 or 7 long (5mins plus) 48khz 24bit wavs reliably. I started using a 10,000rpm external and that all stopped though.

[lolalola]

I've was doing this with a live band earlier this year. First, make sure you have a fader mapped to the mic channel so you can turn it down quickly if it starts feeding back

We didn't run the mic through anything too complex, only ableton fx to keep latency low. I mapped knobs on my controller to a filter delay send, a reverb send, a phaser send and a simple delay send, then 'played' the sends live when we gigged along with the other tweaks. I also had reverb length, delay filter freq etc mapped to knobs to make things a bit more dynamic. We also had a violinist running through a similar channel and it worked pretty well latency wise.


We did try automating all the fx on our tunes to dummy clips in practice for a few gigs, but what sounded good in the practice room usually sounded like overkill on stage deafeningly loud so we ended up doing it live. It was a massive ballache spending our 10 minute soundchecks doing damage limitation on our delay and reverb fx automation basically

Cool - were you doing anything else in Live on the same laptop as the vocals? I'll have synth (Ableton instruments/vst's only, nothing 3rd party!), and some backing tracks too, so was mainly concerned about sound drop outs, etc.

Yep, we had at least one 1/2 a second dropout per show at first - My laptops 5400rpm HDD couldn't cope with playing 6 or 7 long (5mins plus) 48khz 24bit wavs reliably. I started using a 10,000rpm external and that all stopped though.

Weird you say that, as I've been looking at that as an option. Bizarrely (to me) people are running sets off of 8+gb usb sticks. Apparently that's such a huge difference.

[oddstep]

i run a microphone thru Live live quite a lot, one thing I've learnt is to take care with gain staging and compression, and to a lesser extent effect send loops that boost the signal.
the reason for this is that often there isn't much space between the onstage monitors and the mike. that plus an additional inhouse limiter and some incompetence in managing my own levels can often lead to squalls of feedback.