Major vocal compression needed

[jrlemonz]

My singer in my band has a really varied singing style. He does an alomost scizophrenic thing going back and forth from melodic SINGING to totally unmelodic death-metal screaming. It fits the music great, but the levels are so varied that the screams are much too loud and the singing is much too soft. If he backs off the mic on the screams we lose the sound that the totally overdriven mic pre gives, and sound great out of the PA (not so much on recording, we've on numerous occasions done the screaming by micing the pa on recordings). We need some MAJOR compression, but don't want that much noise. We're on a relatively low budget (<$200), and the unit doesn't have to be recording quality, just something that will even it out. Built in noise gate or something would solve the noise issues I think? I always use the plugins, so I don't know much about the actual boxes. Would the Compressor w/Limiter be a compressor with a built in gate? Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Jake

 

[Sound Cracker]

I do some live mixing for bands of a similar style here and there, so I am very familiar with the problem you are discribing.

First I will tell you that for live purposes, unless you have a really dead room and the PA stacks place very carefully, you may never get the quiet vocal parts loud enough without feedback.

To help solve your problem I would strongly recommend purchasing the Behringer Composer Pro and utilizing the Peak Limiter section on it. You can also use a bit of compression BEFORE the limiting set's in.

This unit cost's right around $200, and the Peak Limiter on it makes it worth every penny.

Another way to help out a bit would be to possibly purchase an ART Tube MP, mainly because it has a seperate input and output control. You could really run the input hot so that the lower vocal part puts out a strong signal, but when you go to the screaming part the tube circuit will provide a somewhat smooth sounding distortion. Feeding all that to the Composer Pro with a proper Peak Limiter setting would probably take care of most of your problems.

Good Day!

 

[jrlemonz]

Thanks alot! I've seen those Composer Pro things go for around $120 on eBay, so I'll pick one up. I should probably buy the Tube MP too, or some other tube mic pre, all I use for recording is a Behringer board, and those pre's suck.

Jake

 

[vox]

If it's a case of whispered verses and screamed choruses then beside compression, manually riding the faders helps a lot, My approach to live mixing is that it is an active thing not a set and forget job. You might also need to back down on whatever is competing with the vocal during the quiet parts, if it's the guitars for example backing them off a bit will also make them sound bigger when you bring em back up.
Moving the lead vocal mic away from other sound sources on stage might also help, dont let the singer stand too close to the guitar stacks or cymbals for example.

 

[jrlemonz]

The verses aren't whispered or anything, they are sung full out, they just aren't screamed at full volume into the mic from 1 millimeter away. The problem isn't outside sources, and we already do back off the volume on guitar during quiet parts. It's just that the screaming is just SO loud we have to turn it down, and then the singing gets lost. I think the compressor will do the job, I just don't want so much noticable noise that it is annoying. I wish we had the luxury of having somone do mixing for us live, but firstly, we do a lot of almost improv during our live sets, and the singer doesn't sing the same way twice, and we also don't have anyone that is experiened enough to be trusted fucking with our levels while playing. The only person I trust to set levels after the experiences I've had is me. We use all our own equipment, PA and all, and just kind of set up and play. We'll figure something out, even if it means the singer has to back off the mic when screaming.

Jake