Weak mic sound from mixer

[quagmire77]

Hey everyone,

Any suggestions? My band is trying to route all guitars and mics through an old Peavy 9 channel mixer. We have an amp on the mixer for power, and we have the mix output going to a headphone splitter so that we can all listen to the mix through headphones while playing. The guitars have a little more "distortion" than I would like (a lot of popping in the headphones is getting through) but the real problem is that we are not getting the vocals to come through on the headphones at all really. I wouldn't think that I needed a seperate preamp for the mic since this is not as big of a problem when we output the mix to monitor speakers. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Teacher]

what kind of mic do you have? ribbon, dynamic or condenser?

[TexRoadkill]

You probably need some compression on the vocals to help then stand out over the rest of the mix. Getting a good headphone mix of a full band is pretty tricky. I usually compress the vocals, drums and bass seperately for monitoring. The drums to keep them from overpowering everything, the bass and vocals to help them sit on the top of the mix.

[quagmire77]

It's a dynamic mic