Side-chaining vocals for live band?

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mikemorgan

mikemorgan

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Probably not an appropriate question for this board, but here goes. Does anyone ever sidechain/gate their vocal mics for a live band performance? I mean, once you've established a good live mix at X decibels, wouldn't it make sense to compress the band, or at least solo instruments a couple of db whenever the vocalist cues up? I've watched so many bands lately with unintelligible vocals I can't stand it.
 
I saw a gig at a small club recently where they had the vox trigger a duck on the guitars. I could hear it when it kicked in, but most people didn't seem to notice.
 
I think fi you set up attack and release times to be pretty slow it would help a lot, maybe even for the monitor mixes?
 
If the vocals don't come therugh as they should, I wouldn't call that a good live mix; I'd call that a live mix that has one or more of the instruments overly loud, burying the vocals, or perhaps a mix that has either the wedges or the vocal EQ set up to allow limiting feedback to come in too quick to get a proper vocal level.

If they actually knew how to set proper monitor levels, FOH levels and EQ, they wouldn't need to duck the instruments.

G.
 
I know Glen, they shouldn't need to go that route. Just wondered if anyone had heard of this as a common practice.
The last place I was at the ME was blaming the room for the problem. It WAS a bad room, but a permanent installation with a rack full of rta's, which he obviously thought would fix it for him. I mentioned the side-chain idea, a concept I had to explain, but got blank stares.
 
mikemorgan said:
Just wondered if anyone had heard of this as a common practice.
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I've never seen it myself, though FOH is not my experience long suit.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, to be honest. If the vocals aren't loud enough because of too low of a feedback threshold on that channel, that can usually be fixed fairly easily enough. No need for fancy routings.

And if that's not the problem, if you simply need to bring everyone else down a couple of dB to fit the vocals in, then just bring everyone else down a couple of dB. It's as simple as that to me. At least for the first set. By the time the middle of the second set comes along, the overall volume and balance will be completly changed anyway, and the audience is going to be too stoned to care one way or the other.

G.
 
Seems to me like sidechaing things like that is a complicated and long workaround for a problem that should not exist. Thats why there is an engineer present, to make the necessary mix changes. What if things start trigeering your chain when they aren't supposed to? Then the whole mix suffers. One quick solution is to buss things out a bit. Say drums in a buss, instruments in a buss, vocals in a buss. You can use the vocal buss to push the vocals over the top a bit, or use the others to duck the rest a little. If you ahve VCA's, you can use them to break your mix up even further since you can use them like a buss in the sense that they control a group of channels but you can use 1 VCA instead of 2 busses and still keep a stereo image. Not only that, but VCA's are "stackable" in the sense that you can use them sort of like groups and break things up a bit, but you can also assign something like VCA's 1-7 to VCA 10 where you can still change individual VCA groupings on 1-7, and then also use VCA 10 to be a master for the other VCA's which allows you to duck all instruments at one time from 1 fader. Basically, in over 1500 shows from small clubs and bars to large arena's, I have never seen the need for this type of side-chaining.
 
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